Honouring the city's heritage

Cllr Jayne Francis, cabinet member for education, skills and culture, looks at how Birmingham honours its heritage.

This month we have celebrated a wide range of aspects of Birmingham’s rich historic offer through the annual Heritage Week, coordinated by Birmingham Museums Trust, with hundreds of volunteers working with local history groups and other community organisations to celebrate the past through talks, walks and opening up buildings.

We have a strong commitment to honouring the city’s heritage and preserving its landmarks for future generations, encapsulated through our Heritage Strategy, Public Art Strategy and our forthcoming Design Guide. Arts and culture play an important role, drawing inspiration from significant and lesser-known histories of our people, places and spaces, as well as providing insightful narratives in their own right.

We take our role as custodians of the city’s heritage very seriously. However, we have to acknowledge mistakes were made in the past such as the artists murals originally commissioned for the Register Office in 1962, whose whereabouts are currently unknown. Investigations are ongoing, but despite extensive research, we have not been able to determine the fate of these artworks after the building became the House of Sport in 2005. It has subsequently been demolished to make way for the new Arena Central development.

We sincerely apologise for these previously unrecognised mistakes. The adoption of a decommissioning public art policy and guidance document has since been developed by the Public Art Gateway Group - a collective of council officers, Birmingham Museums Trust and Birmingham Civic Society. This group facilitates the changing portfolio of public art within the city and responds to changes in our public realm. This policy will go some way in helping prevent such occurrences from happening in the future.

We all look forward to seeing the results of this group’s endeavours to help ensure that the wide variety of the city’s public art estate is well managed and protected going forward. This currently includes the re-siting of Anthony Gormley’s ‘Iron:man’ in Victoria Square after the Midland Metro extension works are completed, as well as Gillian Wearing’s ‘A Real Birmingham Family’ and Boulton, Murdoch and Watt which will be re-sited in our new Centenary Square.

 

This post was published on 19 September 2018.

Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

About

The blog of Birmingham City Council

Recent posts

Archives

Tags


Social Links