Take That

Monday and Tuesday, June 27 and 28, saw the biggest crowds ever flocking to Aston. Nearly 1000,000 people, mostly women, attended the two concerts given by Take That in Villa Park, the football grounds of Aston Villa.

Weeks before the event all residents of Aston received and A4 in their letter-box advising them about the invasion that was going to happen and apologising in advance for any inconvenience it may cause. In our area it was not bad. We could hear the music in the distance but for people living closer to the stadium it must have been a lot worse. Walking over to the football grounds through Aston Park I could feel the vibrations of the bass tones in my body while still on the slope downhill. But then the concert was not an all-night affair: the official opening was at 7:00 o'clock and all had ended before 11:00.

What was more disturbing, at least to some residents, was the closure of roads around Villa Park, not only on the days of the concerts but also before and after to build up the huge stage and take it down again. The traffic was diverted along alternative routes but these were not built to accommodate the number of vehicles in such a short time. The problem was mainly felt after the concerts, when everyone wanted to rush home. It took a few hours to clear the traffic, longer than is the case for Aston Villa at home matches.

It may seem strange but I had never heard of Take That before the events of this week. I did not live in England when they first gained popularity in the nineties and besides my interest in pop and rock music has never been great. Anyway I was told that the band broke up and has been reconstituted, so to say, the last one joining again being Robbie Williams, who "was fabulous", according to my spokeswoman.

Concerts like these do not come cheap. The woman just quoted paid no less than £55 for a ticket, which was neither the cheapest nor the most expensive. All in all the concerts generated an awful lot of money and I wonder how much of it ends up in Aston. Taxi drivers had a busy evening; there were plenty of them going to and fro Villa Park. Also the eateries had lots of customers. But I guess that these are just the crumbs that fell from the table of the rich. This is not to complain: Aston was in the news and what is more it was in a positive way.

Ton

Whose the future?

One of my English students is quite a talker. He does not formulate his sentences grammatically correct, but he gets his ideas across, all the time scrutinising your face and looking for signs that he has been understood. When he concludes that you did not get him, he tries again in a different way. He is not easily put off.

His English is clearly of one who has acquired enough knowledge of the language to get by but who never advanced beyond the stage of throwing nouns and verbs at you without connecting them in the right way. He knows his deficiency and one day he confessed to me that he had made a big, a very big mistake. At asking what he meant he replied that he should have attended English courses 25 years ago, when he first arrived in the UK. Now his memory was full and it was very difficult for him to unlearn the broken English which he had picked up during all those years of trying to converse with neighbours and colleagues.

His big mistake would not have mattered so much, he added, within 50 years time or so, but alas he would not live that long. I did not know whether I understood him correctly, but apparently I had, because he continued to explain half-jokingly that by that time the UK would be mostly populated by Asians and he would not need English anymore. I started to say that migration was getting more difficult, but he cut me short and made it clear that he did not have migration in mind. "We big families", he said, "many children". And making a wave with his hand indicating a few generations he said half-jokingly again: "the UK will be ours".

I did not begrudge him his little enjoyment of being in power one day, even though I don't believe for a second that it will ever happen. I rather expect birth rates of cultural communities to fall with the rise in education, particularly of the women, as has been the case everywhere in the world. But why bring in sobering remarks? After all, as a member of a minority grouping he is rather powerless and he knows it: his limited English is a constant reminder.

Ton

Royal wedding

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton last Friday was a great success. According to the BBC 24 million people in the UK alone tuned in to see the wedding on TV and another 10 million viewed at least part of the ceremony. The streets of London were busy too: it is estimated that a million people took the trouble to go out in the streets and catch a glimpse of the newly-wed couple and the royal family. It was great entertainment indeed.

Still these figures do not tell the whole story. It was obvious to me that in the Westminster Abbey most of the people present were white, with black and in particular Asian people being underrepresented. Perhaps this comes as no surprise: the elite of British society are still mostly the old ensconced classes, in spite of Kate herself being of middle class origin and further down the line of miners’ descent.

Changes are indeed taking place. Not just that one day a commoner may become the queen consort of the King, but also a shift is taking place in the ownership of economic enterprises. From steel makers (former Corus is now Tata Steel) to football clubs (Blackburn Rovers) investors from the Indian subcontinent have come in to make their economic clout felt in the home land of their former coloniser.

I wanted very much to estimate the Asian portion of the people lining the streets of London. It was simply not possible: the camera’s, not surprisingly, had another focus. My hunch, though, is that the Asians among them were very few and not only that but also that they did not watch the TV coverage of the event in great numbers.

