ABSTRACT
Birmingham lies at the heart of the second largest urban agglomeration in Great Britain and around a million people now live within the administrative boundary of the city. Together with London, the city (and the wider West Midlands conurbation) was the first destination of migrants from the New Commonwealth arriving in the United Kingdom in the immediate post-Second World War decades. It still has the second largest concentration of people from minority ethnic groups in Great Britain, who formed 23 per cent of the city’s population (231,000 people) at the time of the 1991 Census. The minority ethnic group population of Birmingham is thus larger and more concentrated than anywhere else in Britain, with the exception of a number of London Boroughs. The city’s minority population continues to grow, mainly due to a relatively high birth rate in a youthful population, augmented by migration into the city, though this is now running at a much slower rate than in the 1950s and 1960s.
