In 1990, Birmingham-born John Taylor, a black barrister, was put forward as a Conservative candidate to run for a seat in the House of Commons, representing largely affluent Cheltenham, a town in Gloucestershire, England. Taylor's efforts met with particular resistance from local members of the Conservative party, one of whom reportedly asked, ‘We have 250-odd candidates. Why did we have to choose a nigger from Birmingham?’ A wealth of pathologies lay behind the question, not least the belief that multi-ethnic Birmingham was the very antithesis of genteel, white Cheltenham. The framing of Birmingham as decidedly not like Cheltenham had been given a particular fillip by the extensive disturbances that had taken place in Britain's second city a few years earlier. Following pronounced periods of immigration from English-speaking countries with which Britain had extensive colonial histories, Birmingham became home to significant numbers of black and brown people, living in districts of the city such as Mosely, Sparkbrook and Lozells. It was, however, the district of Handsworth that became synonymous with Birmingham's black presence, and this new book by Kieran Connell sets out to consider the making of Handsworth, with particular regard to an astonishingly rich amalgamation of factors that comprised Race in 1980s Britain. Connell tells us that ‘in 1985 close to 60 percent of the Handsworth population was of African Caribbean or South Asian descent’ (p. 3). It is thus not surprising that Handsworth should find itself the subject of a study such as this.

By the 1970s, profound changes were underway in Britain's immigrant communities, in which ‘those who had arrived in Britain as immigrants increasingly recognized themselves as settlers, rather than sojourners, and their children began to reach political maturity’ (p. 6). Nowhere was this telling shift recognized and celebrated more than in areas such as Moss Side (Manchester), St Paul's (Bristol), Chapeltown (Leeds), Toxteth (Liverpool), Brixton (South London), Ladbroke Grove (West London) and, of course, Handsworth. Areas such as these were transformed by sections of their inhabitants from much-maligned sites of urban deprivation and economic challenge into thriving, counter-cultural sites of resistance, racial affirmation and, particularly, cultural fortitude. They became, in other words, frontline districts, in which a rich assortment of cultural identities germinated. Connell chooses Handsworth as the focus of his study and, in so doing, brings to our attention an extraordinarily rich variety of factors and influences which together tell the story of ‘the experience of living and articulating race in a particular locale: politically, culturally, and in everyday practices and patterns of sociability’ (p. 5).

Divided into four chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue, Black Handsworth sets out to ask poignant questions, namely ‘How did [particular manifestations of race] consciousness impact Britain's key sites of postwar black settlement, of which Handsworth was only one prominent example? And what can an exploration of the specifics of such a locale tell us about the nature of postcolonial Britain?’ (p. 2). Chapter 1, ‘Shades of black: political and community groups’, looks at the ways in which Handsworth's communities of African Caribbean and South Asian descent sought, at different times and in different ways, to forge alliances, unifying around particular notions of ‘black’ identity. At other times, a range of factors and pressures mitigated against multi-ethnic black unity and agendas predicated on a variety of specificities won out. Connell asserts that this latter stratagem dominated, and that ‘People began to see their ethnic identity – as opposed to the more inclusive identity of black – as the only way of obtaining either influence or money’ (p. 26). Chapter 2, ‘Visualizing Handsworth: the politics of representation’ looks at the ways in which Handsworth has been visualized, primarily through the work of the Black Audio Film Collective, whose seminal work Handsworth Songs offered a compelling reflection on Birmingham's unrest of the mid-1980s, and regional photographers Vanley Burke and Pogus Caesar. It is Burke's photographs that, on occasion, appear in the book, as well as one of his celebrated pictures that graces the cover of Black Handsworth. Connell puts the work of such image-makers as existing in contrast, or to contrast with, the sorts of images of dysfunctionality, poverty, criminality and other deviances favoured by sections of the mainstream media. Within this chapter, Connell makes what some might regard as an outlandish claim, that a celebrated/infamous photograph used extensively during the disturbances of the mid-1980s – of a young man closing in on his quarry with a lit petrol bomb – was taken by John Readon (p. 86), a photographer whose work (alongside others such as Derek Bishton) had done an enormous amount to create more affirming images of inner-city Birmingham.

Chapter 3, ‘Dread culture: Africa in Handsworth’, looks at the rise of particular notions of Afrocentric thinking in the 1970s, finding continued and potent expression in the following decade. It was of course Rastafari (which Connell insists on referring to as Rastafarianism) that was the main conduit for such ideas, ensuing that ‘Handsworth's dread culture was a localized performance of diaspora’ (p. 95). As much as any other chapter, this third one makes for gripping reading, peppered with assertions and reflections such as ‘Britain's growing racial diversity was challenging homogenized conceptions of class’ (p. 97). The fourth chapter, ‘Leisure and sociability: the black everyday’, sees Connell paying attention to the ways in which ordinary people went about their lives, their worship, their leisure, their home-making and, in so doing, demonstrated ‘this book's importance of the everyday in the context of race in 1980s Britain’ (p. 120).

Ultimately, Black Handsworth takes as its focus ‘a distinctive African Caribbean milieu’ (p. 8), meaning that there remain other stories to be told with the tenacity, patient research and uncommon perceptiveness demonstrated here by Connell. The book's problems, such as they are, are relatively minor, particularly when set against Connell's greater task of articulating and resurrecting folk histories that have happened right under our noses, well within the lifetimes of many of us. References to the Windrush scandal are conspicuous by their absence, and curiously, perhaps, in his Epilogue, Connell makes only passing mention of Brexit, perhaps mindful, or fearful, of the ways in which the politics of post-referendum Britain are impacting on conventional immigrant histories in a range of ways, some predictable, others less so. The relatively fleeting nature of Connell's references to Brexit is noticeable, given that an unbroken line can be drawn from Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, delivered in a central Birmingham hotel in 1968, and the Brexit vote itself, some half a century later. In this regard, the book is perhaps to be read alongside John Bloomfield's Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham, published simultaneously with Black Handsworth, albeit by a different press. Bloomfield, quite rightly, more substantially grasps the Brexit nettle, putting it in the mix of the parts that immigrants and their children have played in the making of contemporary Britain.