Amid the furore surrounding the mistreatment of Caribbean-born British citizens by the Home Office appears an exhibition, Windrush: Portrait of a Generation, to be shown in central London, just across the water from Westminster.

Jim Grover, a documentary photographer, set out to capture the daily lives and customs of the Windrush generation in the heart of the south London community where he lives. The project began in June 2017 in Grover’s church, where a parishioner invited him to see the clubs where he played “bones” or dominoes. “It was a revelation to me,” says Grover. “I had no idea that Caribbean migrants met three times a week for dominoes in Clapham, where I’ve lived for 30 years.”

Intrigued, he began to visit domino clubhouses in Clapham, Croydon and Wandsworth. At first, people were wary of the stranger with a camera, but soon Grover was welcomed into homes, community centres, places of worship and even funerals.

Grover discovered a much more important story waiting to be told: “I wanted to capture a Caribbean way of life that most likely won’t be around for ever.” He adds: “I feel so privileged to have been able to photograph the distinctive lives of this lovely community.”

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the arrival of Empire Windrush at Tilbury in June 1948, the exhibition incorporates a number of interviews Grover conducted with Caribbean-born UK residents. “I knew I had to track down at least one surviving ‘Windrusher’ if I were to do justice to this story,” he says.

His research took him to 92-year-old Alford Gardner in Leeds, who served in the RAF during the war as a motor mechanic. Having paid the standard £28 to cross the Atlantic on the Windrush, Gardner found work in Leeds with commercial engineers. Inevitably, as a Caribbean “room-seeker” back then he experienced racism (“Room to Let: Regret No Kolored”, ran the typical advert). Usually, though, there was no violence, as any aggressors fled once challenged. “I’ve lived a brilliant life here,” he told Grover. “It was supposed to be tough, but I never really had tough times.”

In migrating here, the Windrush citizens believed they were exercising their birthright. “UK – Right of Abode” was stamped in their Commonwealth-issue passports. Teachers, lawyers, writers, artists and field labourers came in response to a recruitment drive and because they hoped for a better life. Not all of the Windrushers had intended to remain “in foreign”, but gradually it dawned on them that the dream of return was just that: they were here to stay.

Curated by Katy Barron, the exhibition combines personal stories from first- and second-generation Caribbeans with a series of 12 themed photo-stories that, together, seek to describe the “totality” of their lives today. It explores the community, faith, love, death and friendship; it looks at the lives of metalworkers, engineers, churchgoers and former NHS nurses.

With his genial manner, Grover was granted access to photograph a Jamaican funeral and its Nine Night mortuary custom, where friends and relatives gather at the deceased’s house for food and drink. The tradition is fast disappearing among the young, but there is life in it yet. (As they say in Jamaica: “No call a man dead til you bury him.”)

“Jamaican spirituality is such a beautiful thing,” says Grover, who wanted to capture Caribbean religious respect for a life well lived.

His previous photographic exhibitions have documented a year in the life of a Clapham vicar, called Of Things Unseen, and the busy life of a neighbourhood, in last year’s 48 Hours on Clapham High Street. He shoots with a wide-angle lens: “That means getting in really close. At the Jamaican funeral I was literally standing at the grave’s edge. It required a good deal of trust.”

For this project, Grover took photographs on 70 occasions. “In order to capture a dominoes match and its after-party, I sometimes had my camera out for long stretches – seven or eight hours. At other times, I just sat and listened to stories and watched life unfold in front of me.”

The photographs are poignant and intimate. We see calypso-mento dancers in their “felts” (fedora hats) and domino hotshots banging down tiles. At crowded festive dance parties, or “bashments”, he photographed the elderly moving and flexing to jazz-tinged ska, rock-steady and reggae. The dapper Bockie, a regular at the Cosmo club in Wandsworth, told him: “Our generation… we’re rocking our bodies in our chairs.”

Between 1948 and 1969, the formative years of the NHS, an estimated 5,000 Jamaican women came to the UK to work as nurses, while many others worked in different NHS roles. Monica Blair, one of Grover’s 12 photo subjects, arrived from Jamaica in 1964, aged 21, to marry Soney and worked as a cleaner at St Thomas’ hospital near Westminster, before becoming a seamstress. With her deep religious faith, Monica attends the same Anglican church in Clapham as Grover. In his photographs, she ministers communion wine and pores over a well-thumbed Bible, a gift to her as a teenager in Jamaica.

By his own admission a “perfectionist” as a photographer, Grover scoured the south London streets in search of one of the famed “front rooms” and found one in Brixton. Once a part of every Jamaican home, front rooms typically contained framed family photographs, a picture of Jesus walking on water, sofas covered in protective plastic, leopardskin rugs and bouquets of artificial flowers. Often, a gold, plastic model of Big Ben or some other shooting-gallery prize graced a giant cocktail cabinet with a Formica top. The rooms are nearly all gone now. “They speak of a bygone era,” says Grover. “Sadly, to the second- and third-generations they’re just clutter.”

Towards the end of his project, Grover was invited to photograph a Friday “open house” typical of Caribbean life. In the Brixton home of Hermine Grocia, as many as four generations gather each week for food, chat, a quiz or a game of Scrabble. “I wasn’t even sure I had space for it in the exhibition,” he says, “but I am so pleased to have spent the evening with Hermine and 21 of her family. It was so moving to see this wonderful family be so loving, relaxed and connected… they get together every Friday. It was the last thing I shot, and it ended the project for me on such a high.”

Hermine met her future husband, Lester, on the Kingston wharf in 1959, just as they were about to sail for “Missus Queen’s” country. Like most of the Windrush generation, she had come to the UK determined to work. Grover’s moving and often beautiful photographs show the other side of the current Windrush scandal: they celebrate a community and a generation that contributed immeasurably to our cultural life.

“The more I immersed myself in this project,” Grover says, “the more I realised that I was capturing living history. As this generation passes away, and the successive generations pursue their own lives here, some of these traditions will inevitably weaken. It felt imperative to document this way of life and to record these stories before it becomes too late.”

Windrush: Portrait of a Generation is at gallery@Oxo, Oxo Tower Wharf, London SE1, 23 May-10 June. Ian Thomson’s The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica, is published by Faber