The Villa Cross, Handsworth
Villa Cross, Handsworth is the junction of Heathfield Road, Villa Road and Lozells Road. The crossroads was shown on the 1st Series Ordnance Survey map of 1834 as Aston Villa.
The Villa Cross Tavern stood at the junction between Lozells Road and Heathfield Road. It was certainly there in 1879 by that name and may date from the first half of the 19th century. It isn't there any more. The pub was closed after the Handsworth Riots of 1985 - basically it was burned out. The riots were sparked by a police raid on the Villa Cross public house.
As you can see from its location, the police, who went in mob-handed, were able to surround the pub one evening, forming a cordon, and just walk in, drawing the net in. They arrested everybody in there, and there were a lot to arrest, because it was Birmingham's drug-dealing pub in the middle of a black area. Handsworth was black, back in the day - still is, if Robert Jenrick is to be believed, and I see no reason not to believe him. I don't get back to Birmingham much, but last time I was there, there were few white faces. Some would say - and, indeed, are saying, that it is a successful example of integration and multi-culturism. If you leave indigenous white people and their culture out of the integration equation, you could say that - and some are saying just that.
After the Villa Cross customers were all removed to police stations, the police then went in with brushes, sweeping up the ankle-deep drug-deals that had been speedily dropped onto the floor by their owners. The haul represented thousands of pounds.
This set-back to a thriving business was deeply resented by the local black drug entrepreneurs, who forcefully expressed their displeasure.
Hundreds of people attacked police and property, looting and smashing, hurling Molotov cocktails and setting off fire bombs. Buildings were burned out, including a post office. Two brothers, Kassamali and Amirali Moledina, died in a fire at their post office and 35 people were injured. Over 45 shops were torched and looted and 1,500 police officers were drafted-in to bring order back to the streets.
The Villa Cross Picture Palace opened in 1912. It was built in the neo-classical style of an 18th-century non-conformist chapel and had a very large rose window filling the upper part of the round-arched doorway. During the Handsworth riots of 1985 the building was badly damaged by an arson attack and demolished in 1989.
Robert Jenrick was only 3 years old when the '85 riot kicked off. I suppose you could say that 40 years on, Handsworth is immeasurably safer than it used to be. At least he could walk the streets.
The Bishop of Birmingham, the Right Rev Dr Michael Volland accused Jenrick of "generating anxiety" that "fed a fire of toxic nationalism" after he was recorded comparing Handsworth to a "slum" and "one of the worst integrated places" he had ever been.
The fire storm that has greeted Jenrick's remarks demonstrates that The Establishment simply will not allow the truth to be told. We all have to pretend that Handsworth is not a slum, that it is a happy, well-integrated, law abiding place. That it is not populated by the '85 rioters, their children and grandchildren. Draw a line and move on. The British public are being gas-lighted by an Establishment using a concerted plan that swings into action when there is any hint of civil unrest, any speech that might cause disquiet. A plan that firmly tells us that we are living in the best of all possible worlds.
It took a Nigerian woman to support Jenrick and give credence to his remarks. I'm liking Kemi more and more.
There's actually worse places in Birmingham than Handsworth, as mr ishmael described:
"Last time I was in Alum Rock, about twenty years ago, it was like a foreign country, peopled by rude, nasty belligerent arseholes who looked like they'd cut your fucking head off, soon as look at you, and that was just the women; it was like a no-go area for whites. I couldn't believe it, it used to be an Irish enclave, some Poles, too. I lived there, briefly, as a child. It was always a shithole and the flowing waters of the bourgeois gentrification which has transformed places like Moseley bypassed Alum Rock, it was always a poor shithole of a place but on this occasion it was truly frightening and after five minutes I jumped in my car and fucked off out of it as fast as I could. It was broad daylight and at that time of my life I had been accustomed to walking around Handsworth at any time, day or night; I was never worried about blacks or maybe it was that they were never worried about me but that ferocious hostility from Moslem men, women and children in Alum Rock really shook me. I am not surprised to hear that it is now barricaded-up against the Infidel, its schools teaching alienism."
