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After World War Two, mass immigration of people coming to work began in earnest. The 1948 British Nationality Act said that all Commonwealth citizens could have British passports and work in the UK. Many of the earliest arrivals were from the West Indies, South Asia and Cyprus. The most famous arrival was of people from the Caribbean - mainly Jamaica and Trinidad - on the ship Empire Windrush in 1948. This is sometimes mistakenly referred to as the first arrival of black people.

Immigrants worked mainly in areas of great labour shortage, such as on buses and in hospitals, and settled in areas of cheaper housing in cities such as London and Birmingham. They experienced frequent racial discrimination and violence; landlords would refuse to let rooms to black and Irish tenants; and 'colour bars’ operated in some workplaces. In 1959 there were serious race riots in Notting Hill, West London, when a black man named Kelso Cochrane, a 32-year-old Antiguan immigrant, was murdered.