Flights across the Channel: tracing the memories and heritage of maritime migration in the English Channel

This article traces the heritage of maritime migration across the English Channel and examines how it engenders new forms of solidarity with contemporary maritime migrants. While migrant struggles and acts of resistance are often analysed in spatial terms, recent work in migration and citizenship studies has begun to adopt a temporal approach that considers how sedimented memories of past mobilisations shape solidarity practices in the present. Building on this temporal turn, the article develops a novel conceptual framework that integrates insights from ocean studies. It asks: what happens when we investigate the mobility of people alongside the mobile materiality of the sea? It argues that attending to the material, legal, and social specificities of the sea, together with the memories of past crossings, generates solidarities that challenge the nation-state and the citizen/migrant dichotomy. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork along the South Coast of the United Kingdom, the article first examines how maritime custom embeds principles of solidarity in seafaring practice and law. It then analyses key moments in the history of Channel migrations, including responses to Belgian refugees during World War One. The final section proposes a conception of the heritage of maritime migration that unsettles national frames.