Nathan Dennis

Brummies are ridiculously resilient

Hailing from a family of active church-goers, Nathan Dennis has been active in the Lozells & Handsworth area and has seen the impacts of outside influence whether it be good or bad.

Nathan is a founder and trustee of a charity called First Class Foundation which is based in Birmingham that is dedicated to young people within the city. He says that his family mainly come from Handsworth and that many of them are active church-goers, “My dad, my community have strong roots. They go to churches in those areas and my dad’s culture was the rasta culture so I had some fun during the 70s and 80s”.

When asked to speak about his first memories including disturbances, like many others, Nathan refers back to riots and in this case, it was the 2005 riots. Having a vivid memory of what took place, he explains how it was the result of a rumour that a girl had been sexually assaulted by a different ethnic community hence it led to strong, intercommunal tensions, “I remember being in the frontline outside beauty queen in Perry Barr and it was tense man. The black community were angry, they were annoyed and there was a lot of conversations happening on the community radio stations.”.

Once the riots were over, Nathan explains that the situation did ease off and things improved for the better. He goes on to further say however that communities overall are better at reacting rather than responding in the sense that it takes a crisis for a community to then respond to a situation, “I think there’s pockets of good work but it seems to only happen like as a reaction to some kind of a crisis that happens… we’re very good in Birmingham at reacting to issues but we’re not necessarily good at responding.”.

Regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, Nathan speaks about how the community at first “didn’t believe it, didn’t trust it”. As a result, he believes that the community response wasn’t so good. He explains that due to there being mistrust of the Government by the community, they felt as though it was a “scam” hence conspiracy theories were going around about the situation. Furthermore, he says that it destroyed the collective mindset of the Black and Asian communities in Lozells & Handsworth. He ends off by saying that there was a lack of “cultural understanding” between senior leaders.

Nathan has witnessed many changes to the neighbourhood. He expresses this by saying, “Villa road, Handsworth and Handsworth park, these were like symbolic black places. If I go to those places now, it’s multicultural, there are so many new communities, there are so many different languages… like when you go to Soho road, I always say that it has just changed.”. To conclude, he says, “one of the things you can say about Birmingham is that Brummies are ridiculously resilient”.