This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Caribbean migration to Britain, beginning with the 1948 arrival of the Empire Windrush and continuing across the decades that followed, carried Rastafari to the United Kingdom along with the migrants who held it. The movement did not simply transplant itself unchanged; it grew into something distinctly British over the years that followed the first arrivals.
By the late 1970s and into the early 1980s a reggae scene rooted in Britain itself had formed, carried by groups and performers including Steel Pulse, Aswad, UB40, Smiley Culture and Carroll Thompson. Their music traded the ghetto themes of Jamaican reggae for the inner city conditions of Britain's own cities, and it blended Jamaican patois with Cockney slang, a mixture of language that marked the sound as belonging to Britain rather than to Jamaica alone.
What this reggae scene changed for Rastafari's spread was the movement's character in Britain itself: rather than remaining an import carried unchanged from Jamaica, Rastafari became, through this music, a British born expression of the faith, speaking in a voice shaped by the streets its new adherents actually lived in rather than the island most of them, or their parents, had left behind.