As you’ve probably seen from my recent post about visiting the GIANTS exhibition, I’ve been to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) and therefore it is time to feature it for #MuseumMonday. This museum sits in the heart of the city, an imposing Victorian landmark in Victoria and Chamberlain Squares whose long façade and clock tower have presided over civic life since the late 19th century. The building itself (designed by Yeoville Thomason and opened in 1885) is part of the experience: heavy stone, classical porticos, and a layout that still reads as a municipal palace of culture. Its status as a Grade II* listed building is not only an architectural fact but a curatorial challenge, because the museum team must balance preservation of a historic fabric with the practicalities of bringing huge, diverse collections to a contemporary public. This is of course easier said than done, especially for a local museum that does not have the financial clout of some of the larger and more well-known museums I’ve previously covered in London.
Once you step inside, you quickly see why BMAG matters. It is not a single-type gallery or a boutique collection. It is a city museum in the old British sense, encyclopaedic and wide-ranging, bringing art, local history, archaeology, natural science and industrial collections under one roof. That breadth is one of BMAG’s great strengths: it can move you from a painted Pre-Raphaelite portrait to a display about Birmingham’s sweating, inventive industries in the Victorian era, then to a room of Staffordshire ceramics and Anglo-Saxon gold. The trust that manages the site, Birmingham Museums Trust, looks after multiple venues across the city and treats BMAG as both flagship and hub, which is appropriate given the breadth and depth of the holdings.
The collections are impressive in scale. Birmingham Museums Trust holds around 800,000 objects across its sites (BMAG contains a very large slice of that), and the art and design collection at BMAG includes historic and modern paintings, applied arts, ceramics, metalwork, textiles and much more. When a museum is as large and historically rooted as this one, the collection becomes part of civic identity: objects are not just artworks but civic memories, trophies of municipal ambition, keepsakes from industry, domestic ceramics, trade tokens, even personal items from Birmingham’s civic leaders. The sheer range means there will be something for many different visitors, and in the best moments those things are assembled to tell richer stories about the city, the people who made it, and the wider cultural currents to which Birmingham contributed.
The layout of the museum is a little weird, but they’re trying to fit a lot in given the limited space so we’ll cut them some slack there. The first gallery that is listed on the map (although you may not visit it first) is the The newly revitalised Industrial Gallery which is now home to the Made in Birmingham display. This does more than celebrate Birmingham’s industrial might: it explores the city’s identity, its contradictions, and the emotional footprint of its manufactured history. Rather than simply narrating a linear story of machines, entrepreneurs, and factories, the gallery’s curators have crafted a nuanced portrait of a city shaped by perpetual reinvention, pride, nostalgia and grit. The Made in Birmingham display offers visitors a snapshot of some of the people and things which have been made in Birmingham (probably no surprises there) that give this city its identity. Its real power comes from connecting these objects to lived experience, from roadworks and redevelopment to the memories people carry of Bristol Street or a demolished pub. Walking into the gallery, one is struck immediately by the architecture: the space retains its Victorian industrial grandeur, with a high, vaulted glass roof, sweeping wrought-iron balconies, and sunlight burners (historical gas lights converted to electric) still hanging from the ceiling. This setting isn’t just decorative, it’s deeply evocative. The glass and iron conjure the industrial age’s optimistic ambition, and the light filtering in frames the objects in a way that links past and present. As a particularly modern flourish, a neon sign reading “Made in Birmingham” now illuminates the space, bridging the city’s manufacturing history with its contemporary identity.
What truly gives the gallery its emotional and intellectual heft is its storytelling: the curators have assembled a diverse vocabulary of artefacts, many of them unexpected, to tell a story that’s as much social as it is technological. Among the highlights are iconic city-made objects: the giant HP Sauce factory sign is a particularly arresting piece, symbolic not only of industrial production but of a brand that became deeply embedded in British (and specifically Brummie) identity. Alongside that are nostalgic bits like vintage Bird’s Custard signage, mobile pub signs (such as one from the Eagle & Tun, a pub immortalised in UB40’s Red Red Wine video), and everyday technological items, such as a typewriter owned and used by the late poet Benjamin Zephaniah. These artefacts are more than just industrial trophies: they are touchpoints of memory, civic pride, and local humour. The exhibition doesn’t shy away from more critical or ambivalent stories. It acknowledges that Birmingham is not a static place: “a city that will be nice when it’s finished,” as one interpretive panel puts it, a wry recognition of perpetual redevelopment, roadworks, and contested urban change.
