Live and let live: how migrants, through hard labour and integration, helped forge modern Birmingham

Emerging from the shadow of Enoch Powell’s dark rhetoric, Britain’s second city has a far more optimistic and inclusive outlook, writes Jon Bloomfield

Kwessi Blankson gives a light to workmate Jack White in a Birmingham factory (Getty)

Novelist Jonathan Coe has a better feel than most politicians and commentators for what is happening in our country.

Towards the end of his latest novel Middle England, one of his main characters, Sophie, says: “A more cheering thought rose up: the realisation that here, on this sunny day in April, the people of Birmingham – young people mainly – were going about their lives in happy and peaceful acceptance of precisely that melding of different cultures that Powell’s pinched, ungenerous mind had only been able to imagine leading to violence.”

These are turbulent times, but Coe captures the mixed, open and accepting spirit of modern Britain.