8 comments:
Me used to go Andwurt back in de day, mrs i. To play cricket against those tough West Indian boys who were very much better cricketers than we were. Every single one of them brought up straight and true by their God-fearing parents. Polite and surprisingly unwilling to hurt the rabbits among us. They'd pitch the ball well and truly up to ensure nothing was in danger but the stumps. This was during the early/middle 1970s. It was much changed when we drove over to watch the riots. We parked in a side street by all the minibuses of coppers - eating their sarnies while they waited for darkness to fall, and for it all to kick off.
I was a young Probation Officer in inner-city Birmingham during the riots, mr mongoose. It formed my view that Britain's cities are unpoliceable and that it takes only a long, hot summer and a grievance and they will go up in flames. The thing is, riots are such fun - why wouldn't the lads get stuck in, burn cars and loot? Only strong policing stands between the peaceful majority and urban dystopia.
Good to here that the coppers had their sandwiches before having to wade in behind those plastic riot shields.
Wind forward 40 years, mrs i, and I was the dad on the boundary watching. And who should turn up to nets but delightful Mrs Cricket Mum and her lad. Mum was from Barbados and sounded every bit of it. Dressed much more decently than the rough lot we have become. Polite, smiles and thank-yous everywhere, and her lad was the best natural cricketer of the group too. Five years after that he was lost to the weed and Bandit Country. No more cricket. Last I heard he was a borderline dealer/street-corner layabout lout. I never saw or heard a word about a father btw. We make them, I think, these feral blighters. The schools, the phones, the benefits, the malingering, the endlessly low expectations for and of them.
It is an alternative career structure in an alternative society, mr mongoose. A failure of society and education to give young men a stake in mainstream society. Denied legitimate outlet for their aspirations, what else are they going to do?
One of the young narcolepts spent a summer working in a supermarket, where he got to know people he would normally never have met (walking past them in the street doesn’t count). It was a cold shower of reality and it destroyed a lot of his previously optimistic attitudes towards multiculturalism. He and his little family have now moved well away from London.
Just before the Plague struck we were on the point of buying a house in Aberdeenshire, but it got put on hold, and then my dear mr n decided he didn’t fancy moving to a place where his accent and general demeanour might be unwelcome. I tried to tell him most Scottish people are enchanting, and lots sound just as English as he does, but it didn’t work. We are now househunting in Devon.
Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Wickedest Man In The World (no, not that one, the other one). He seems quite unremarkable nowadays.
Aleister Crowley - well remembered, mrs narcolept. Very strange chap, with peculiar earlobes. Pretty much up his own fundament.
Aberdeenshire is quite, quite gorgeous - almost as nice as Yorkshire, and much nicer than Aberdeen, which is grey, granite and Victorian. I've spent a fair bit of time there, as mr ishmael was often in the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, which is about the size of a small city, and the overnight Northlink ferry docks there.
I don't know about Devon, although I've holidayed there when the kids were young - I remember it as pretty, but with very congested roads.
I think North is the best option. Not necessarily Scotland, if mr narcolept is queasy about the Scots, but Northumberland is fabulous - beaches, castles, stately homes, countryside and Craster for the best kippers and seafood in the world. Yorkshire - my home county - ranges from Victorian industrial to moorland and dales. Then there's Cumbria and lakes. Just remind mr narcolept that you get a lot more house for your money if you go North.
Like your lad, mrs narcolept, I spent a summer working in a supermarket when I was a student. I met people I wouldn't normally have met, being a sheltered, virginal, grammar school girl. They thought it hilarious to lock me in a store cupboard with the local self-designated stud, to take me down a peg or two, and stand guard outside. They unlocked the door when the manager came into view. It was too late by then.
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