The Project

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Children's Lives is the first major project in Birmingham and the West Midlands to consider children’s lived experiences from the 18th century to the present day. Consisting of a series of interrelated activities, the project draws on nationally acclaimed collections of archives, artefacts, oral histories and film material held by Birmingham Archives & Heritage, Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery and the Media Archive of Central England.

The Exhibition

The exhibition ran from 24 March to 10 June 2012 in Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. It explored the different ways people have thought about childhood as a stage of life, the relationships of children with their families and peers, the experiences of children in school, at work, and at the hands of various welfare institutions, and the ways that children have imagined the world. The exhibition presented the diversity of the city in all its forms, for example, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability. Children’s Lives drew extensively on Birmingham’s collections to bring the voice of the child out of the archive and museum and in so doing aimed to draw the past and the present into sharper focus. Highlights from this exhibition are now reproduced on this website.

During the exhibition members of the public shared their childhood memories on film. The video below shows extracts from these interviews.

The Young People's and Schools Project

Children’s Lives also included a section on contemporary childhood in the 21st century curated by young people from two local schools. This part of the project worked directly with young people to enable them to record, research, document, and communicate the histories and experiences of children and young people by:

• Providing access to rich and diverse archive collections
  
• Providing training for young people to record oral histories
• Providing support and training to enable young people to develop and establish a Children’s Lives archive at Birmingham Libraries & Archives
• Providing support and training to enable young people to research, interpret and curate their own exhibition as part of the Children’s Lives exhibition at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery
• Supporting young people to deliver a young people’s exhibition launch event
• Establishing an online presence by creating a contemporary digital archive

The Website

This website aims to echo the physical exhibition while also incorporating galleries of additional archival material. It also provides links to useful resources as well as the project blogs.

The Project Team

The project was managed by Dr Siân Roberts, Head of Collections Development at Birmingham Archives & Heritage.

The University of Birmingham was represented by Professor Ian Grosvenor, an acknowledged expert on the history of education and childhood.

The involvement of young people in the project was managed by Izzy Mohammed and Nikki Thorpe, outreach and learning officers at Birmingham Archives & Heritage.

The website was designed by Brigitte Winsor and content provided by Dr Nicola Gauld.