My hunch is based on two small incidents which took place some months ago. During one of the English classes I’m assisting in the tutor asked the learners: who is the head of state of the UK? To my astonishment the learners, all Asian of long stay in England, did not come up with the answer. They only knew it was a woman, it was a queen, but even their combined effort did not provide the name of the queen!

The other incident involved primary school children of Asian descent. A few of them came into our house and right at that moment the queen was shown on TV walking towards her car to go back to Buckingham Palace. We asked the children: do you know that lady? Their faces showed it all; they had no clue whatsoever. They did not even know that they were watching the queen.

These incidents made me think that Asians seem to have their own media from which they get their news and entertainment. These are not in the English language and apparently their contents are far from the English scene as well.

Ton

Walk of Witness

It has been a tradition in Aston - I don't know for how many years now - that the Christian churches in the neighbourhood publicly show their Christian faith on Good Friday. They hold a Walk of Witness going from one church to another and conducting short services in front of each church. They don't enter the church buildings but remain outside emphasising that the Walk of Witness is meant to reach out to the largely non-Christian population of Aston.

Aston Churches Together (ACT) is behind the Walk of Witness. It does not represent all the churches in Aston, not even half of them. The reason is that a number of Christian denominations are not interested in any kind of cooperation with other Christian churches. Perhaps they see it as a threat to their own identity or they feel that the truth, as they profess it, cannot be compromised.

The Walk of Witness does not suffer from this lack of cooperation, as the attendance this year was better again than that of last year. The glorious weather no doubt was a factor in bringing over a hundred Christians to the streets of Aston but it is certainly not the only one. I have participated in the Walk of Witness three times now and I noticed an increase in attendance every time.

The participating Christian churches are clearly from different traditions and hold different views about sin, grace and salvation. They also have their own particular style of reading scripture texts, and of preaching and praying. Still, these differences are overcome in the desire to commemorate the cross of Christ together and acknowledge him as the living Lord.

The common act of worship binds the participants together. They see through the differences that divide them and sense the sincerity by which each denomination reveres Jesus Christ. The Walk of Witness is an enriching experience and this may be the true reason why it enjoys a still growing attendance.

Ton

The Common Good

I may be wrong, but I can't help feeling that my understanding of what organisation is all about is different from that of my neighbours.

Recent experiences are the cause of that feeling. Together with some others I'm involved in setting up two different organisations here in Aston. Organisation means influence, power if you like, and that is a scarce commodity in a deprived neighbourhood. Organisations are rather crucial in having one's voice heard.

In preparing for the two organisations it was unavoidable to discuss frameworks and constitutions. The discussion brought home to me two concerns I had not really thought of before. One said that great care should be taken not to exclude anyone and certainly not persons with a kind of following. They may turn against you if they are not properly acknowledged. The second concern was even more interesting. It had to do with the possibility that one particular group of people, a large family or a network of family and friends, would try to hijack the organisation for its own particular ends.

These concerns struck me, because so far I had thought of my organisational efforts as an attempt to bring people of different backgrounds together. It was all about bridge-building for the sake of the community as a whole. But apparently, this is not how my partners in the discussion looked at things. Perhaps, they thought me rather naive, as they had stories to tell of how organisations have been used not to serve the common good but to benefit the leaders.

It brought home to me that the 'common good' is very much an abstract concept. In a community that is fragmented, there is no such a thing as the common good, at least not in an experiential way. It is all about your own group, your own particular community, your own culture and religion. And even if the different groups would get together, they are not in it for an overarching purpose but to promote their own interests. It is the politics of the temporary alliances: you scratch my back and I scratch yours. Until, that is, when I grow strong enough to do without you.

The 'common good' may not seem to be part of the 'real world'. Still, there is joy in getting to know each other, to explore each other's backgrounds, to share each other's experiences and to set common goals. Both realists and idealists have their place; together they may make a difference.

Ton

The Birthday of Muhammad

Not all Muslims celebrate the birthday of their prophet Muhammad and not all who do, celebrate it on the same day. The Shiites celebrate it five days after the Sunnis do. This year the celebrations took place on February 15 and February 20 respectively.

Walking about in Aston it is easy to see which mosques take part in the celebration; they have their facades adorned with strings of little lights. The lights are not simply there to call the attention of passers-by. They have to do with the meaning of the feast itself. Light signifies wisdom and those Muslims who celebrate the birthday of Muhammad consider him 'the best of all creatures', a guiding light of God's wisdom.

