Fort Dunlop tyre factory, Birmingham, under development into a hotel and offices, 2006. Wikicommons/Oosoom. Some rights reserved. In the forthcoming book, ‘Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham’, crowdfunded by Unbound, Jon Bloomfield has interviewed fifty migrants to Birmingham from all walks of life: a mix of first and second generation; men and women; from Ireland to India, Pakistan to Poland, the Caribbean to Somalia who talk frankly and with humour about their experiences both at work and in society more generally. In this second extract, he meets the migrants who, jostling with poorly-qualified locals, work at the low paid and casual jobs rife in the Birmingham area.
Ashraf lives in a long line of red brick, narrow-fronted terraced houses. Tall and slim, we sip tea in his living room, where the front door opens straight out onto the pavement. There are a row of streets here that stretch in parallel lines down to the main road that slices its way through inner city Sparkbrook.
