A colourful, complex mix of contrast & continuity typifies much of what has happened to Handsworth during the past century. Soho Road, & nearby, provide a prime example of radical change: bright, lively shops run by people of West Indian, Pakistani & Indian background share space with an elegant Muslim mosque & imposing Sikh Gurdwara (temple) silently calling into question a famous poet's dictum, ' Oh, East is East & West is West, & never the twain shall meet'. Handsworth (and part of Perry Barr) remains a residential suburb, its most famous residents surely being Boulton, Watt & 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 & contrasts, of then & now.