Mariam Khan: Political History in the Making?

Mariam Khan, aged 21, is on the brink of making political history in Washwood Heath. Standing as the Labour candidate in the May local council elections, both local and national trends point to a victory that would make her one of the youngest ever councillors in Birmingham.

Mariam set aside some time from a busy campaigning schedule to talk to Alum Rock Life about her political influences and aspirations.

She grew up just off the Alum Rock Road and attended primary schools in Ward End. Her exposure to the world of politics began at a young age, with her elder family being long-standing Labour party members, and her uncle Ansar Ali Khan has been a Washwood Heath councillor for a decade.

She recalls attending a residents’ meeting at the age of 14 which led to her appointment to the panel for Youth Opportunities Funding and Youth Capital Funding in Hodge Hill and Yardley.  She sees those years of involvement in decision-making as crucial to her current role:

“If I didn’t take part in that, a lot of the skills I’ve developed I wouldn’t have had now, because there’s only so much you can learn in the classroom. Actually making decisions about real things that happen in the area, from such a young age, it sort of developed in me to have a natural care about the area, about what young people are able to do in the area, and giving them a chance to do things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.”

Alongside this role and other voluntary work, Mariam, like many other young people in Alum Rock, was exercised by events in Gaza in early 2009 and helped organise a spontaneous assembly for young people in Birmingham city centre. After some reflection thereafter she decided to work for change within the Labour party and considered pursuing a political career after her university degree.

However, in late 2011 the Labour Party in Birmingham moved towards adopting all-female shortlists for council seats like Washwood Heath where two of the three existing councillors were male. Mariam allowed her name to go forward, and was successful in being nominated for the seat. Since then the last few weeks have involved frenetic rounds of door-knocking, leafleting, and meeting her electorate.

Mariam is at pains to acknowledge the influence of her uncle  whilst expressing her individual contribution: “I am me, I am myself, I am my own person. Please don’t just tie me down because I’m part of the Khan family”.

She sees her role as championing the needs of young people and of women:

“Throughout childhood I’ve always noticed living in Ward End all my life that we’ve always had a gap in the area in that we’ve never had a female and we’ve never had a young person. The population, if you have a look at that, we’ve got a lot of young people and 50% female, but there’s no one who’s ever represented them. I think it’s really important in order to make a difference to the actual lives of people, to have somebody to represent them.

Up until now, and I don’t want to say anything bad about all three of our councillors, they’ve been working well, but there’s always that gap because a lot of women I know have issues in the area, but because of our culture and religious reasons, they’re not going to approach a male. I think it’s not fair for women in the area and for young people in that they’ve always had the problem. So I’m hoping to make a difference in the sense that I understand the issues because I’m young and I’ve lived there all my life.

We’ve never had a young person or a female to actually sit down and have an agenda and change Alum Rock for the better and I really, really want to focus on that.

I just really want to make a mark and hopefully maybe four years down the line we might have a few more aspiring young females to become candidates for other areas, or for Washwood Heath.

Hopefully the negative comments about Alum Rock from both people inside Birmingham and outside Birmingham will change, but that’s only going to happen if the community and everybody accept change”.

The result of the Washwood Heath election will be announced very early on the morning of Friday May 4^th.

Aside from Mariam Khan (Labour), the candidates in Washwood Heath are:

Mohammad Azam (Liberal Democrat)

John Bentley (Green)

Arthur Davis (UKIP)

Allister Du Plessis (Conservative)

Alum Rock Life will post the result of the election on this blog.

Harlew Caravans Leaves Alum Rock

One of the longest-serving businesses on Alum Rock Road, Harlew Caravans, has left Alum Rock for new premises in Glebe Farm.

The owner, Kuldip Dhanjal, has been on Alum Rock Road since 1989. The business itself has been in the area since the 1940s, taking the name "Harlew" from its original owner, Harry Lewis. Also moving to Glebe Farm is Tony Austin, who has been working in the shop for nearly forty years.

The relocation is due to changes in the current lease, and the desire of the new landlords to maximize rental income having being purchased the property as part of the liquidation of the Norton Estate properties in the Alum Rock area over the last eighteen months.

The new address for Harlew Caravans is 33 Glebe Farm Road, Stechford, Birmingham, B33 9LY. Tel: 0121 785 2924 or the old number which still works: 0121 327 5369.

