Sounds of Our Town: The Birmingham Edition

Abstract

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: This creative output (zine) emerges from the SDVC Special Support Award Project on popular music heritage and deindustrialising cities. It asks the questions: why should we preserve popular music heritage?; What can the music made in the city tell us about its people and histories?; what role might a city's popular music past have in strengthening its creative and heritage futures?. This zine concentrates on the case study city of Birmingham (UK). RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: Contextualised by empirical research undertaken in Birmingham, the zone contains three commissioned pieces from UK contributors active in preserving, or writing about the preservation, of music heritage in Birmingham. Each of these contributions tackles the relationship between music, urban identity and cultural justice from a different perspective and medium (a reflection on being the founder of a heritage initiative; a poem; a Q&A with the editors). These musings on music heritage and cultural justice are accompanied by original photographs taken during fieldwork. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The contents of the zine present the key themes and findings of the research creatively to a non-specialised audience as well as providing a means to make some of the project's data set open access. The contributors to the zine, with their pieces placed alongside original images from the project, offer a compelling case for the potential of popular music's past to reinvigorate the contemporary experience of life in the deindustrialising city of Birmingham.