West Midlands Heritage Trail

Read about our exploration of the Places of Worship Heritage Trail, an initiative of the Faithful Neighbourhoods Centre in the Birmingham metropolitan area.

The Urban Transcendent amidst a Heritage Trail in the West Midlands

Gabriele Shenar and Raminder Kaur

‘Reconciliation starts in our towns.’

Be it in a fragrant flower penetrating an asphalt road, a ladybird landing on a fingertip, or a shaft of light reflecting the ripples onto the underside of a canal bridge, the transcendent is all around us in urban locales even in Britain’s former industrial heartlands, colloquially referred to as the Black Country.

Moreover, as Canon Dr Andrew Smith, Director of Interfaith Relations for the Bishop of Birmingham, maintains, the transcendent is especially encountered in the many urban places of worship.

In May 2024, we had the opportunity to explore such phenomena on an interfaith heritage trail in one of Sandwell’s super-diverse neighbourhoods, Smethwick, a district adjoining Birmingham, as part of our ‘Pilgrimonics’ research on pilgrimage, economics and related circuits of exchange.

The Places of Worship Heritage Trail is an initiative of the Faithful Neighbourhoods Centre. Along with Andrew and Reverend David Gould from Smethwick’s Holy Trinity Church, community leaders including Shobha Sharma, Kulbhushan Rai, Harvinder Singh Sehespal, and Shaykh Nasir Akhtar acted as tour guides on the day.

The interfaith trail connects otherwise separate community hubs and residents to learn with, and from each other, to find similarities and differences, and to eat and even pray together. Those who engage in activities beyond the annual interfaith week, understand that there is a need for more community interaction to think ‘not of just one community but a community of communities’ as David described it—one that crosses divides between religion, ethnicity and race.

Beginning with the monumental cast-iron Galton Bridge that was opened in 1829 now tucked away behind an A-Road, we walked for several hours on a rare sunny Saturday. After an informative stop outside the New Hope Christian Centre, the urban ‘pilgrims’ went into the Durga Bhawan Mandir, were treated to tea, and then sprinkled with holy water during an aarti ritual.

We then went past the Oldbury Jamia Masjid as we headed towards the West Smethwick Methodist Church where we chanced upon a musical performance. We ventured towards the Sikh Gurdwara Baba Sang Ji - once a theatre showing home-grown star Charlie Chaplin’s performances, and a place where former prime minister John Major’s performing parents worked. Here, we sat down on the floor to partake of a communal meal (langar), originally intended by Sikh gurus to break down barriers between castes and creeds. After seeing the 300 holy scriptures from British gurdwaras sent here for repair, we went past the Guru Nanak Gurdwara down the road, one of the largest in Europe with its all-day programmes and religious and musical specialists from India.

Next, we walked up a hill to the Holy Trinity Church established in 1838. On the lawn, we saw a tree planted in 2019 to commemorate Guru Nanak’s 550th anniversary in an act of solidarity to the nearby gurdwara. Noting that the gurdwara gets ten times more visitors than the church, David acknowledged that they were the ‘minority group’ in Smethwick. We were then taken to the Abrahamic Foundation that conducted their services in English to communicate to younger Muslim generations.

We ended up inside the largest mosque amongst West Midlands’ numerous mosques, the Jamia Masjid, marvelling at its grand ceiling, calligraphy and vast rooms, followed by a fond farewell outside the nearby Smethwick Baptist Church.

Participants traversed the past as they navigated landmarks to do with Smethwick’s industrial, colonial and migrant histories, once called the ‘workshop of the world’. This included the Smethwick Glassworks of Chance Brothers that had manufactured sheet glass for London’s Crystal Palace and Big Ben; a clocking-in system for bus companies that began to employ migrants in the 1960s; and Marshall Street visited by the African-American civil rights activist Malcolm X in 1965, only nine days before his assassination in the USA—he was invited by Indian Workers Association’s Avtar Singh Jouhl against the toxic racism and housing and leisure segregations that blighted Britain. A blue plaque marked a very ordinary street with an extraordinary legacy that led to the 1965 Race Relations Act.

Such landmarks raise interesting questions about the very conceptualisation of heritage including religious, socio-political and everyday insignia. They are especially pertinent in the layering of old buildings—those that have been repurposed as with the Guru Nanak Gurdwara that used to be the Smethwick Congregational Church (established 1855) and converted in the 1960s to become a Smethwick spectacle. In another instance of interfaith alliance, the Durga Bhawan Mandir, formerly the Spoon Croft pub, was bought with the help of the Sikh community in the 1990s and transformed into a Hindu place of worship.

At the end, some of us continued our walk along the Smethwick section of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, a reminder of the serene beauty that the urban landscape can harbour, and a welcome sanctuary from the noisy hubbub of the busy traffic-congested streets. Fittingly, the canal sported a narrowboat named Shanti (Hindi/Panjabi for peace). We also learnt that, as part of the Faithful Friends on Tour, some faith leaders had visited the Golden Temple (aka Harmandir Sahib), the holiest Sikh shrine in India, staying in the Nishkam International Centre that is managed by Birmingham’s Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha gurdwara. As guests of Birmingham’s Sikh leaders, they received special access to the sanctum sanctorum in the centre of the holy pool, sarovar.

Andrew was even compelled towards carrying the palki with the holy scripture, the Guru Ganth Sahib, to its overnight resting place in the Akal Takht building in the complex. Interfaith trips to India and Israel/Palestine in the past also included members of Birmingham’s Jewish community although there are no synagogues in Smethwick.

Altogether, the Places of Worship Heritage Trail enabled collaborative ethnography through walking and talking, and an immersion into the multi-sensorial reality of Smethwick’s heritage markers, large and small, local and transnational. Another benefit was obtaining different angles through our camera lenses as we recorded places and people for a film to share with participants. Afterwards, we observed youth setting-up tents and tables outside Gurdwara Baba Sang Ji for the Nagarkirtan procession - literally meaning traversing the town with spiritual song. But that is another story of urban transcendence.