Both my parents came here from St Vincent and the Grenadines in the early 1960s, and growing up in our front room caused me much aesthetic distress. The wallpaper and carpet never seemed to match, and Jim Reeves would be crooning from the Blue Spot radiogram on a Sunday. This room was based on the Victorian parlour and was inscribed with a formal code of behaviour because it was reserved for receiving guests. It was packed with furniture, ornaments and soft furnishings surrounded by a gallery of pictures and photographs.

But why would I be interested in ^­ doing a book about it? The reasons lie in understanding how such rooms have shaped identity. More than 35,000 visitors of different ages, genders and social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds visited The West Indian Front Room, an exhibition and installation that I curated at the Geffrye Museum in east London in 2005-06. They experienced moments of embarrassment, recognition and identification, as well as the expression of working-class respectability in the home. The front room resonated emotionally on an inter-generational level beyond simply the black British domestic homes but with other migrant diasporas, from Lagos to Peckham, Dublin to Kilburn, Delhi to Southall, Nicosia to Wood Green, Tel Aviv to Golders Green.

Colonialism meant that my parents' generation was imbued with English culture, and they saw themselves as British citizens coming to the "Mother Country". Many West Indian migrants eventually acquired homes and created front rooms in which they could express their social and cultural values.

As sociologist and broadcaster Stuart Hall tells us: "The front room is a conservative element of black domestic life, which is more complex and rich than the generality of the society ever realises".

Furthermore, Caribbean culture has no one true point of origin, which means that, aesthetically, the West Indian front room is a hybrid based on West Indian and English tastes.

One of the images used in the book has a wooden cabinet radiogram at the centre, which stood like a religious object in many Caribbean homes. Since many West Indians, especially men, were excluded from white male-dominated pubs and clubs, entertainment took place in the home with music played on the radiogram. And whether it was bluebeat, calypso, ska, reggae or soul, it enabled us to reconnect with our original selves through song, rhythm and dance.

• Michael McMillan is author of The Front Room, published by Black Dog, £19.95. Details at thefrontroom.org