The Podcast

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…

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…

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…

This one settles into a big, close Irish family: a nan who was one of ten from the centre of Dublin, six aunties, and a mom who left school early to help raise the younger ones. Rebecca remembers her dad arriving from Ireland and being taken in by an Italian family near the College Arms,…

In this solo episode Carl answers a question he has fielded his whole life: what actually makes a historian? He goes back to the heroes who gripped him as a boy, Robin Hood and William Tell, King Arthur and Hereward the Wake, and the novels of Rosemary Sutcliff that pulled him into Roman Britain and…

For Father's Day, Carl opens with his own dad, Buck Chinn, the bookmaker who taught him how to shake hands and that the lessons which hit your pocket stick hardest. Then guests from the past year pick up the thread: Casey Bailey on a father who quoted Kipling and Shakespeare off the cuff, Robin Campbell…

Growing up in Chelmsley Wood and then Yardley, Stacey has spent a while pushing back at the snobbery those places attract, and that pride colours the whole chat. He and Carl cover a hard-graft family ethic, the move from newspapers into photography, and the Birmingham colour swatches that unexpectedly took off around the world. There's…

Kate and Carl talk about what reader-funded local journalism is actually for, and why knowing who controls the roof over your head is a story worth chasing. She describes a Dispatch investigation into homes quietly put up for auction while the tenants had no idea, and makes the case for listening properly and keeping people's…

Toby takes Carl back to a Roma childhood in Poland where prejudice arrived before he could even understand it, including the day at a market, aged five, when he first grasped he would be hated. He speaks about reaching Britain, surviving a coma after a brutal beating, and the single hug that he says turned…

Christina grew up in the mill town of Dukinfield, and she and Carl dig into class and accent prejudice, including her mom failing the eleven-plus on purpose because the family couldn't afford the grammar-school uniform. The heart of it is a buried family secret: her ancestor Robert 'Reschid' Stanley, a hundred-year cover-up, and the shock…

Roifield and Carl start with a courtship in a Small Heath grocery shop, one of the few West Indian shops in the city, then widen out to Windrush, Jamaican independence and the depopulation that emptied his mother's home district. He is candid about identity, calling himself English of Jamaican extraction and meaning the order deliberately,…

The centre of this one is Adrian's father, a German Jewish boy put on a boat to Harwich weeks before war broke out, one of only two from the whole extended family to survive the Holocaust. That inheritance shapes a wider talk about migration then and now, and why he wears the label son of…

Kiran's mission is to surface the South Asian men and women who served in both World Wars, and she and Carl weave that together with her own family: grandparents who came from the Punjab on work vouchers to labour in Birmingham's foundries. She recounts how partition in 1947 reached even the villages off the main…

Sitting just off the Bull Ring, John fills the room with the old market world: the barrow boys, characters like Winnie Hart who tucked pound notes into her stockings, the glamorous Iris Mosley, and the families who wheeled their wares across from Coventry Street. He talks about leaving school at thirteen to work the markets…

Over whiskey at Norton's, Robin remembers a Jewellery Quarter childhood, a father who engraved the Lord Mayor's chain, and the move to a Balsall Heath his family thought was paradise for its food and its mix of cultures. The pull of reggae then takes over the story: falling for the music as a teenager, playing…

Sophie's novel Kissed by the Angels grew from something her late dad told her about the facial birthmark she was born with, that the angels had come and kissed her, and she and Carl use the book as a way into a warm tribute to him. They talk about the confidence he gave her, his…

Between jokes about pints at Norton's, Joe and Carl get into family: grandparents he wishes he had asked more about, a plan to record his own mom and dad's stories, and a distant relative he finds himself both forgiving and appalled by. He reflects on comedy as something learned young, laughter as a tool from…

Casey paints a Nechells childhood full of love and chaos, and at its centre his late mom Christine, an Irish woman who ran a print-finishing business, employed half the street and became the person everyone came to for help. He speaks plainly about being stabbed close to the spine, and the friend whose question about…

Claire's story runs from a happy Edgbaston childhood and years of competitive Irish dancing to the campaign that took over her life. Her son Vinnie was born with a serious heart condition and needed open-heart surgery at just two days old, and when the school stairs became impossible she and a team of other moms…

The very first episode is Carl's own manifesto: that history belongs to everyone, not only the powerful, and that each life carries a story worth recording. He sets out what social history means to him and why the working class, women, ethnic minorities and disabled people have too often been written out of it. It…

A quick introduction to the show. Carl sets out what to expect from Our Lives, Our Stories: unhurried conversations with a real range of people, from grassroots campaigners to familiar names, all built on the belief that everyone has a story worth telling.