The Opening of "The Pod"

Saturday June 23rd was an important day in the life of the community on the border of Alum Rock and Bordesley Green. After several years of hard work initiated by Margaret, a local resident, and many twists and turns, Basharat Dad of Our Community was able to preside over the opening of “The Pod”.

Located on Whitacre Road, just over the railway line at the far end of Ludlow Road, “The Pod” has turned a vandalised container and a disused skate park into a colourful venue with the potential to offer many opportunities to local residents.

As Basharat Dad explains:

“This was the hot spot area for anti-social behaviour. The police got Our Community CIC involved in the process and we’ve been working on the ground in the area for over two years, building that relationship with the young people, and working with the council at the same time which is quite difficult to achieve. And then within that two and a bit years we’ve actually managed to take the skate park off the council, and it’s going through community asset transfer, so we’re going to take the actual site. It would be an asset owned by Our Community”.

On the opening day over 150 people came to see the site's possibilities. Basharat’s plan is to use both the skate park and the Pod building itself to widen the range of activities offered by Our Community and one of its associate organisations Evo Youth:

“In terms of going forward, we’ve got this building, “The Pod”. I’m working with a number of housing associations, and a number of local organisations who want to use this for different types of activities. So everything here won’t be run by Our Community CIC, we’re just going to manage that process. But the youth work will be run by Our Community CIC and Bordesley Green Detached Project. They’re part of the Youth Service, and they’ll be delivering some of their programmes from this site.

So it is a community facility and it will be run by the local community. We’ve got local women that want to do something here, so it will be resident-led. We’ve got volunteers that want to support us. All the painting you can see on the Skate Park has been carried out by volunteers, and paint that we got from local organisations”.

Given the alarmingly high unemployment in East Birmingham, Basharat is keen to offer support into employment and training routes:

“We’re looking at working with 24 young people and working with them to progress through to careers advice, education, and helping them make those choices. Not only just sign-post them, but actually step by step working with them and slowly making that change. We’ve already got a project at the Evolution Centre, and hopefully that will be coming here. That’s already in the pipeline. We’re still running our cricket, still running our football, so any young people that want to do that can do that”.

Basharat summarised his feelings having seen "The Pod" open:

“It’s been a bit of a process, but just to see it open on Saturday, and with the feel and vibe of the community, makes it all worth it”.

For more details see the Our Community Facebook page and Twitter feed

Faith Watch: The Eyes and Ears of the Community?

West Midlands Police has teamed up with 14 members of the local community and religious institutions to establish ‘Faith Watch’ patrols in the Washwood Heath ward.

As the neighbourhood police sergeant Richard Evans explains, the initiative aims to harness well-respected members of the local community to walk around their area and pre-empt potential incidents of low-level disorder.

“It’s a coining of Street Watch...we have such a really strong community, and if we can get the religious community involved that might act as a strong cohesive unit”.

The name ‘Faith Watch’ reflects the inter-faith work done by the local police in recent years, building on the contacts made by John Bradley, one of the local Police and Community Support Officers:

“It’s almost like an outreach, Faith Watch, understanding that actually we haven’t just got the one faith, although the area is predominantly Muslim, we’ve got multi-faiths in here. So, ‘let’s get you all working together’ which will improve the cohesive nature of the area, and then hopefully everyone will see, and it sounds quite cheesy, but it’s almost quite harmonious. If the leaders can do it, then the members of the public can do it.”

The members of Faith Watch devote at least two hours a month to their patrols, guided by advice from the police on where to focus.

Sergeant Evans emphasised the role of the Faith Watch members in helping to address the long-standing local concern about litter:

“It’s also about empowering the members of the community to take a pride in their own area. It’s not just about anti-social behaviour...there’s a litter thing – A couple of the members are so good, they will knock on doors and say, ‘Is that your rubbish? Who’s responsible for this?’ And that’s so powerful. If we did it, sometimes we might just get lip service. It’s about the community, there’s more respect there, because they’ve lived there for a long time”.

Faith Watch began in March and Sergeant Evans is pleased with its progress so far. For him the spirit of the initiative is to say to people: “Go out there and be the eyes and ears of your community, and make a difference in your community. The enthusiasm of some of the group is infectious, it really is great to see, and I wish I’d started this years ago. Because to harness that positive attitude about the community and about their own area, it’s been great.”

“I have a passion for this area because I think it’s a close-knit community, but there’s a large proportion of people who want to make a difference. I’m fed up of seeing negative stuff about Alum Rock, it’s nice to see the positives because there are lots of them.”

To find out more about Faith Watch contact the Washwood Heath Neighbourhood Police Team via

washwoodheath@west-midlands.police.uk

Mariam Khan wins in Washwood Heath

Further to the previous post Mariam Khan has been elected as councillor for Washwood Heath.

The result in full:

Mariam Khan (Labour)  6608 (80.55%)

Mohammad Azam (Liberal Democrat) 1049 (12.79%)

Arthur Davis (UKIP) 185 (2.25%)

John Bentley (Green) 184 (2.24%)

Allister Du Plessis (Conservative) 178 (2.16%)

Majority: 5559

Mariam Khan , aged 21, together with her newly elected colleague Josh Jones in Stockland Green, thus becomes one of the youngest ever City Councillors in Birmingham's history, as in modern times the age at which someone could stand for political office was only reduced to below 21 in summer 2010.

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: