It is an unremarkable house on a busy road in Wolverhampton: semidetached, five bedrooms, a coal bunker, some original features including ceiling roses and stained-glass windows, currently rented to a young family with a large German shepherd called Fang.

One day it could also sport a blue plaque on its front wall, informing passersby that “Enoch Powell, 1912-1998, Conservative MP, lived here”.



These few words would not reflect Powell’s legacy, nor reveal the strength of feeling of many city residents against the erection of a monument to their erstwhile MP. Among others, Clive Gregory, the bishop of Wolverhampton, speaking on behalf of local faith organisations, has strongly opposed the idea, saying it would be “widely interpreted as honouring Enoch Powell’s racist views”.



Nominations for a plaque have been received by the Wolverhampton Civic and Historical Society, which will consider them this year if they turn into a formal application. A decision on whether to proceed could come within months of Friday’s 50th anniversary of the politician’s inflammatory anti-immigration “rivers of blood” speech.



Powell, who represented Wolverhampton South West for almost a quarter of a century, caused outrage with the speech he made in Birmingham on 20 April 1968. He claimed constituents had told him Britain would soon not be worth living in as a result of immigrants and their descendants.

“It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre,” he said. “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man walks past graffiti stating ‘Powell For PM’ in 1968. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

The full speech, interspersed with analysis, is to be read by an actor in a BBC radio documentary this weekend. Online promotion of it by the presenter, Amol Rajan, prompted Dr Shirin Hirsch, an expert on Powell, to demand her contribution be removed altogether; a request the BBC acceded to on Friday.

The programme also prompted criticism from the Labour peer Andrew Adonis. In a letter to the media regulator, Ofcom, demanding the cancellation of the programme, Lord Adonis described it as “the most incendiary racist speech of modern Britain”.



The day after his speech, Powell was sacked as shadow defence minister by the Conservative leader Edward Heath. Rival demonstrations for and against Powell took place in Wolverhampton. In London, 1,000 dockers walked out on strike in support of the MP, some bearing placards saying “Back Britain, not Black Britain”.



“The speech had an immediate impact, with 12 reports of racist attacks in the area in the two weeks that followed,” said Hirsch, an academic at the University of Wolverhampton, whose book In The Shadow Of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality and Resistance will be published in the autumn.



“Black and Asian people I’ve interviewed speak of real fear in the weeks and months after Powell’s speech.”



Wolverhampton at the time was a “boom town”, she said, with no shortage of work for migrants arriving from Commonwealth countries. Many took jobs in the NHS, public transport, factories and foundries, often living in multi-occupancy homes where beds were slept in on a rotation basis to match shift patterns.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anti-immigration protesters march four years after Powell’s speech. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

“Previously there were local stories of interracial marriages and people organising in the workplace. But after the rivers of blood speech, immigrant communities were forced to organise to defend themselves against racist violence. The locals left were in disarray as they watched sections of workers walk out on strike in support of Powell,” Hirsch said.



Angela Spence, who was six at the time of Powell’s speech, has no recollection of the event, “but I grew up recognising that he was a very divisive and toxic figure”.



Her parents had come to Wolverhampton from Jamaica. “We lived in a street where we had neighbours from Fiji, Pakistan, India, all parts of the Caribbean, Poland, Italy – and people who had been born in Britain. It was incredibly diverse but very harmonious, very neighbourly.”



The family was politically aware. “As I grew up I remember my parents talking about friends who were facing negative views, which were probably exacerbated by the speech and sentiments around it.”

Spence attended West Park primary school, which had attracted national attention weeks earlier when Powell referred to it in another speech, claiming it had only one white pupil. A photograph of two boys, one white and one black, was carried in most newspapers.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Best friends Mike Edwards, left, and Ray Comrie at West Park primary school. Photograph: Alamy

“It was a complete lie,” said Mike Edwards, 59, the white boy pictured alongside his best friend, Ray Comrie. Other white pupils included his brothers and cousins, he said.



The spotlight on the school and the rivers of blood speech had an immediate impact. “Before we were just kids, and afterwards I was white and they were black. I can remember seeing graffiti on my way to school after the speech, saying ‘Nigger, go home’, that sort of thing. I had to ask my mum what it meant.”



Some now fear the tensions stoked by the speech half a century ago could be reignited by the blue plaque suggestion. Critics accuse the local paper, the Express and Star, of fomenting division by running an online poll, in which 70% of 20,000 respondents backed the idea. Some opponents claim the link to the poll was shared by Ukip supporters far from Wolverhampton.



Supporters of the plaque include Nigel Hastilow, a former Conservative parliamentary candidate who was dropped in 2007 after writing a newspaper column arguing “Enoch Powell was right”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Angela Spence, centre, with other former pupils of West Park primary school, including Mike Edwards, left. Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Observer

In a debate on the proposal in February, Hastilow said: “People of significance in history, whether you agree with them or disagree, should be remembered. Powell is arguably one of the greatest politicians of the last century.”



According to Hirsch, “plaques are intended to celebrate a notable figure. But the rivers of blood speech was not an interesting curiosity, it was a powerful and threatening message whose impact is still being felt. You cannot separate the racism from the man.”



The Rev Ray Gaston of St Chad and St Mark’s church in what used to be Powell’s parish, and a key figure in the campaign group Black Country Stand Up To Racism, said the broader backdrop to the plaque proposal was hostility towards refugees, a fear of diversity and growing Islamophobia. “It feeds into a cultural mood that needs to be resisted.”

The area was what sociologists called “super-diverse”, he said. “There are different communities, several languages spoken, a significant number of asylum seekers. Powell would see this as a nightmare, but I see much hope and possibility.



“If it wasn’t for migration and refugees, this church would be on its last legs. Instead it’s going through renewal. There’s a new Christian culture developing here.”

A straw poll of a dozen students at the University of Wolverhampton last week found most had never heard of Powell or his speech, and all were relaxed about living in a diverse city.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eleanor Smith, Labour MP for Wolverhampton South West. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

But perhaps the biggest riposte comes from Eleanor Smith, who was elected last year in Powell’s former seat as the city’s first MP from an African-Caribbean background. Like her fellow Wolverhampton MPs, she is a staunch opponent of the plaque proposal.



Smith was 10 when Powell delivered the speech. “He sought to divide the city and the country, and divide working people. I remember being called names, and these things remain in your head,” she said.



“But almost 50 years on, the people of Wolverhampton voted for me, a black woman, to represent them – and that speaks volumes. Powell would be turning in his grave. It’s poetic justice.”

