Sarfraz Manzoor says he will use new role to make Luton ‘cool’

When he was growing up, Sarfraz Manzoor dreamed of leaving his home town of Luton. Now the author and journalist has become chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire and has one clear mission – to make people think of Luton as “cool rather than crap”.

Luton is a town with a bad reputation, he said. But he hopes this new role will help him fulfil his ambition of challenging that image and getting people to associate Luton with interesting ideas and culture.

It’s nearly 50 years since Manzoor arrived in the Bedfordshire town from Pakistan to join his father, who was working at the Vauxhall car plant.

He said being appointed chancellor of the university, after a 2019 film adaptation of his memoir, Greetings from Bury Park, and several successful documentaries, felt “like a completely impossible journey to have made”.

“The Luton campus is not that long a walk from where I grew up,” he said. “That journey, from wearing clothes from the jumble sale to the robes of a chancellor, is completely strange and surreal.”

Manzoor has written on a variety of subjects, from class and race to music and film. His most recent book, They: What Muslims and Non-Muslims Get Wrong About Each Other , explored British identity and religious tolerance.

His experience at the University of Manchester, despite initially being about “trying to get away from my parents and my home town”, was formative. “It expanded my vision of the world. One of the things I would like to do [as chancellor] is expand not only the vision of students but also of people living in Luton.”

The town has a “resilience and a don’t-count-the-underdog-out spirit” he keeps returning to. He wants to show people all that it has to offer: “When I was growing up I was writing Luton off. Now I feel like it’s the next big thing.”

Manzoor plans to use his role to be a “curator of conversations”, bringing special guests who have grown up in Luton – such as Nadiya Hussain or Paul Young – to the town to speak.

He is also putting on an exhibition called The Story of Luton in 50 Objects. Contributing his diaries from when he was nine years old and growing up in the town, and hoping to find tickets from when the Beatles performed in Luton in 1963, his goal is “to bang the drum for the town and help it punch its weight”. This is “the story of Luton updated”, he said. “It isn’t just Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate.”

Manzoor hopes through these conversations and the exhibition to bring the town and the university together – though the latter has a large number of home students from the surrounding area, meaning the connection is already strong.

Asked what he can personally bring to the role of chancellor, Manzoor said he wanted to give hope. “The fact that I come from a fairly uncommon background in the sense of class and ethnicity – people who also come from those backgrounds should see that where you come from does not necessarily shape how far you can go,” he said. “In terms of education and other things. I hope that offers some encouragement to some students.”