Handsworth

‘The people’s champion” is how Benjamin Zephaniah is fondly remembered in his home town of Handsworth, Birmingham. The words, spray-painted in fiery-red ballooned letters, leap out of a colourful mural that wraps around one side of a local Sons of Rest building, a place where retired war veterans once met and socialised. To the side looms an image of the late poet and writer, his face full of expression and thought. For a moment, it feels as if he’s there with you.

A couple of years earlier, and he may well have been. “Seriously, you could come into Handsworth Park and he’d just be walking through, just leisurely. Benjamin, he’d sit with you, he had time for you,” says Marcia Dunkley, one of the founders of the organisation Black Heritage Walks Network, which commissioned the mural.

It’s a chalky blue-skied August day in Birmingham, and while many of the city’s residents have flocked to the centre for the annual Caribbean music and food festival, I’m on a walking tour in Handsworth, the neighbourhood where much of the creative legacy of Birmingham’s Caribbean population was first felt.

The tour, launched in 2018 by the Black Heritage Walks Network, explores the history and legacy of the influx of Caribbean migrants who settled in Handsworth after the second world war.

The walk largely takes place along Handsworth’s Soho Road, a bustling high street north-west of the city centre where elaborate saris and glistening wedding jewellery spill out of shops and on to pavements. Fifty years ago, the high street, now dominated by south Asian traders, wore a different face.

“Black-owned, Black-owned, Black-owned,” says Dunkley, pointing at an array of mismatched buildings that were once the nightclubs, restaurants, law firms and banks that made up the Black economy in Birmingham, after thousands migrated to the neighbourhood from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s.

On any given day, they are buildings that might not warrant a second glance. Take Garvey House – a neglected and disused Victorian house, with a faded white painted front and boarded-up windows. Named after Jamaica’s national hero Marcus Garvey, the space once brimmed with life, offering temporary accommodation to waves of migrants arriving for the first time in the city. The only remnant of its past life is a faint sign above the door.

Black Heritage Walking Network was born out of the ambition of three history buffs, frustrated by Birmingham’s lack of recognition as a city steeped in Black history and heritage. Since creating the Madiba tour in Handsworth, named after Nelson Mandela’s famous visit to the area (Madiba was his Xhosa clan name) the company has developed a plethora of walks, exhibitions, and educational workshops that highlight the history and legacy of the African-Caribbean community in Birmingham.

“People who want to know about Bob Marley and Malcolm X and so on, if you don’t tell them, then they’ll just go to London to find it … People are used to the culture in London and having access to all of that at their fingertips, which means they don’t want to come to Birmingham,” says Dawn Carr, who co-founded the network.

Along Soho Road, unkempt and derelict buildings are contrasted with an array of colourful murals, commissioned over the years, to highlight the neighbourhood’s diverse and evolving identity. On Soho Bridge, a hand-painted mural shows Strikers in Saris to commemorate a group of south Asian women who famously protested poor working conditions at the Grunwick film processing factory in the late 1970s.

Close to the mural of Benjamin Zephaniah in Handsworth Park, is a brightly painted tribute of 13 Birmingham-born reggae artists that Dunkley brings to life by playing Steel Pulse’s Handsworth Revolution and UB40’s Food for Thought out of a portable speaker.

Where the rich cultural history of Handsworth escapes its outward appearance, Dunkley’s evocative storytelling brings it to life. Her passion for uncovering the lost history of Birmingham streets pours out in theatrical re-enactments and poised reflections on the ways we are taught the past.

While narrating the rich cultural and economic life of old Handsworth, Dunkley is careful not to gloss over the more painful realities of the racism and brutality that marked many residents’ lives.

Remembering that the Black and Irish communities ran 24-hour blues parties hosted in the interlinked cellars of houses along Soho Road known as shebeens, she’s quick to remind us that this was often the only nightlife available to residents, who risked returning “blue and beaten” if they ventured into the city centre.

In the same vein, we are frequently reminded of the strength and resilience of the community. “What you had were elders of the community … who would literally stand vigilante along here,” says Marcia at the edge of a road leading to the city centre.

“They stopped the youths from going down there. But they also stopped the neo-Nazis, the skinheads, coming up here, because that’s what was happening. Big clashes there. It was murderous. It was brutal.”

Some of the most painful accounts of the difficult reality for Handsworth residents are discussed outside the austere redbrick building with tall, narrow windows and stone lintels that was once the local police station. Then called Thornhill Road police station, Dunkley recalls a passage from Benjamin Zephaniah’s autobiography, where he describes a room with dreadlocks pinned to the wall, kept by police as trophies after alleged brutality.