They believe more; they also believe that the celebration of Muhammad's birthday brings blessings to those who honour his achievements, his moral conduct and his way of life. They experience the good influence of his eminent example of 'the last and greatest of all prophets', as they call him. It is this belief that makes ordinary faithful hang banners in their windows. They witness to Muhammad's importance in their lives and open themselves up for his benevolence.

Other Muslims frown on this kind of piety. They call the celebration of Muhammad's birthday an 'innovation', which was added to the true faith and deviated from it. What is at stake is the pre-eminence of the Qur'an, the holy book of the Muslims, that came straight down from heaven. Muhammad is just the messenger who passed on the divine words without adding anything of his own. Consequently, the birthday of Muhammad has no importance; after all he received his first revelation only at the age of forty.

The believers in Muhammad are not deterred and they celebrate his birthday with great joy. To them Muhammad is not just a prophet who passed on the divine words to others but he lived them himself to the full. This makes him special, a kind of saint, one who preceded them to where they hope to go themselves.

Ton

Advice Centre

The St James Advice and Community Centre is in danger of closing down. It has been in existence for 33 years and provided a great service to the migrant communities of Aston, mostly on issues of immigration and social benefits.

It all started very simple. The local vicar of the Church Of England was asked by recently arrived migrants to help out with their paper work. He did so with the help of a young man from Bangladesh who later studied law and became the director of the Centre. So from the beginning the Centre not only involved the Church of England but representatives from the migrant communities themselves. This is still very much the case, both with respect to the staff of the Centre and the Management Team. The Centre in its very heart reaches across ethnicity and across religion.

The reason for the imminent closure is the Birmingham City Council, the main sponsor of the St James Advice and Community Centre and of many other similar centres across the city. Times are bad and spending cuts of 20% or more were expected, but what was not expected was the interruption of subsidies altogether. Last December the City Council announced formally that its funding will stop by the end of March. It allows reapplication by July but for the intervening period the advice centres are on their own. What this means in fact is that the smaller centres with less financial capacity are forced to stop operations and lay off their workers. This is exactly what the St James Advice and Community Centre did: it sent redundancy notices to its seven staff.

It did more than this. It also collected 500 signatures of local residents who protested the way the City Council had made its funding decision and it involved the Birmingham Mail to put pressure on local politicians. One problem is that Aston is Labour territory, whereas the councillor and cabinet member for local services is Lib Dem. Political strife may be involved in another way as well: one of the two Labour councillors in the area is the former director of the St James Advice and Community Centre who built his reputation by his long-standing service in the Centre.

Attempts are on their way to continue the advice service on a voluntary basis, at least until the time that reapplication for funding can be made. But there is a hitch or two: Funding in the future may not be on the basis of an individual advice centre but only when they are grouped in clusters. What is more, advice centres should move away from face-to-face meetings with their clients and operate mainly via the internet and telephone connections. This would be disastrous for Aston: whether the Council likes it or not, migrant communities function mostly on the basis of face-to-face encounters.

Ton

English Language Learning

Every Wednesday I help out with English learning in a small community centre not too far from our home. The learners are all men, mostly from Bangladesh and Pakistan. They live in Aston and in the neighbouring communities of Lozells and Newtown. Classes start at midday which suites those of the men who work in Asian restaurants. They come home late at night and sleep until deep in the morning.

If I have learned one thing from assisting these learners, it is how difficult the English language is for them. Some had little education at home and have to acquire the additional skills of reading and writing the letters of the alphabet, one by one, both in small and capital letters. It takes them hours of practice to produce some satisfactory results. Others are a step further and know some reading and writing, but they have trouble in recognising words. They are able to spell the letters of a word separately, but they have difficulty in putting the letters together and hit on the word itself. The biggest group, however, reads and writes easily. They are functional literates and only have to cope with the considerable confusion the spelling of English language poses to them.

In English the same sounds can be represented by different letters or letter combinations, and the same letters can stand for different pronunciations. It is not only the vowels that are afflicted with this bad habit but some consonants as well. Moreover, you have the silent consonants which you are obliged to write but not allowed to pronounce. The learners find it utterly confusing and I can't blame them.

There is no way of explaining the differences. Rules do exist but there are so many exceptions that indeed the rules are made to be broken. Historical explanations are not very helpful either. They are highly complex and often more governed by coincidence than by logic. So, what it comes down to in the end, is that learners have just to memorise 'the way it is'.

