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Old family letters and photographs arranged as an archive
The Archive

Stories worth keeping

Explore social history through remembered lives, family records, neighbourhoods, work, migration, culture, and the moments that changed ordinary people.
A living collection

History, told from the ground up

The archive brings together oral histories, films, articles, photographs, and family memories. Each piece is a point of entry into a larger story about how people lived, worked, loved, struggled, and changed the places around them.
The collection will grow over time. Begin with a theme, follow a person, or listen to the latest conversation.
Latest additions

New conversations in the archive

Podcast Episode

Lyle Bignon

The conversation moves through a 1980s Balsall Heath childhood, where neighbours came from Yemen, Kashmir, Jamaica and Ireland and a real sense of community sat right alongside crime and a red-light reputation. Lyle and Carl trace how music runs through everything he does, talk candidly about living with ADHD and the crashes that follow its…
Podcast Episode

Siobhán Stevenson

Two people who both love oral history talk about why ordinary voices belong in the record. Siobhan describes the Birmingham Museums project bringing the city's sound archive out of storage and back to the communities who made it, and the part she likes best, playing old recordings to groups and watching them find where their…
Podcast Episode

Dr Karamat Iqbal

Carl and Karamat share a love of history and use it to open up Kashmir's story: how the British sold the land and its people for 75,000 rupees in 1846, why migration to Birmingham, Bradford and Luton runs back more than a century, and what partition did to the villages around Mirpur. Karamat speaks about…
Written stories

Columns and memories from the archive

Carl's columns and community stories are coming soon.

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