Birmingham has a rich collection of community oral histories gathered from across the West Midlands. The Voices of the City project is the first step in a wider ambition to work with community participants and volunteers, to explore how these histories can be recognised in the story of how the city and the wider region became what it is today.

Focusing on four specific collections and working with the Trust’s dedicated team of volunteers to transcribe interviews from the following archives over the next three years.

Vibes - A History of Urban Music focused on collecting histories of Black/urban music, following specific contemporary genres from their presence in the West Midlands back through their roots in the Caribbean and West Africa. The collection includes interviews with major Black urban musicians exploring African and African-Caribbean urban music cultures in Birmingham and Coventry.

Change in the Inner City: Childhood was funded by Birmingham City Council’s Inner-City Partnership. The oral history interviews recorded in the 1980s captured the memories and experiences of working-class people from across central Birmingham. This collection focuses on working class lives and recollections of childhood growing up in back-to-back housing in inner-city Birmingham.

Take Heart: People, History and Change in Birmingham’s Heartlands explores the story of Duddeston, Nechells and Bordesley through the experiences of people living and working in the area known as Heartlands. During the 20th Century the north and east of the city experienced continuous change, so the project explored key historical concepts such as continuity and change, and how people had responded to the subsequent social and economic changes this brought.

Nazi Genocide: The Spoken Recollections of West Midlands Survivors 1923-1966. The Spoken Recollections of West Midlands Survivors’ is one of two projects deposited with the City Sound Archive during the 1980s by Birmingham’s Jewish community. Conducted between 1983 and 1986 by the Birmingham Branch of the Jewish Historical Society and the West Midlands Oral History Group, the collection includes a diverse range of testimonies from Holocaust survivors who share powerful personal stories of hope, tragedy, and survival.

If you are interested in hearing these stories and making them accessible to other people in the hope of learning about the lives of West Midlands communities, get in touch, we would love to hear from you and welcome your support.

Funded by Esmee Fairbairn Foundation.

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