The teaching of grammar relies heavily on memory as well. It is more a question of memorising sentences in certain situations than an explanation of the distinctions that underlie grammatical differences. Learners are taught how to approach their GP in a health centre, what to say when they go shopping, how to talk about their children's education etc. It is hoped that by means of adopting these sentences the learners gradually develop a feeling for the language and spontaneously start using the right grammatical constructions.

It seems to me that this is the way children learn a language, but children are fast learners and have excellent memories. My learners are adults, they need plenty of time and lots of hard work to put things to memory. A few hours of English once or twice a week is on the whole not enough.

Ton

Monoculture

We are now three years in Aston and sometimes I have the feeling that the tide is running against us. We selected Aston mainly because it was a multicultural and multireligious neighbourhood, and we hoped very much to build bridges between people of differing background. We had no illusion about how difficult this would be: you can't force people to become friends with strangers! We knew it would be a slow process of establishing trusting relationships.

But shall we have the time to do so? Is our neighbourhood not changing from a multicultural community into a monoculture? The statistics have it that about 20% of the population of Aston is white English and Irish, but that is not the impression you get when you walk the streets. You hardly see any white people: they seem to have disappeared from the scene.

What is happening is that white people are still moving out of the neighbourhood. They follow their children who have moved out ahead of them in search of the employment opportunities no longer found in Aston. The same is happening, but to a lesser extent, to the Afro-Caribbean people. They are still present in good numbers, but they are ageing and their children are no longer with them. The empty places are being taken in part by new migrants, refugees from Africa and Asia, and economic migrants from Eastern Europe. It remains to be seen, however, how stable these new arrivals will be. This leaves the Asian population, from Pakistan and Bangladesh, already in the majority. They are a young population, fast growing in this country and with plenty of relatives in their countries of origin willing to come to England and hoping for a better life. They will occupy the empty places left by the other groups and as a consequence Aston will grow into a monocultural neighbourhood.

I like to emphasise that the processes underlying this development are all very natural, there is nothing sinister about them. Lots of individual decisions, all making sense by themselves, point in the same direction and the combined outcome is a monoculture.

How to react to this development? You can't stop the tide. I think, two things can be done. There are people in Aston among the white and the Afro-Caribbean population who do not want to move out. They see the variety that is still being present as a plus, as something to be appreciated and cherished. It will be important to spot these people and support them in whatever way we can. They show what a future of living together may look like. Secondly, when neighbourhoods continue to lose much of their variety, one needs to look beyond one's own neighbourhood and attempt to bring neighbourhoods of different kinds together. As somebody told me in a slightly different context: it will make the difference between a ghetto and an enclave.

Ton

Closures

 

When we arrived in Aston three years ago, the Guild Arms, the pub at the corner of Witton and Ettington roads was all boarded up. Nothing has changed since then in spite of several attempts to auction off the pub. Perhaps the problem is that the land belonging to the pub has been sold and redeveloped. In fact, the very house we are living in is built on it, so that I cannot really complain. Just the same, selling off the open space of a property may make it more difficult to sell the rest, in particular if it concerns a listed building, as the pub is said to be. The result is that what should be a beauty to look at becomes an eyesore.

Recently, at the beginning of the academic year, another building in Aston was closed down. It was not an old building at all: City Academy Aston opened its doors only in 2004 and the building it occupied was newly constructed. It is sad to see a building like that go out of use. Apparently, City Academy, which has four other campuses in Birmingham, saw no future in keeping the Aston campus open. One wonders what will happen to the building now?

Opposite City Academy Aston, the Broadway School, the largest secondary school in the area with 1,300 pupils, has its campus for the 7 and 8 years. It will not remain in its present location for long. If everything goes according to schedule, the Aston campus will join the main campus of the Broadway School in January 2011. The unanswered question is what will happen to the vacated building and how will it be protected against vandalism?

The Aston Library dates back to the time when Aston was still an independent coumcil, that is before 1911 when the amalgation with Birmingham City took place. Its long history, however, does not guarantee its continued existence. There are no less than 40 community libraries in Birmingham and all are under review for delivering value for money. The announced spending cuts may mean that a number of libraries will be closed and its services transferred to mobile libraries. If this happens to the library in Aston another building will close down, as Aston Pride which has its offices in the same building, will stop operations in March 2011.

All buildings under discussion lie within a short distance of one another: standing at the corner where the pub is one has the other three buildings in one's vision. While going around taking pictures of them a resident approached me and commented that Aston is becoming a depressive place. He was not just talking about the buildings, but about the high unemployment and the benefit cuts as well. For him Aston was not the place to be.

Ton