A colourful, complex mix of contrast and continuity typifies much of what has happened to Handsworth during the past century. Soho Road, and nearby, provide a prime example of radical change: bright, lively shops run by people of West Indian, Pakistani and Indian background share space with an elegant Muslim mosque and imposing Sikh Gurdwara (temple) silently calling into question a famous poet's dictum, 'Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet'. Handsworth (and part of Perry Barr) remains a residential suburb, its most famous residents surely being Boulton, Watt and Murdoch, the trailblazing eighteenth-century entrepreneur engineers whose work attracted world-wide acclaim. Even just a skim through these pages will reveal intrinsically interesting as well as highly nostalgic comparisons and contrasts, of then and now

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