Christine Quarless tells her mother how offensive she finds it when people use the word 'coloured' to describe her. Although she is mixed-race, she feels more black than white.

John Akomfrah is interviewed for Liverpool radio, and talks about the aim of the documentary. He wants to retrace the steps of J.B. Priestley's, who visited the city in 1933 and wrote about it in his English Journey. Akomfrah is looking for mixed-race families who can trace their roots back to the 1930s.

He starts his journey at the Adelphi hotel, where Priestley stayed in 1933 when he came across a school in the middle of the city and was struck by its multicultural intake. Akomfrah notes that this type of multicultural school had been there for at least 200 years.

Akomfrah sets out to find this class of '33 and ask them how it feels to be both black and English. Archival footage of a 1958 documentary illustrates divided responses to mixed-race relationships.

George and Ann Quarless were both born in Liverpool of mixed-race families. Their son, Ray, and daughter, Christine, relate their experiences of growing up in Liverpool. Patsy and John Birch and their children, Colin and Alison talk about how they are seen by others, while the children describe their feelings about being mixed-race. The lives and histories of these families represent, for Akomfrah, the hope for another England. He wants to celebrate them but he also wants to find out more about their lives.

In the 1955 documentary 'Has Britain a Colour Bar?', the presenter says how culturally different 'coloured people' are, a fear that Akomfrah links to the pronouncements of Enoch Powell in the 1960s.

Akomfrah explains that the community of Liverpool 1 is proof that people from different cultural backgrounds can create new communities - an alternative England. He's been told by local people that this community was a refuge, a safe haven from the racism in other parts of Liverpool. Akomfrah talks about how this community has tried to survive by creating own social clubs that cater for its own needs, and how its members found their own way of describing and valuing themselves.

Looking at family photographs of his interviewees, Akomfrah concludes that Englishness is a hotchpotch that banishes more than it includes. The challenge is to expand the definition of Englishness.