Roja Stores: Fifty Years at the Heart of The Rock

It is noteworthy for any shop to survive for a half a century, to have done so on the Alum Rock Road is a remarkable achievement, given all the changes in recent decades.

Yet Roja Stores has been present near the Saltley Gate end of Alum Rock Road since 1961. In fact the Rohman family has been running businesses in Birmingham since Mr Rojour Rohman entered the textile trade in 1948, running four large stalls in the old King’s Hall market. At the same time Mr Rohman opened one of the first Asian restaurants in Birmingham on Broad Street in the early 1950s, making him a double pioneer, an entrepreneur in both food and fashion.

He continued in the King’s Hall market until 1960 when the building of the first Bull Ring shopping centre forced a relocation.

In 1961 a store at Number 22 Alum Rock Road opened. Initially the name of the previous shop was kept – ‘Maurice’, a clothes store – as Mr Rohman became the first retailer of Asian fabrics on the Alum Rock Road. Business prospered and the present site of Number 24 and Number 26 was acquired.

As Mr Rohman’s son, Ahmed, now running the store with his sister Yasmin, recalls:

“Trade was good, he was open until ten o’clock at night. People were coming from Manchester, London, Leeds, all over the country, from Glasgow, just to buy the materials. So as he expanded the shops, Number 22 was kept as materials, this (Number 24) initially was all materials as well. Then Dad found there was a change in the area where people were coming in, Europeans, thinking they could buy European things, and they couldn’t, so he thought, well, I need to integrate that as well. He had the foresight to think, ‘Well, I’ll put Western clothing in, bring the curtains and nets back into it again’, soft furnishings.”

Today Number 24 Alum Rock Road survives, the longest established business on the road. Mindful of the saturated market in Asian textiles the store focuses on a selection of Western clothing and that same mixture of curtains, nets and blinds introduced thirty years ago.

As Ahmed Rohman remarks:

“It’s been a happy time here, we are well recognised by all members of the community. A lot of our long-established customers still return, some of whom date back to King’s Hall market. We’ve seen the changes on the road over the years and hopefully we can be here for many more years to come”. 

St Saviour's Church

“A large church in the perpendicular style”. So wrote the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner in the 1966 Warwickshire edition of his guide to the buildings of England.

St Saviour’s has always loomed large on the horizon of my life, ever since I spied it as a child from the top deck of the bus into the city centre looking East towards St Andrews. The imposing medieval cast of the tower and its prominent position on a steep incline still serves as a visual marker.

Until the recent Heritage Open Day I’d never entered the building. Courtesy of the genial warden Mr Phipps I was able to take these photographs and discover more about this richly decorated place of worship.

Constructed from 1848-1850 through an endowment from Charles Adderley, the first Baron Norton, with R.C. Hussey as architect, St Saviour’s has had only 15 vicars in its lifetime, survived war-time bomb damage, and continues to offer regular services in an Anglo-Catholic style.

The interior of the church is lofty, spacious, with rich symbolism at every turn. 

The altar is backlit through a vivid stained-glass window which clarifies the church’s Anglican inflection.

The Lady Chapel is particularly notable for an example of the art of Lawrence Lee (1909-2011) widely known for his nave windows in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral

Nearby is the Chapel of the Transfiguration, dating from 1907:

To the left of the altar is the St Francis Chapel:

which like the St Vincent chapel at the rear of the church hosts smaller prayer and worship gatherings.

The most exciting, if treacherous, part of the visit was a journey to the top of the tower. What felt like nearly a hundred steps spiralling a steep incline took me past medieval-looking battlements cut into the tower:

Ever-dustier, slightly fragile stonework led me to the church bell, apparently still in working order:

I lacked both the courage and the footwear to attempt to get on the rooftop, another time I hope.

St Saviour’s is normally only open on days of worship, the main service being on Sundays at eleven. There is also a service at 7 p.m. every Wednesday evening.

Though denominationally Anglican, St Saviour’s looks and feels more Catholic than many modern Catholic churches.

The Walsingham influence is strong, providing the source for the font’s Holy Water and the destination of an annual congregation trip to the shrine.

Though some of the interior plasterwork needs renovation and the graveyard is severely overgrown, the dignity and intimate grandeur of this striking nineteenth century presence in the heart of Saltley remains intact - something signalled poignantly by the fragments left in one of the windows after an air raid in 1941, another connection with Coventry:

Traces of the Past (II)

Another layer of the area's retail past has recently been peeled back.
At Number 610 Washwood Heath Road, opposite Sladefield Road, is what used to be a ladies' outfitter called Jean Ballard. According to Kelly's Directory this stood here from about 1963 to 1967.
If you look carefully you can read its predecessor store, L. Newey, milliners, on the sign above the door.