One of the gallery’s strengths is its human-centred approach. It isn’t simply about smoky forges or whirring machines. The stories of people who made and lived in Birmingham matter. The display gives a voice to workers, inventors, migrants, artists, and communities, the people who shaped and were shaped by the city. The curators have deliberately chosen objects that connect to personal histories, not just economic might. For example, in celebrating a city of a thousand trades, they highlight not only heavy machinery or large-scale manufacturing, but craftsmanship in metalwork, decorative arts, and more humble but deeply resonant everyday objects. Beyond the ground floor artefacts, the gallery includes a balcony level with a thematic component called A to Z of Birmingham, that highlights 26 objects or that provide a snapshot of what shaped Birmingham. This inclusion is important: it signals that the industrial story is not monolithic. Instead, the gallery acknowledges varied perspectives, a reminder that Birmingham’s making tradition includes more than just factories. This balcony display helps the gallery feel simultaneously historic and contemporary, bridging civic heritage with creative critique.
Curatorially, the Made in Birmingham display is bold but intentional. The objects are arranged in thematic vignettes rather than purely chronological order. This allows visitors to move through different narratives such as manufacturing milestones, social life, urban change, or identity in a way that feels less like a textbook and more like walking through the lived city. There’s a playful and reflective tone throughout, the exhibition is as comfortable showing off its shiny industrial icons as it is admitting to the messiness of urban change. The interpretive panels work well. They do not merely list dates or fact,; many include reflections, anecdotes, and questions. For instance, the interpretation around the HP Sauce sign does more than celebrate a brand: it nods to the factory’s closure, its role in the city’s skyline, and its symbolic weight. Through such objects, visitors are invited to ask: what does it mean for something to be made in Birmingham? Is it just production, or is it identity, memory, and belonging? This invitation to reflect elevates the gallery beyond a simple industrial museum and turns it into a site of civic self-examination.
On the visitor-experience side, the gallery is thoughtfully designed for flow and engagement. The central floor plan with glass cases and display islands ensures good sightlines across the room and allows visitors to pause in front of individual artefacts or to step back and absorb the room as a whole. The balcony adds verticality and with it, a layered way to experience the exhibit, where one can view industrial objects from below while watching contemporary art from above. According to the BMAG floor plan, this gallery (Gallery 2) is clearly mapped, and its circulation feels intuitive. For those wondering, Gallery 1 is the shop which you have to walk through to get to this one. Lighting and atmosphere are critical in this space, and BMAG has carefully preserved historical features while adapting them for a modern exhibit. The original Victorian sunlight burners (gas lights) are still present, now retrofitted electrically. Their restored presence is both a design triumph and a symbolic gesture: the gallery retains a direct physical link to its 19th-century industrial origins, even as its neon sign and curated displays bring a 21st-century sensibility. The interplay between old and new lighting mirrors the exhibition’s thematic tension between tradition and reinvention.
One of the most compelling achievements of the gallery is how it grounds global or large-scale industrial narratives in local, human stories. The decision to highlight Birmingham’s thousand trades rather than just its heavy industry pushes back against reductive myths and reminds visitors that this city’s creativity and productivity have always been more varied than stereotypical narratives might suggest. This framing helps visitors, whether local or tourist, understand that industry is not just about machinery but about people, labour, community, and identity. From a broader museological perspective, the gallery is also a signal of BMAG’s evolving mission. Through Made in Birmingham, the museum stakes a claim on stories that are not conventionally fine art but are deeply cultural and civic. This helps reimagine what a city museum can be in the 21st century: not just a repository of paintings or treasures, but a place where everyday objects including signs, typewriters, and pub paraphernalia can contribute to identity, memory, and belonging. It’s a deliberate democratisation of material culture. Finally, the gallery’s reopening as part of BMAG’s phased return is itself symbolic. After years of closure for maintenance and restoration, the revived Industrial Gallery acts as both a physical and symbolic heart of the museum’s reengagement with the city.
The Contemporary Voices gallery (Gallery 3) leads on from this celebration of Birmingham and is a bold new space located just next to the tearoom (Gallery 4). This gallery signals a deliberate shift in BMAG’s mission, embracing not only its historic collections but also engaging with the living, evolving identities of Birmingham, its artists, its communities, and its stories today. Rather than viewing the museum simply as a repository of the past, Contemporary Voices functions as a platform for creative commentary: a place where artists, makers and communities respond to Birmingham’s own collections, and to key social, cultural and political themes that resonate across the city. One of the gallery’s most noteworthy ambitions is its commitment to community and underrepresented voices. Recent commissions clearly reflect BMAG’s desire to foreground stories that are often peripheral in mainstream cultural institutions: giving space to lived experience, marginalised perspectives, and contemporary social narratives. A striking example is the exhibition ‘Watch Us Lead’ by Christopher Samuel, opened in June 2025, which is hosted in the Contemporary Voices space. Samuel’s work focuses on the disabled experience in Birmingham, especially among disabled people of colour. Through new interviews, ink drawings, stained-glass work, and carefully selected objects from BMAG’s own archives and local disability archives, the piece explores themes of stigma, belonging, visibility, and agency. Birmingham Museums This is not only an artistic gesture but a social one: the gallery becomes a place for recognition, for telling ‘missing stories’ and for making space for narratives that institutions have historically under-collected.
