A City with No Memory?

Nicola Gauld

Nicola Gauld is the Co-ordinator for Voices of War and Peace: the Great War and its legacy. She is a historian, outreach worker and curator based in Birmingham. You can follow her on Twitter @nicolagauld or on her blog.

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In December 2014 Birmingham City Council announced drastic cuts to its budget for 2015 and beyond. The Library of Birmingham, opened in September 2013 at a cost of £189m and the biggest public library in Europe, did not escape and a saving of £1.3m is currently being implemented, resulting in around 100 redundancies to be made in 2015 and a reduction in opening hours from 73 to 40 per week. Further cuts to the service are likely to be made in 2016-2018. The city’s Archives, Heritage & Photography department, housed in the Library, will be dramatically affected. This will inevitably result in reduced access to documents and photographs that are the city’s memory and the loss of skilled and experienced staff will mean that the service can no longer engage with citizens from across Birmingham to tell their stories and include them in the archive for the future.

A recent event at the newly-opened Impact Hub Birmingham, organised by myself, Immy Kaur (Co-founder of the Hub), Fiona Joseph (author) and Jez Collins (BCU/Birmingham Music Archive), discussed how we could deal with this situation. My connection to the archive is closely related to my personal experience of living in Birmingham. After moving here in late 2009 it took many months to feel part of the city, and starting work with the archives in spring 2011 undoubtedly helped me to connect, primarily through the city’s history but also through working with colleagues. For Fiona, who has written extensively about Birmingham’s historical residents, including the Cadbury family, the city’s history and its archive collections are essential for her work and Fiona spoke eloquently about the ‘trail of discovery’ that occurs when you begin to delve into the city’s history. Handling archive material triggers connections to the past, and to restrict access to that material, to letters, photographs, documents, that which connects us as humans, will inevitably have a negative impact. As Fiona remarked, by accepting the loss of the archive we are saying that it’s ok to be divorced from the past. As a ‘citizen archivist’ Jez set up the Birmingham Music Archive, a resource that clearly demonstrates the importance of shared memories and nostalgia, helping people to connect to the past but also to the present and to other people. Jez observed that it was important to reimagine how the service might be delivered – what might be the new ways of working and can that be more diverse and inclusive?

Discussions at the Impact Hub

The event attempted to explore the following questions: what will the cuts to the Library and Archives service mean for the city and its residents? What does engagement with the city’s past now look like in this new landscape? How can we, its citizens, help protect and preserve the city’s important historical legacy? And how do we harness our shared knowledge of the past to better inform Birmingham’s future? All who were present at the event understand that the cuts should be resisted and that we should protest vehemently and loudly against them but we also wanted to start thinking about the landscape after those cuts have happened. And they are happening: colleagues and friends are losing their jobs, jobs that they have done for decades, jobs that they love and do out of passion and enthusiasm, jobs they desperately don’t want to leave, but the reality is that Birmingham City Council will not protect them, or attempt to find ways to protect them, and clearly does not value the work that has been done over the years, the active and determined inclusion in the archive of new residents and citizens of Birmingham, the sense of place and identity, belonging even, that has come from the many, many projects the archive has been involved in. Being angry about that, being incredibly sad, demoralised and outraged about the situation will take time to fade but what can we do about it? How can we keep doing the good work, keep reaching out to communities, keep telling those stories that will remain otherwise untold?

Jez talking about the Birmingham Music Archive

We come together and build libraries and archives because the past is bigger than any us. What do we do when the institutions that we build are taken away? Birmingham Archives, Heritage & Photography has recognised that an archive is a collaboration, built together by citizens, demonstrated by the years of valuable outreach work that has been done (for example Connecting Histories, Birmingham Stories). How can we help enable and support that outreach work to continue happening? Sadly the word ‘outreach’ disappeared from the Library of Birmingham’s staffing structure before the new building had even opened but the huge importance of the work that has been done cannot be disregarded (see Jim Ranahan’s recent blog post ‘Real People, Real Archives’ on the 10^th anniversary of Connecting Histories). This work is too precious to lose and we must not allow the cuts to prevent this work from continuing to happen in the future. The form in which it happens now needs to be re-thought, re-negotiated and re-navigated.

As Matt Houlbrook remarked during the discussion, we are at risk of writing Birmingham out of UK and world history – is that really what we want?

Birmingham’s history is for everyone

Chris Callow

I once worked part-time in the archives service at Birmingham’s old Central Library. That experience taught me that archives services do far more than help with a bit of post-Christmas family history research. They give people an interest in a place, and sense of pride in a place, and they are an effective marketing tool for a city to the wider world.

