Mukhtar Dar, a founder of Sheffield Asian Youth Movement, political artist and activist, and now director at Kalaboration Arts reflects on shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick’s observations about Birmingham Handsworth’s lack of whiteness and, hence, integration. After moving to Birmingham in 1985 and joining the Birmingham Asian Youth Movement, he offers a perspective through the opposite lens, showing Handsworth as a crucible of culture and a place where belonging is being constantly remade.
‘I didn’t see another white face.’ [1]
With that single sentence, Robert Jenrick revealed not a truth about Handsworth, but the narrowness of his own imagination. His remark – describing the Birmingham district as ‘one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to’ – rested on a crude arithmetic: that the absence of white faces somehow signifies the absence of belonging. Such an equation says far less about the people of Birmingham than it does about the blindness of privilege. It is a formula that mistakes difference for disorder, confuses colour with cohesion, and equates culture with chaos.
From a man aspiring to oversee the justice system, such thinking is not only simplistic but perilous. It turns Britishness into a mirror that reflects only one image back, and declares everything else an aberration.
Handsworth has never waited for Westminster to define its identity. It has always been a living archive of Britain’s working-class struggle and cultural rebirth – a place born of movement and music, of labour and laughter, of histories colliding and re-forming. It stands apart from the narrow scripts of those who preach from podiums, a living rebuke to the notion that identity must be singular.
Long before politicians began counting faces, this district was shaped by waves of workers who came, not to fracture the nation, but to build it. Handsworth’s story begins with the builders of industrial Britain: Irish canal diggers and railwaymen, Jewish tailors and traders, Caribbean bus drivers, South Asian foundry hands and factory workers. Each wave added a new voice to the city’s song – a harmony forged in hardship and hope.
By the 2021 census, Handsworth had become one of the most ethnically mixed areas in the country – a living mosaic of some eleven thousand residents of South Asian background, more than three thousand of Black heritage, and just under four thousand White, with hundreds more of mixed and other identities. Most are British-born, the children and grandchildren of those who came to build Britain’s factories, drive its buses and heal its hospitals.
Scholars at the University of Birmingham have long recognised this richness. In a 2017 working paper from Birmingham’s Institute for Research into International Migration and Superdiversity, Handsworth and neighbouring Edgbaston are described as having grown ‘increasingly superdiverse’ over the past decade – places where ‘Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Afro-Caribbean, Eastern European, Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese, Polish, Kurdish and African’ communities now live and work side by side. It is, they wrote, ‘probably the most diverse that you could possibly have’.[2]
And yet, Jenrick – whose Nottinghamshire constituency remains over 95 per cent white – looked upon this living symphony of languages, faiths and faces, and saw only disunity. The irony is painful: where he saw separation, generations have composed belonging.
I moved to Handsworth in 1985 from Sheffield, drawn by its pulse. I was 25, invited to speak on behalf of Sheffield Asian Youth Movement about the lessons from the Bradford 12 campaign at the New Inns pub, a magnificent red-brick giant building perched at the top of Soho Road. After the meeting, I wandered downstairs into the courtyard, where a Jamaican sound system thundered through the air – a wall of speakers, a tremor of bass so deep it shook the foundations. Three Rastafarians flicked through records while the selector dropped the needle, and the MC, mic in hand, chanted down Babylon.
Across the courtyard, Sikh men, their hands still dusted with flour from the bakery, drank Bacardi and Coke as they recited revolutionary Punjabi verses dedicated to the Naxalites. In the next room, Irishmen and women raised their voices in Republican ballads, while upstairs, members of Banner Theatre rehearsed English songs of Saltley Gate and working-class struggles.
Around the tables, the conversations flowed as freely as the music – members of Birmingham’s Black Sisters, the Asian Youth Movement, the Indian Workers’ Association, African-Caribbean Self-Help organisation, trade unionists, poets, academics and white comrades argued politics, art, and revolution deep into the night. Handsworth was their meeting point, their shared ground – a crucible where activism met artistry, and ideas met experience.
It was a revelation: a microcosm of everything Britain could be – not united by sameness, but by solidarity. I had never witnessed anything like it. For the first time, I felt not like an immigrant, but part of something living – a collective heartbeat. I stayed. I worked. And I bought a house just around the corner from the New Inns, on Farcroft Avenue – within earshot of the laughter, the arguments and the songs that gave the place its soul.
