Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM) has commissioned artist Joy Gregory to create an artwork for an exhibition opening in October on the transatlantic slave trade. It will explore how the impact of the trade can still be seen in Devon and Exeter today.

The exhibition is part of a wider programme in 2020 that will see RAMM use its collections to ask difficult questions and explore hidden stories. Untold Stories will feature a series of exhibitions, events, artist commissions and other activities that are also designed to give a voice to neglected communities. Read more here.

In this recent article May Bulman reflects on a decade at the start of which the “hostile environment” didn’t exist. The term had been bandied around by ministers, both Labour and Conservative, but nothing was in effect. But in the last ten years, however, "a stream of policies were quietly formulated with the sole aim of making the UK a hostile place for undocumented immigrants". And now those two words encapsulate the root cause behind a string of Home Office immigration scandals.

In the last three years in particular, criticism of the Home Office implementation of flawed immigration policy has become frequent and public as many stories of injustice have come to light (Photo: British-born Mohamed Bangoura was unable to be reunited with his mother after a holiday). The Windrush Scandal is perhaps the best known, but there are many others, such as thousands of asylum seekers and migrants being wrongly denied emergency NHS healthcare. The Grenfell Tower tragedy also highlighted flaws in the hostile measures. In many cases the Home Office only took remedial action once cases had been reported in the media. Read more here.