Even if you’ve never set foot in an archive you might well know that they contain exciting things. TV historians wearing white gloves – usually unnecessarily – often manage to find something precious in them.

Yet the importance of the documents themselves, and the stores in which they sit, is far greater than this simple image suggests; archives aren’t for special occasions and their value goes beyond being historical eye candy. That said, Birmingham was recently voted one of the top ten cities in the world to visit by the travel handbook company Rough Guide; it noted that the Library was a defining feature of the city.

Library of Birmingham

Right now the case for the wider relevance of archives needs to be made because in the UK local authorities are looking for ways to save money by making cuts to archives and library services. In Birmingham, the city council is seeking to reduce opening hours and cut over half the staff in its new, award-winning Library of Birmingham (opened September 2013).

Where these cuts will fall within the library is not clear but it seems reasonable to assume that they will affect the opening hours of the Archives, Heritage and Photography section and reduce its already small number of expert staff. The knowledge that such staff have of the archives is extensive and will be impossible to replace if they are made redundant.

Campaigning is underway to discuss the fate of the library services. Petitions seeking to reverse the cuts to the Library of Birmingham and protect its photograph collections can be signed on-line at change.org. Friends of the Library of Birmingham Archives and Heritage have organized a public meeting to discuss the future of the Library on Wednesday.

The public needs to know (as do the decision-makers) what is kept in the stores in the Library of Birmingham (LoB) and the wider importance of those archives . The archives are vast, they are important to many different people for many different reasons, and it is in everyone’s interests, especially those people in Birmingham, that they continue to be readily accessible. Like so many other public services, you only discover their value when you go to use them.

The scale and diversity of the archive at LoB is extraordinary, it being one of the largest municipal archives in the UK. It contains not only the city council’s own archives – one of the most significant collections of documents on a major city’s development anywhere in the world – but everything from key documents on technological development and industrialisation, locally and internationally significant photographic collections, to recent records of new communities in Birmingham (discussed on this blog twice previously).

Birmingham’s inevitable connections with its region, Warwickshire especially, means that, among other things, LoB is home to a renowned and extensive collection of material relating to Shakespeare. This, then, is far more than a place to film an episode of Who do you think you are?, although it serves the family historian very well.

Gillian Wearing’s sculpture ‘A Real Birmingham Family’.

In fact, given the diversity of records of schools, businesses, hospitals, personal papers and photographs in LoB’s archive, family historians find out more in LoB than they might in other archives or via any genealogy service on the internet. The archive is a testament to the generations of archivists who have helped develop it, continue to develop it, and have ensured that it is one of the UK’s designated collections.

The size and diversity of the LoB’s archive means it attracts a diverse audience. From a staff perspective it takes years to actually understand what the archive contains – or at least I hope my own ignorance of it after a year of working there said more about the archive’s size than my ability to learn.

Finally I want to give three examples of the kinds of different users the service has and why maintaining sufficient opening hours and specialist staffing matters. In some respects these examples are typical, in others they are not.

First is simply of a couple of local boys, both probably about 10 years old, both from British Indian backgrounds. They came to the archive one day, unaccompanied, to find out more about the history of their school – I forget where it was in Birmingham exactly they were from. They spent about an hour looking at the earliest (Victorian) records of their school and asking questions about it.

I am not sure what had led them to visit the archive or how they knew it even existed, but they went away knowing more about their own locality than they had before. Limited access will prevent casual ‘engagement’ with kids from ‘hard to reach’ communities like these two, who no doubt went home and told friends and relatives what they had learnt.

Similarly, the proposed complete cut in LoB’s outreach activities will stop all schools’ use of the archive – over 30 schools used it in 2014. No school children will have their knowledge of Birmingham or knowledge of history enhanced once the new financial regime is in place.

Second, is the case of a young married couple who had just moved to Birmingham and just bought their own house, a Victorian terrace. They came to the archive to research the history of their house via building plans and other records about their street. Like my first pair, these were people just developing an interest in their city but their arrival in Birmingham was clearly their own choice. They clearly valued Birmingham’s cultural offering and it had probably given them a reason to move to the city.

People don’t move to new cities on the strength of their archive or libraries but when these services are available and known about, they help shape an impression of them. At present the LoB is probably a draw for professionals choosing where they live; it would be a mistake to disinvest in the cultural sector and deter people from choosing Birmingham for its ‘canals, culture and housing’.

