Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery holds hand-painted banners from the first political union in Britain founded in the 1820s, a plaque made from plaster scraped from the walls of Wormwood Scrubs by a First World War conscientious objector and over 100 badges collected by a local supporter of the miners’ strikes to name a few items, and this exhibition is presenting this hidden collection to the public in many cases for the first time.
Kieran Connell takes us through his personal journey on what brought him to researching Handsworth, an inner city locality in Birmingham, and what it might tell us about multiculturalism in modern Britain.
Birmingham’s once-vibrant suburb of Selly Oak provides a clear cut case study from very close to home of contemporary capitalism shattering a community in pursuit of profit.
A handmade wooden gun confiscated by the British during the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya made its way into Birmingham’s museum collection.
It is time to explore how we make sense of Britain’s past and the value of thinking historically in public life.
The disruption of a traditionally middle-class patriarchal space and the outrage provoked by attacks on artworks confirmed to suffragettes that the public and the press cared more for valuable objects than for women undergoing forcible feeding.
