Suburban Birmingham: spaces and places: 1880-1960

Suburban Birmingham: spaces and places: 1880-1960' is a research project led by University of Birmingham academics working in partnership with curators from Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries, and archivists and librarians from Birmingham Libraries and Archives, and University of Birmingham Special Collections. Together, the team will use the partner institutions' extensive collections of documents, images, and artefacts to research and recount the history of Birmingham's suburbs. As its title suggests, the project will focus on the suburban spaces in which increasingly large numbers of Birmingham's inhabitants worked, rested, and played from the late-nineteenth century onwards. The researchers will explore how public spaces (e.g. streets, squares, lidos, parks, meeting halls), semi-public spaces (e.g. pubs, clubs, music halls, shops, cafés, allotments, places of worship), and private spaces (homes and gardens) were built, used, thought about, and represented over an 80 year period of great social, economic, political and cultural change. At the end of the two and a half year project, the team will make available to the public a new interactive website that will include a VODcast documentary film, articles about the history of Birmingham's suburbs, and 300 images of historical documents, paintings, photographs, maps, and artefacts. This innovative website will also be accessible in the new displays about the history of suburban Birmingham that will be opened to the public at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and at the University of Birmingham Special Collection's exhibition space. Birmingham Central Library will also host a new display that will, in due course, tour the city's Community Libraries. To mark the launch of the website and displays, University of Birmingham will hold a Day School for members of the public interested in learning more about the history of Birmingham's suburban spaces and places. It is hoped that the new website, displays, and the Day School will provoke public interest in, and further scholarly research on, the historical significance of the extensive, and previously under-studied, suburbs of Britain's second city.

The project's research will be conducted by two teams. Each team will have one member from Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries, one from Birmingham Libraries and Archives, and one from University of Birmingham Special Collections - all working closely with University of Birmingham historians. The partner institutions have extensive experience of working on AHRC-funded collaborative research together: University of Birmingham and Birmingham Libraries and Archives ran the 'Connecting Histories' project and continue to work on 'Birmingham Stories' (www.connectinghistories.org.uk); University of Birmingham and Birmingham Museums and Art Galleries run 3 collaborative PhDs together, and University of Birmingham and Birmingham Libraries and Archives have applied for 6 more; all three institutions have been partners in a series of workshops held as part of their collective preparations to mark together the bicentenary of 'The Father of Birmingham', Matthew Boulton, in 2009. However, 'Suburban Birmingham: spaces and places' will be the first time that AHRC funding has afforded curators, archivists and librarians much more time to focus on research than their work schedules usually allow. This is important because such staff are enormously knowledgeable about Birmingham's history and the city's collections in which that history is recorded. The project will enable curators, archivists, and librarians to share their knowledge with one another, to develop it through research, and to communicate the results in innovative ways to the public of Birmingham and beyond. In the process, the partners' ability to produce outstanding research by working together will be further improved, boding well for the future of history in Birmingham.