Weekes' Story

Arrival in Northampton

Weekes Baptiste’s story begins with movement: from Grenada to England, from childhood familiarity to a new and unfamiliar Northampton. He came to the town in 1970 with his brother, following his parents who had already settled in Arthur Street, Kingsthorpe Hollow. Like many Caribbean families of the Windrush generation, his family’s journey was shaped by hope, work, adjustment, and the need to build a life in a place that did not yet fully feel like home.

Arriving as a child brought what Weekes describes as a culture shock. Northampton was different from Grenada, not only in landscape and weather, but in the everyday rhythms of school, shopping, food, friendship, and community. He attended St Paul’s School, then Bethney, and later Kings Park Public School. These early years were about learning how to live in a new country while holding onto the memories, habits, tastes, and expectations of the Caribbean home he had left behind.

The Mounts: Food, Family, and Memory

The Mounts became one of the first places where this new life began to make sense. For Weekes and his family, it was not simply a part of town; it was where practical needs and emotional connections came together. There were shops where Caribbean food could be found, including plantain, yam, sweet potatoes, bananas, salt fish, and other provisions that were not available in mainstream supermarkets. There was also the laundrette, the swimming baths, and the chip shop where children could buy chips and lemonade after swimming and walk home together.

In Weekes’ memories, The Mounts is a place of warmth and usefulness, but also a place marked by disappearance. Many of the buildings, shops, and landmarks he remembers have gone. When he says there must be a photograph somewhere, he is expressing more than nostalgia. He is pointing to the importance of evidence, memory, and local records. The places that supported Caribbean families in Northampton risk being forgotten if they are not documented.

The Racecourse and Black Youth Belonging

As Weekes grew older, another important place came into focus: the Racecourse. It became a gathering place for young Black people in Northampton. No one needed to organise it formally; people simply seemed to know where to go. Weekes describes it almost as a hidden radar, drawing together young people from different Caribbean islands and backgrounds. There, under the trees and near the swings, they could talk, play music, play cricket and football, eat, laugh, and speak in ways that felt natural to them.

The Racecourse mattered because it gave young people space to be themselves. It was where community was made through friendship, music, fashion, language, and shared experience. Reggae was central to this world. Bob Marley, Afro hairstyles, dreadlocks, kung fu culture, and Caribbean youth style all became part of the atmosphere. Music brought people together and gave shape to a sense of identity that was both local and international.

From Informal Gathering to Community Action

Out of this social life came a more organised need for community space. When winter arrived and outdoor gathering became harder, the Matta Fancanta Movement emerged. The squatting of the old Salvation Army building, and the later involvement of the council, showed how informal gathering could become collective action. Although Weekes says he was not one of the main people sustaining the movement because he was working full time, he recognises its significance. It created space, visibility, and cultural confidence for Northampton’s Black community.

Theatre as Work and Education

At the same time, Weekes was building another part of his life in theatre. He worked as a stage technician at the Royal Theatre, a demanding job that could run from morning until late at night when a show was on. He was responsible for the hard, practical work behind performance: preparing the stage, putting things away, and repeating the process night after night. Yet the theatre also became a place of education. While working backstage, Weekes listened carefully to plays, texts, actors, and audiences.

He began to understand how drama worked. Each performance was different, and each audience responded in its own way. Plays by writers such as Shakespeare, David Hare, and J. B. Priestley helped him think about dialogue, tension, structure, and power. An Inspector Calls had a particular impact on him because it showed that a play did not need spectacle to be powerful. People sitting around a table, talking, could reveal deep truths.

Theatre also made Weekes aware of barriers. He watched others move into positions of responsibility while he felt certain routes were closed to him. Rather than abandon creativity, he turned towards writing. If he was not being offered the roles he wanted within the institution, he could create his own work, shape his own stories, and speak from his own experience.

Finding a Creative Voice

The Playhouse Theatre became another important creative space. Weekes helped with sets, lighting, sound, costumes, rehearsals, and productions. He later produced and directed his own play, The Swan in the Attic, there. For him, writing was not a fixed act but a process of constant revision. He compares it to moving into a new house: at first everything may seem right, but gradually you realise what needs changing, repainting, moving, or rethinking.

His creative work returns again and again to memory, place, and Black experience in Northampton. His one-man show, The Uprising, tells the story of how he came to Northampton, the places he went, the Racecourse, the Matta Fancanta Movement, and the music scene that shaped him. The title, taken from a Bob Marley album, connects his personal story to a wider Black cultural and political imagination.

Another play, 1948, reaches further back into Northampton’s post-war history. It tells the story of Cynthia, a Black woman who came from London to Northampton after the war, worked at Barratt’s Shoe Factory, married a white man, raised mixed-race children, and lived through changing attitudes and racism in the decades that followed. Through the device of two removal men clearing a house after Cynthia’s death, Weekes turns domestic objects, photographs, and memories into a drama about migration, family, ageing, inheritance, and belonging.

Preserving Black Northampton History

Weekes’ story is also a story about preservation. He remembers places that have vanished, films he made, exhibitions that now hold community material, and footage that has been lost forever. His regret about losing film of Henry Bird’s safety curtain being assembled at the Royal Theatre shows how easily important local history can disappear before people realise its value.

Through his interview, Weekes Baptiste offers more than a personal life story. He gives a record of Black Northampton: its shops, parks, theatres, movements, music, friendships, and creative life. His memories show how Caribbean families made homes in the town, how young people built belonging for themselves, and how theatre, film, and writing can keep community histories alive.

At the heart of Weekes’ story is the relationship between place and creativity. Northampton shaped him, but he also reshaped Northampton through the stories he chose to tell. His work turns memory into performance and local experience into cultural history. In doing so, he preserves a world that might otherwise be overlooked: the world of Black Caribbean life, youth culture, community action, and artistic imagination in Northampton.