High Street on Parade

From Thursday 11th September, the latest phase of the DigBromsgrove project will be up and running in the Town Centre with the launch of the 'High Street Gallery' exhibition. As part of the nationwide festival of Heritage Open Days, dozens of buildings along the High Street, Worcester Road and The Strand are displaying posters that will shed light on the buildings and characters of Bromsgrove's past. The exhibition will remain up for a fortnight before moving into Bromsgrove Library.

Local historians Jenny Townshend and Julian Hunt have been searching the archives for historic maps, photographs and documents to provide the material for the exhibition.

There'll also be links on some posters to clips from interviews recorded between Bromsgrove School students and local residents talking about their memories of Bromsgrove's past. You can find more of the audio clips, together with photographs of the places featured, on our Audioboo playlist. Copies of the 'Bromsgrove: People and Places' CD are available from Bromsgrove Library.

Bromsgrove town centre has some wonderful buildings with long and interesting histories, and some colourful local characters. Many of the buildings along the High Street are much older than they appear, with grand 18th and 19th century brick facades concealing much earlier timber-framed structures. This exhibition is all about getting people to take a second look at a familiar space: look up, look around, and find out about some of the people who've brought life to the High Street over the centuries.

This Saturday 13th September, we'll have a market stall in the High Street, talking to residents about the fascinating history of the town. Come along and say hello!

A gem of a photograph!

Last week, we received a fantastic group of photographs of historic Bromsgrove from the Brotherton collection. Many thanks to Bob Richardson for loaning them to us! They've now been digitised by our Digitisation and Microfilming Service, and we're working through them to see if any relate to the buildings on our site.

The picture below immediately caught our eye. The accompanying notes state that it was taken in 1951, during the demolition of the houses along St John Street. Much head-scratching ensued, and we spent a long time scrutinising the historic maps and working out angles and fields of view, to try to figure out the location of the buildings being demolished.

Eventually, we cracked it, and the answer is quite exciting: they fall within our #DigBromsgrove site area! We hope to position our trench to pick up the rear wall of the building, incorporating the yard area and the boundary with the building that adjoined it to the west.

The photograph's existence is a real stroke of luck for us, as it gives us tantalising glimpses into the way this area was built and rebuilt over the years. Our buildings archaeologist, Shona Robson-Glyde, pointed out that whilst the brickwork and windows of the rear wall of the house look to date from the early 18th century, the chimney and roof structure exposed by the demolition look like they may belong to an earlier phase of building. One of the key goals for the excavation is to establish the extent to which St John Street was subject to alterations and rebuilding over the centuries, so this photograph is an encouraging indication that there may be an interesting sequence of archaeological phases on the site.

One further question remains: we'd love to know more about the cars on the left hand-side of the picture! Are you a fountain of knowledge on classic cars of the late 1940s/early 1950s? Can you help us to identify them? If so, get in touch, or leave a comment below.

Rob Hedge

St John Street during demolition, 1951. Copyright: Brotherton Collection