In the 1930s tens of thousands of people fled fascism in continental Europe for the safety of
the British Isles. These refugees - many of them Jewish - brought with them a set of
revolutionary ideas and practices about art politics and architecture which were to change the
face of modern Britain. Exiles is the little-known story of their lives and work. In its
teeming pages we meet artists from Weimar Germany psychoanalysts from Freud''s Vienna
communists from Russia and Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe all trying to make their way in
a cold and foreign land. Some were enchanted by the quaintness and eccentricity of traditional
England others were repelled by its rigid class hierarchy repressed national character and
resistance to change. In all of these encounters cultural conflict gave rise to new artistic
and political movements from Brutalism to neoliberalism as the exiled Europeans took the
cornerstones of British culture and reimagined them. In doing so this refugee generation
created the world we live in today and achieved that most British of feats: a quiet
revolution.
