The City of Birmingham is a significant and important context for the Cadbury Centre’s work. England’s second city, a strategically-significant and prominent member of the Core Cities network and Europe’s largest local authority, Birmingham is the youngest major city in Europe, with under 25s accounting for nearly 40% of the city’s population.
Most of the substantial immigration into the city region from the 1950s onwards was from
Commonwealth countries, including particularly the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, and rather less of it from Europe than in some other parts of the UK. It is also one of Europe’s more interreligious cities, with one of its main streets being labelled ‘
the most religiously diverse road in Britain’.
Birmingham can lay claim to being the current focal point of interfaith and ecumenical activity in the UK, since the establishment of the Birmingham Faith Leaders’ Group after 9/11 and because of the close collaboration between the Roman Catholic and Anglican Archbishop and Bishop and their dioceses. There is a strong case for suggesting that England’s second city is very much a reflection of the Commonwealth in miniature, therefore. For all these reasons and more, Birmingham is an excellent location for the Cadbury Centre.