[4][5] New Beacon Books is widely recognized as having played an important role in the Caribbean Artists Movement, and in Black British culture more generally.

[6][2] The associated George Padmore Institute (GPI) is located on the upper floors of the same building where the bookshop resides at 76 Stroud Green Road, Finsbury Park, London.

New Beacon Books started out as a publishing house that was run out of the Hornsey, North London, flat of John La Rose and Sarah White.

[2] Early publications included La Rose's first poetry collection, Foundations (1966), Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays by Wilson Harris (1967), and a new edition of John Jacob Thomas's 1889 polemic, Froudacity (1969).

[9][8] Other notable works published by New Beacon Books include: Edward Kamau Brathwaite's History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in the Anglophone Caribbean (1984); Erna Brodber's novels Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (1980) and Myal (1988); Martin Carter's Poems of Succession (1977); Bernard Coard's How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System (1971); Lorna Goodison's I am Becoming my Mother (1986); Mervyn Morris, The Pond (1973) and Shadowboxing (1979); and Andrew Salkey's A Quality of Violence (1978).