May is Local and Community History Month, the aim of which is to ‘raise awareness of local history, promote history in general to the local community and encourage all members of the community to participate’.
Its aim is to encourage communities to learn about the history of their local area and to engage with groups to research and tell their stories.
Archives & Collections hold a number of collections deposited by community history projects, and one that embodies the spirit of Local and Community History Month is the My Route project: A people’s history of Stratford Road (MS 4944).
The idea for the project was by Sampad Arts who wanted to run a community engagement project based around the Stratford Road, taking inspiration from the no. 6 bus route. They initially engaged Tasawar Bashir, a local resident, to walk the Stratford Road and talk to locals. What he found was their voices and stories needed to be heard and recorded, so the fast-changing heritage of the area was captured. The My Route project was born and the initial research and interviews that shaped the project can be found in MS 4944/7.
Describing the project in the My Route book:
My Route was a major community heritage project which researched and documented the history around Stratford Road in Birmingham, from the 1940s to the present day. Undertaken from 2014-15, the extensive programme of work was supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.
[Sampad] have sought to capture the history of Birmingham’s Stratford Road as lived and remembered by its people… Our aim was to enable Stratford Road residents, past and present, to articulate their stories and create a rich archive of information.
A copy of the book was deposited with the collection and is fascinating, taking the reader through chapters reflecting the themes of the project: Communities, Faith, Architecture, Politics, Trade, Music, Leisure and Cinema.
Each chapter records the voices and experiences of local residents and workers through memories, photographs and poems describing what the Stratford Road means to them as well as the changes that have taken place over the 20th Century. This couldn’t have been achieved without the dedication of Sampad and the volunteers recruited who ‘got to work gathering oral histories and public contributions, surveying shops and businesses and studying Birmingham’s archives.’
What comes across strongly is this is a history written by the people of the Stratford Road about their own community, a community they take pride in. Community history projects such as this allow residents the opportunity to invest and engage with their history and, ultimately, their identity and that of the area.
A standalone website was created for the project, and although no longer live, information, videos and images can still be accessed on the project pages of the Sampad website, which includes excerpts from some of the oral history recordings.
Records of the project can be accessed by appointment in the Wolfson Centre for Archival Research. Please contact archives.appointments@birmingham.gov.uk for further details of items in the collection.
Nicola Crews, Archivist
The Iron Room 