The pioneers
Families arrive from Jamaica, Barbados, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ireland, and beyond, settling in Handsworth, Sparkbrook, Small Heath, and Balsall Heath. They drive the buses, staff the hospitals, and work the foundries — often facing colour bars in housing and work. Their courage begins this story.
Bull Ring · 1960s
The city the pioneers arrived to · John Ball collection
Through the 1950s and 60s, Birmingham became one of the great destinations of post-war migration. Families arrived from Jamaica, Barbados and across the Caribbean; from Punjab, Mirpur, Sylhet and Gujarat; and from Ireland, which sent more people to Birmingham in these years than anywhere else. They settled where rooms could be found — Handsworth, Sparkbrook, Small Heath, Balsall Heath, Aston — neighbourhoods whose names would become bywords for Birmingham's diversity.
Street life
Everyday Birmingham, mid-century · John Ball collection
The work was hard and essential. New Brummies drove and conducted the city's buses, staffed its hospitals as the NHS grew, and took on the hottest, heaviest jobs in the foundries, forges, and factories that English working-class families had powered for generations. On the shop floor, migrant and English-born workers laboured side by side — sometimes in tension, often in solidarity, always building the same city.
Settlement meant struggle. Colour bars operated openly in housing, pubs, and some workplaces; overcrowded lodgings and unscrupulous landlords were common; and families relied on their own institutions — churches, mosques, temples, gurdwaras, credit unions known as 'pardner' schemes, and simple neighbourliness — to survive and put down roots. The photographs, letters, and rent books of these years are among the most precious items this project will digitise.