Last, as a type of user, might be the kind of academic researcher from outside the UK who comes to Birmingham, either annually or for one-off visits, because of the specialist collections which relate to their interests. We used to have a historian from New Zealand who came to Birmingham every year in their vacation to use one or two collections of papers; they wrote books where Birmingham featured heavily and which encouraged others to take an interest in the city.

Other examples of historians of modern Britain visiting the archives are numerous. Sadly, limited opening hours will dissuade scholars from the UK and abroad from visiting Birmingham; they will adapt their research and go elsewhere. Given that University of Birmingham’s History department has just been rated as the UK’s best for research it would hope to capitalise on this and grow its own strengths. New UoB researchers hoping to make use of Archives and Heritage may be disappointed. Like anyone else, they might not be able to find the time during the week to visit an archive which is rarely open, or find a person who works there who can offer them informed advice.

Connected Histories in Birmingham

Kate Smith

Spotted: this advert for the Horrible Histories Christmas special, now showing at the Old Rep Theatre, on a number 50 bus heading home from Birmingham city centre at the weekend. This ‘action-packed historical adventure’ features historical figures like Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Oliver Cromwell and, of course, Santa Claus. Brilliant. The Horrible Histories brand has always offered a great way to get kids enthusiastic about history and learning about the past: an endeavour that can only be applauded. But what sort of past is being represented here and on stage? There are three ‘great’ men (four, if you want to count Santa) and one woman; a king and a celebrated author; all of them are white. These histories might be action-packed, but they are also horribly lacking in diversity. Can this version of the past really speak to the people of Birmingham, or Britain more generally?

The Horrible Histories poster stood out, because I was coming back from a day of learning about the diverse and connected histories that come together to make up Birmingham’s vibrant past and present. On Saturday Chris Moores, Matt Houlbrook, Sarah Pett and I ventured into the new shiny building that is the Library of Building to hear a series of presentations about other forms of history being researched and written here in Britain’s second largest city. ‘Connected Histories: Voices Past and Present’ had been organized Izzy Mohammed who works as the Audience Engagement Coordinator at the Library while working on a PhD in the University of Birmingham . On Saturday 15 November, Izzy brought together a range of people to share their experiences of running different historical projects across Birmingham.

Horrible Histories might not necessarily speak to the people of Birmingham, but at Connected Histories we heard the voices of many of the city’s citizens retelling its diverse pasts – both those who have been recorded describing their own lives, and the volunteers and community representatives who are working so hard to elicit their personal testimonies. We heard from Kate Gordon who is working with members of the Chinese community to complete a series of oral histories that seek to mark and record processes of migration to and home building within Birmingham’s neighbourhoods. Similarly, we learnt about From Mirpur to Birmingham, an ambitious project that focuses on the experiences of individuals who have journeyed from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir to Birmingham. Like Kate Gordon’s Chinese Lives in Birmingham, the Mirpur project has recorded oral histories to capture the experiences and meanings of migration, in the hope that younger generations will gain a better understanding of the lives lived by older residents in the city. The desire to pass histories from one generation to the next was also evident in a project being organized by Maureen Smojkis and Ania Gibson of the Midland Polish Association. Oral histories, photographs, objects and documents have been uncovered to construct a richer history of Birmingham’s Polish residents. During the day we also heard about the work of Christina Darragh who is working to document the experiences of residents of the Three Estates in Kings Norton. Built in the 1950s, little evidence currently exists to show what these estates were like to live on in the second half of the twentieth century. This project, like the others we heard from, places value on the different lived experiences of Birmingham’s residents and tries to unpick the complicated histories located in its sites and spaces.

Here, in the Library of Birmingham, on a blustery Saturday afternoon, people had come together not to consume history as a spectacle, but to share in the process of making history – to listen and learn from the efforts and achievements of others embarked on practising history at different locations across the city. During the day I was sat next to a member of the Hall Green History Society who was interested in embarking on an oral history project of his own and wanted to learn from others. I also spoke to a woman who wanted to find some way of recording the history of her father and his professional contacts who had trained as doctors in the subcontinent before moving to Britain and practising medicine here. The ‘Connected Histories’ event encouraged people to share expertise, knowledge, skills and experience in order that others might also go out and capture the histories of those around them. The different presentations we heard demonstrated that individuals and groups are working together to capture a past that is much more diverse than those we meet in traditional media. They also, in their methods and practices, showed how broad the project of writing history has become. Individuals and groups outside of the academy are working to ensure that a more inclusive vision of Britain’s past is being created – and, just as importantly, connected. Chris, Matt, Sarah and I left the Library keen to learn from those endeavours.