STORY · GLOBAL
The front line and the far east: how reggae built places abroad
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Jamaican music didn't just travel - it named streets, districts and venues on four continents.
Brixton's 'front line', Toronto's Reggae Lane, Brooklyn's Little Caribbean and Yokohama's clash scene are all places the music built.
Where the sound put down roots
Wherever Jamaicans settled, the sound system arrived first and the geography changed around it. In London, Brixton's Atlantic and Railton Roads became a 'front line' of record shops and blues dances, while the Four Aces in Dalston turned a Victorian circus building into one of Britain's first homes for black music. In the Midlands, Handsworth gave its name to Steel Pulse's 1978 debut; in the west, St Pauls built the bass culture that later Bristol acts inherited.
North America drew its own map. Toronto's Little Jamaica on Eglinton West was a reggae recording centre by the late 1960s, and in 2015 the city made it official, naming Reggae Lane and painting a mural of its pioneers. In New York, Flatbush became 'Little Caribbean' - Jamaica's unofficial 15th parish - while the clash stage at Amazura in Queens crowned champions.
A sound system needs a room; give it a decade and it names the street.
The farthest outpost went furthest of all. In Yokohama, four friends built Mighty Crown from mixtapes and speaker boxes, learned the language in Brooklyn's record shops, and in 1999 won Irish & Chin's World Clash - proof that a Jamaican place could be made anywhere the bass was loud enough.