Walking tours can at times feel like lectures, only with heavier legs and a burgeoning craving to sit down. On this tour, Marcia keeps us alert by making us work. At every twist and turn in the narrative, she interrogates the group for answers, sparking debate and conversation.

The tour ends at Handsworth leisure centre, the unexpected site of a visit from Nelson Mandela in October 1993. When news spread of his visit, residents of Handsworth flocked in droves to the sports hall– some even camping out the night before – to hear him speak. According to Dunkley, it was a visit city leaders fervently tried to block, fearing it might spark unrest in the part of Birmingham they referred to as the “ghetto”.

“But where’s the statue? Where’s the narration board?” says Dunkley, voicing her frustration at the lack of any physical commemoration to mark the event, a theme she reflects on throughout the tour. “Where’s the celebration?”

Black Heritage Walks Network offers guided tours all year round, weather permitting. Tickets can be bought through its website and start from £17 for adults and £5 for children under 12

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has defended remarks he made in March about the Handsworth area of Birmingham, calling it “one of the worst-integrated places” he had ever been to.

In a recording reportedly made during a dinner and published by the Guardian, Jenrick said he had not seen “another white face” in the hour and a half he spent in Handsworth filming a video about litter.

Jenrick stood by his comments on Tuesday, saying he had no regrets about the language he used.

Labour Party chair Anna Turley criticised Jenrick, saying his comments reduced “people to the colour of their skin”.

Handsworth’s Independent MP Ayoub Khan said the remarks were “not only wildly false but also incredibly irresponsible”.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said she did not know the context of the recording but that Jenrick may have been “making an observation” about his visit to the area.

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say how many faces he saw, but the point is that there are many people in our country who are not integrating,” she told BBC Breakfast on Tuesday, adding she was “very worried about what is happening in Birmingham”.

The authenticity of the recording at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association is not disputed by Jenrick’s team.

In the recording, he goes on to say: “That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. I want to live in a country where people are properly integrated.

“It’s not about the colour of your skin, or your faith, of course it isn’t. But I want people to be living alongside each other, not parallel lives.”

Asked on BBC Radio 5Live on Tuesday whether he regretted the comments made in the recording, Jenrick said: “No not at all and I won’t shy away from these issues.”

“It’s incredibly important we have a fully integrated society”, he said.

“It’s a very dangerous place if we have a country where people are living in ghettoised communities, where people are not living together side-by-side in harmonious communities. We’ve seen the damage that can do in our society,” he said.

“We’ve had major failures of integration in this country for my whole lifetime. We’ve got to fix it, and that’s the comment I was making in Birmingham the other day.”

Responding to the recording, Labour’s Turley said: “This weekend Kemi Badenoch said she stood against a politics that ‘reduces people to categories and then pits them against each other’.

“Robert Jenrick in his leaked comments reduces people to the colour of their skin and judges his own level of comfort by whether there are other white faces around. His comments clearly cross a red line that his leader has rightly laid down.

“People of colour should not have to justify their Englishness, or their Britishness, or their presence in this country, to Robert Jenrick or anyone else.

“Robert Jenrick needs to urgently explain himself and why these comments are in any way compatible with what his party leader said.”

Asked if the number of white people seen in an area is the right measure for integration on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Badenoch said: “The right measure for integration is that people don’t care what people look like.”

She added: “We are a multiracial country. That means we have to work harder to bring people together.”

She said Jenrick was “making a point which I don’t have the context of”.

“I think we should look at these things in the spirit of what was intended, which I believe knowing Rob and hearing him speak, is that he wants, as I do, a country that is well-integrated”.

Jenrick is due to address the Conservative Party’s annual conference on Tuesday, when he will set out plans to put ministers in charge of sentencing policy.

Khan told the Guardian that Jenrick had “misrepresented a storied and diverse community, awkwardly distorting the product of an all-out bin strike to fit his culture-warrior narrative filled with far-right cliches”.

Former Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street told BBC Newsnight: “Putting it bluntly, Robert is wrong.”

“Handsworth, it’s come a hell of a long way in the 40 years since the last civil disturbances there and it’s actually a very integrated place,” he continued.

Street also rejected Jenrick’s recorded comment that Handsworth was “the closest I’ve come to a slum in this country”.

The former mayor noted the “incredible hope, optimism and people taking part in education which is based around British values and thinking how they can make a contribution to the future of their region their city and their area.”

“That is not a definition of a slum,” the former Conservative mayor said.