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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2020
The recreation of urban historical space in museums is inevitably a complex, large-scale endeavour bridging the worlds of academic and public history. BCLM: Forging Ahead at the Black Country Living Museum is a £23m project recreating a typical Black Country town post-World War II. This article uses case-studies of three buildings – a Civic Restaurant, a record shop and a pub – to argue that urban-historical research methodology and community engagement can both create a vivid sense of the past, and challenge pervasive prejudices. It also argues that such a collaborative and public project reveals much about the urban and regional nature of industrial areas like the Black Country in this pivotal historical moment.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the Black Country Living Museum, and the project's historical advisory panel for their support and advice throughout this project. I am also particularly grateful to Dr Oliver Betts, Prof. Matt Houlbrook, Dr Shane Ewen and Dr Tosh Warwick for their comments on this article.
1 Black Country Living Museum (BCLM), Forging Ahead Oral History Project 2018/010/001, interview with Cynthia Burgin regarding Burgin's newsagents, conducted by Simon Briercliffe, 28 Nov. 2017.
2 BCLM, Forging Ahead Oral History Project 2018/075/001, interview with John Purchase regarding the Elephant & Castle public house, conducted by Simon Briercliffe, 29 Nov. 2017.
3 BCLM's interpretative ethos is ‘real lives, real stories’, so that while archival research has included sources covering the whole of the region such as newspapers, council reports and publications, focus has been particularly on the individual buildings included within Forging Ahead. Extensive and ongoing oral history research has been undertaken in relation to each of these buildings in dialogue with the archival work, to ensure individual stories are at the forefront of research and interpretation.
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8 GB Historical GIS and University of Portsmouth, ‘Wolverhampton District through Time | Population Statistics | Total Population’, A Vision of Britain through Time, accessed 7 Aug. 2018, www.visionofbritain.org.uk/unit/10168650/cube/TOT_POP. The borders of the Black Country have long been disputed. Some base them on the exposed South Staffordshire coalfield, some include the market towns around the edge such as Stourbridge, Wolverhampton and Walsall. The Museum reflects the Black Country Society's definition and collects from anywhere within the modern metropolitan boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and the City of Wolverhampton.
9 Political strategy can be seen in Black Country Development Corporation of 1987–98 which can lay claim to enabling the peripheral authorities like Wolverhampton to buy into a unified Black Country for the first time. Recent bottom-up initiatives such as a Black Country flag and Black Country Day on 14 July (to commemorate the invention of the Newcomen Engine, the first of which was built in the region in 1712) have received strong support from local councils and politicians.
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19 The end date was chosen to represent a symbolic end of older industry in the region with the closure of Baggeridge Colliery, the last deep mine in the Black Country.
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25 Dudley's capacity in January 1942 was 1,000 meals per day; and across Darlaston's two British Restaurants, 21,538 meals were served in June alone the next year. Dudley Herald (DH), 17 Jan. 1942, ‘Dudley's third British Restaurant’; Walsall Observer (WO), 5 Jun. 1943, ‘Popular British Restaurants’.
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30 DALHS/CBD, ‘Provision of new Civic Restaurant'. This had been true of wartime British Restaurants too: menus to cater to ‘Scottish tastes’ appeared in Scotland, including Scotch broth and haggis; kosher food appeared in some parts of London. Durbach, ‘British Restaurants and the gender politics of the wartime midday meal’.
31 2s 3d in 1948 is approximately £3.50 in 2019; 10d in 1942 is approximately £1.64. DH, 31 Jul. 1948, ‘Opening of new Civic Restaurant’; DH, 31 Jul. 1942; ‘Cheap Walsall meals’, WO, 4 Apr. 1942.
32 DALHS/CBD, ‘Dinner at the Ednam Restaurant, Fisher Street, Dudley on Friday 10th September 1954 to mark the occasion of the visit to Dudley of a party of Tanganyikan chiefs’, 10 Sep. 1954.
33 A.B. Dodo, ‘A report on his recent journey to England by Chief Amri Beo Dodo of the Gorowa Tribe’, 31 May 1955, Institute of Current World Affairs, www.icwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/RFG-9.pdf, accessed 13 Feb. 2019.
34 Birmingham Daily Post (BDP), 28 Jul. 1954, ‘“Close Civic Restaurant”’; BDP, 30 Apr. 1956, ‘Restaurant may be sold’; DALHS/CBD, ‘Civic entertainments and Civic Restaurants Committee minutes’, CE/2/1, 29 Aug. 1956.
35 BCLM, Forging Ahead Oral History Project 2018/010/001, interview with Cynthia Burgin, 28 Nov. 2017.
36 Although local community representatives have fed into the selection and research process since the earliest planning stages, the nature of interpretation within a living museum – involving translocated or replicated buildings, set at a specific point in time – means this project is not formally co-production in a strict museological sense.
37 BCLM, Forging Ahead Oral History Project 2018/010/001, interview with Kay Quinn regarding L. Thomas hairdressers, conducted by Clare Weston and Nadia Awal, 15 Jan. 2018.
38 See, for example, Gildart, K., Images of England through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1955–1976 (London, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horn, A., Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–1960 (Manchester, 2010)Google Scholar.
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