Mobile shot of the Birmingham skyline from the train heading into Birmingham Moor Street, passing Digbeth. Wikicommons/ Elliott Brown. 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 third extract, he looks into efforts to preserve a cultural inheritance in a new and diverse context.
‘It looked like a war-zone’ says Mila as she recalls the first time she went to the Saturday school run in the Polish community centre at the top of Digbeth. There were five different classes all taking place within one large room. The whole show was a bit of a shambles. The sharp increase in the number of Polish families in the city after 2004 had caught the long-standing Polish Saturday school – set up after the Second World War by the city’s émigré community – wholly unprepared. Mrs. Wyszynska had been running the school for a long time and she was in poor health. The numbers fluctuated as parents came and went which was difficult for the education of the pupils; the Polish club was not so open to the changes needed; and there were problems with the insurance. Mila stayed and began teaching Polish for GCSE classes. She quickly became involved running the school. It soon became clear that Mrs. Wyszynska wanted to pass the baton onto her.