Crucible of culture
Handsworth was no ‘slum’, as Jenrick called it; it was a crucible of culture. Out of these same streets came Steel Pulse, the Grammy-winning reggae band whose debut album Handsworth Revolution (1978) became both a manifesto and a prophecy. Its songs were the voice of Britain’s Black working class – railing against racism, inequality and police brutality, while celebrating the pride of place. The album’s title wasn’t metaphorical; it was a declaration that the revolution of sound, of solidarity, of self-definition was already happening in Handsworth.
That same energy — that collision of struggle and beauty — was captured again in Handsworth Songs, the award-winning 1986 film by the Black Audio Film Collective. It told the story of the 1985 uprisings, but not through the cheap lens of riot and disorder — instead, through poetry, music, and the haunting rhythm of memory. It spoke of a Britain that refused to see its own reflection in the faces of its children, and of a community that demanded to be heard. Together, Handsworth Revolution and Handsworth Songs turned this neighbourhood into a symbol: a place where Britain’s hidden histories sang themselves into being.
Harmonies out of inherited struggle
Music has always been Handsworth’s lifeblood – the pulse through which a community found its voice. Along Soho Road, reggae met bhangra, soul met qawwali, and rebellion learned to dance in a Brummie accent. From Steel Pulse’s righteous rhythms to B21’s bhangra anthems, from Malkit Singh’s global hits to the crossover alchemy of Apache Indian, Handsworth turned diversity into sound. Its record shops and basements were laboratories of identity – young people building new harmonies out of inherited struggle.
That flowering of creativity grew from the ground up. Oriental Star Agencies, born in Balsall Heath with its Soho Road outpost, became the heartbeat of the diaspora’s music – recording legends like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Bally Sagoo, and Alam Lohar, and transforming Birmingham into a global capital of South Asian sound. When Nusrat performed at the Farcroft Pub in 1985, his voice soared from Handsworth to the world; a local echo became a global resonance.
Difference: the truest form of unity
But Handsworth offered Britain more than music – it offered a conscience. From these same streets came Benjamin Zephaniah, dreadlocked and defiant, whose poetry carried the rhythm of reggae and the ethics of justice. His words turned protest into art, giving voice to those Britain refused to hear. And in the pubs and cafés of Handsworth, the true watering holes of radical thought, ideas were poured as freely as pints. It was here that scholars like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and many others gathered, shaping the language of race, culture, and belonging. Hall once called Britain ‘a diasporic space’, and nowhere embodied that vision more vividly than Handsworth itself – a place where music became philosophy, and difference became the truest form of unity.
As the traditional pub declined elsewhere, becoming a relic of a vanishing Britain, Handsworth’s public houses found new life. The same spaces that once hosted poets, radicals and philosophers were reborn as Desi Pubs – run by South Asian landlords who fused two working-class traditions: the British pub and the Punjabi kitchen. Inside, the air hums with conversation in Brummie, Punjabi, and English; the scent of curry mingles with beer; the rhythm of dhol drums replaces the jukebox. These are not mere businesses, but acts of reclamation – everyday revolutions that turn decline into renewal, and remind the nation that belonging, like culture, is never lost but constantly remade.
Poverty isolates, culture connects
To call such a place unintegrated is to misunderstand what integration means. It is not about racial uniformity, but about shared humanity – about people living, working, and creating together despite the divisions imposed upon them. The real threat to cohesion is not diversity, but deprivation. Fourteen years of austerity have stripped Birmingham’s services bare: over a billion pounds cut from the council, youth centres shuttered, libraries closed, housing neglected. Poverty isolates; culture connects. Yet politicians like Jenrick find it easier to blame colour than class.
When power speaks in the language of exclusion, it poisons public life. When a would-be minister of justice uses skin tone as a measure of national belonging, he betrays the very principle of justice itself. But Handsworth endures – loud, bright, and undiminished. Its streets, its markets, its mosques, temples, gurdwaras, churches, reggae bars, and curry cafés are not signs of fragmentation but of life. Here, the spirit of Handsworth Revolution still hums beneath the city’s surface.
Handsworth, belonging remade
When I first stood in the courtyard of the New Inns, the bassline shaking the ground beneath me, I knew I was standing in the future. Handsworth was the sound of a new Britain being born – one that cannot be reduced to a single colour or creed. Jenrick may not have seen a white face that day, but he failed to see something infinitely more important: the human face of a nation remade in rhythm and resistance – the true face of belonging.
[1] Robert Jenrick, MP, made this, among other comments, during a dinner at the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association on 14 March 2025, though they came to public attention at the start of October. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy85zlpwne6o
[2] See https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/college-social-sciences/social-policy/iris/2017/iris-wp-16-2017.pdf