Hands. Psychology Today. All 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 last of four extracts, from the chapter on ‘Sex, Love and Marriage’: he searches for the life beyond peaceful co-existence in the shift towards inter-marriage.
There has been a live and let live ambience in the city for several decades. People have not necessarily been getting on like a house on fire but they have got by and learned to accept and at times respect one and other. To draw a Cold War analogy, for most of the time there has been peaceful co-existence, with various efforts to create a more harmonious and equal city, interrupted by the odd flare up.