The premises have been empty for quite some time, but recent refurbishment activity and the installation of new shutters suggest a new venture about to begin. 

Crowning Glory?

The Crown Buildings at the corner of Alum Rock Road and Washwood Heath Road are more than the gateway to Alum Rock. Their condition is an easy to read barometer of the area's vitality. With their failure to reach the guide price of £1.3 to £1.5 million at the May 2011 auction, the future of the eleven vacant units is unclear.   



Still for sale

As of July 2011 the agents acting for the estate that has been selling its remaining Alum Rock properties indicated that the units are now likely to be sold individually. Indeed one of the end properties on Alum Rock Road was purchased at auction in May 2011 and the new owner is applying for the property to become a takeaway (there are so few already).

The end property of the block on Washwood Heath Road has been a solicitors since 2002 and is not part of any future sale.

19 Washwood Heath Road

Despite their aged, neglected facades the Crown Buildings retain a little of the late nineteenth century grandeur of the Victorian era. The empty units have also housed significant institutions in the area’s history. Straddling the corner, the Law Centre grew out of the Saltley Action Centre – a radical community project and drop-in centre - part of the heady conjunction of local activism and the government funded Community Development Project in the 1970s. Before they are sold off to restaurants, retail and whatever passes for twenty-first century regeneration we should mark the traces of a more radical recent past.

The Saltley Print and Media Workshop (SPAM) on Washwood Heath Road housed printers which produced among other things screen-printed T-shirts, posters for gigs and publishing gems like Our Area, the collection of poems by local children compiled for the Saltley Festival of 1979.

Next door the signs for the Bangladesh Workers Association and the Mirpur Elders Centre signal the journeys from South Asian villages to East Birmingham factories, terraced houses and latterly endless card games amidst satellite television.

Although the City Council's Regeneration Framework for Washwood Heath identifies the Crown Buildings as a development opportunity, the failure of the units to reach the guide price and their likely piecemeal sale in the coming months may prevent a more imaginative reconstruction of their former glories.

As a former occupant pointed out the Crown Buildings make a statement about the area to residents and visitors alike. They are one sensitive restoration project away from giving Alum Rock the high quality gateway that would signal a fresh start.

The 'Other' Alum Rock



An area with a reputation for crime, drugs and gangs, populated mostly by one migrant community. A familiar description of Alum Rock – except this is not Alum Rock, Birmingham B8, but Alum Rock, San Jose, CA 95127.

Anyone who types “Alum Rock” into Google or YouTube quickly encounters this “other” Alum Rock of cycling in Alum Rock Park and basketball at the Alum Rock Youth Center 

I was able to visit the Californian Alum Rock in August 2009. A ninety minute journey on the pleasingly clangy Cal Train south of San Francisco through Silicon Valley took me to San Jose. Two bus rides later I was walking along Alum Rock Avenue, the broad seven mile thoroughfare from the city of San Jose to the foothills of Alum Rock Park.

At first glance the setting could not be more different from the Alum Rock Road in Birmingham: the hills of the park overlook a quiet shopping parade with a Starbucks at the intersection:

and further along White Avenue the five million pound Alum Rock Youth Center with its highly polished sports hall and play activities:

Yet the two Alum Rocks have more in common than at first sight: in California like in Birmingham one ethnic community predominates: 71% of the population of 15,000 are Hispanic. Local residents of the San Jose Alum Rock told me “you don’t want to live here”, “there’s a lot of gangs”. A few days after my visit a young woman was murdered at the Alum Rock transit station from which I’d caught my bus.

Yet like in Birmingham, community organisations attempt to bring shape and structure to everyday life. The Californian Alum Rock has a traders' association and a a Methodist church. 

As with Naseby Centre in Alum Rock, the Alum Rock Youth Center has faced the prospect of closure.

This unexpected connection between two Alum Rocks five thousand miles apart offers opportunities. How enriching and fascinating if the two communities could be ‘twinned’ in some way, with both online and face to face connections, one day perhaps exchange visits.

I now know the way to San Jose, many more from East Birmingham should have the chance to follow.