Shadow Work: Architecting While Black in British Guiana

My grandfather, Charles Eric Wilkinson, was a black architect-builder involved in major government-sponsored building and infrastructure projects in British Guiana from the 1930s to the 1970s. I place Wilkinson’s built work and its surviving archive of bookkeeping ledgers, letters, photographs, and architectural drawings in conversation with material from national archives in Guyana and England, adding oral histories from family members. White architects stationed in British Guiana and the Caribbean reported back to England about the “skilled craftsmen” (carpenters and building contractors) that they observed. Based on family lore and archives, I question the interactions between the supposed foreign “expert” architects and the local builders, seeking to document this period more accurately through architectural work that has remained in the shadows. The backdrop to my research is the rise of foreign-aided, self-help building schemes in British Guiana in 1954, the same year that Wilkinson endeavored to build a concrete house for his family. British and US architects were involved in British Guiana’s planning and housing development work. Howard Mackey, a Black American professor at Howard University, was on a team contributing to the self-help project. This period of Britain transitioning its so-called dependencies to self-sufficiencies provides an important context for understanding the role that black builders would play in shaping the built environment of the (independent) nation to come.