Twin City Tells The Stories of How Gentrification Affects the UK's Black Diaspora
With a collection dubbed, “Mentally I’m Here.”
UK-based house swapping app Twin City isn’t just a tool for your travels – it’s a platform where community, creativity and connection thrive. Founded in 2020, the team sought to connect like-minded, global creatives while celebrating local experiences.
With travel these days, conflict arises among tourists and natives induced by gentrification and negative effects on the local economy. Twin City isn’t about it. “There’s a sense of oil and water with gentrification. I could probably go a week in Lisbon without speaking any Portuguese,” says Twin City co-founder Jamiel Thompson. “Home swapping is different. You only have one unit of demand. You can’t just have five houses on the platform and profit from them. We’re a part of the shared economy, making the most out of what people have and not incentivizing landlords to make rent higher.”
As experts in telling human-led stories, especially around travel and culture, Twin City found themselves uniquely positioned to investigate a new story – one closer to home: the Black British Exodus.
Thompson noticed a general sentiment among his friends: “London is bad vibes.” So, he and the Twin City team decided to look into it. They found that 39 percent of Black Britons under 25 want to escape the U.K. and that 1 in 7 people of color already have a ticket booked to leave.
“It was a conversation I couldn’t escape,” Thompson shares. “Black people, the creative class, want to leave the U.K. because it’s too expensive and there’s a lack of third spaces. It doesn’t feel like you’re living to live, you’re working to live. It’s the opposite of traditional immigration patterns where people come from the third world to the first world. Our parents fought so hard to get into this country and within only one generation we’re like ‘Nah, we’re good on this.’ That feels like a seismic shift.”
So, Twin City decided to tackle this with a fashion project dubbed “Mentally I’m Here.”
The collection creatively nods to the concept of “Farsickness,” described as a “longing for distant places and a yearning for travel.” The T-Shirts in the collection hold the message “Mentally I’m Here” written across the chest alongside countries that they want to see amplified.
“We’ve been seeing all of these ‘Brazil’ shirts but we were like ‘Where’s Ghana? Where’s Trinidad? Where are all of these other Black countries that we want to represent?,” asks Thompson.
Arriving in a variety of hues, the baby tees are a sexy and mature take on the diamante-crystal aesthetics seen in travel gift shops. The “Mentally I’m Here” collection, backed by Polaroid, is available to purchase at the Twin City website.
Keep an eye on Twin City ahead of Nottingham Carnival where they are planning continued activations for the initiative and before you go, check out the film that they unveiled to compliment the collection.