Critically, the Contemporary Voices gallery also serves as an important statement about institutional change. While BMAG has long been prized for its historic collections, the creation of this space signals that the museum now sees its role as more than keeper of the past. It wants to be relevant to residents today, to support local talent, and to grapple with the complex realities of Birmingham’s present. Through commissioning living artists, collaborating with community groups, and inviting contemporary reflection, the museum reimagines itself as a living, breathing civic space. Visually, emotionally and intellectually, Contemporary Voices feels like a space of potential. It is not just displaying art, but inviting reflection: on who gets to be heard, whose stories matter, and how public institutions can respond to and uplift their communities. For visitors, the gallery offers moments of creative intimacy (watching Holder draw, hearing Samuel tell his story) and moments of civic significance (recognising voices historically under-represented in institutional narratives).
Okay, let’s back up a bit and head back to the Round Room (Gallery 5), which is the part of the museum that you are welcomed to when you first enter. So, what is the Round Room? It is one of the most architecturally and symbolically significant spaces in the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. It has served as a kind of “front room” for the museum for nearly 150 years, anchoring the collection in a grand, classical-style space. The gallery’s domed ceiling, mosaic tile floor, elegant curved walls, and sweeping sightlines make it more than just a display room, it is a ceremonial and civic space, designed to impress, to gather, and to reflect. When BMAG underwent essential maintenance work (including floor restoration and roof repairs) ahead of its phased reopening, the Round Room was central to that renewal. In October 2024, the Round Room reopened with a fresh curatorial vision under the title ‘One Fresh Take’. Rather than simply restoring its old hang, the museum rethought how art in this space can speak to Birmingham’s personality, present-day diversity, and cultural future. The new display weaves together long-standing favourites and surprising voices: historic and contemporary artists are brought into conversation to show how art helps us see the world differently.
At the heart of the Round Room remains Jacob Epstein’s imposing bronze sculpture Lucifer, a familiar icon of the gallery since the mid-20th century. Its presence is deeply symbolic: suspended in the centre of the space, it acts as an anchor around which the new display orbits. The restoration work has ensured that this central sculpture can once again be seen in dramatic light, framed by the room’s architectural grandeur. Flanking the statue and lining the curved walls are paintings and works selected to evoke a sense of continuity and change. The ‘One Fresh Take’ display includes work by historic landscape artists like David Cox, whose delicate watercolours evoke pastoral serenity, but also pieces by Lubaina Himid, Bridget Riley, Cold War Steve, and others. This mix foregrounds how different artistic voices, separated by time, background, and style, can engage with place, memory, identity, and meaning. One of the most interesting curatorial choices is how the new display connects older works with contemporary perspectives. For example, the presence of Bridget Riley’s work offers a dialogue around form, movement, and perception; Cold War Steve’s more irreverent, collage-like style introduces social and political commentary; Lubaina Himid’s art brings histories of migration, race, and belonging into the Round Room. These juxtapositions make the space feel alive, consciously rooted in history yet responsive to the present.
Nevertheless, the gallery does raise some challenges and prompts reflection. Bringing together very different artists and styles in a single space demands delicate curatorial balancing. Some visitors might find the juxtaposition of abstract or contemporary works with more traditional art to be jarring or disjointed, others will celebrate it as a thoughtful conversation. There’s a risk that in trying to cover many perspectives, the display could feel less cohesive than a more conventional hang. But that risk is also part of what gives the Round Room its renewed vitality: it doesn’t just preserve the past, it questions it. Another challenge is making sure the room remains dynamic over time. As an iconic circular gallery, its very structure makes it feel permanent but if ‘One Fresh Take’ is to reflect contemporary voices and evolving narratives, the museum will need to ensure the display evolves. Will there be periodic rotations? Will new commissions enter the space? How will community feedback shape future iterations? These are the curatorial questions that could define the Round Room’s role in BMAG’s long-term strategy. From the perspective of architecture and design, the successful restoration of the floor and roof has reactivated the Round Room’s formal beauty. The careful conservation respects the room’s Victorian origins, while the new interpretive display ensures that the historic space does not feel dusty or static. Instead, the Round Room feels recharged, a gallery that honours its origins but pushes into new territory.
Moving forward, you enter the Bridge Gallery (Gallery 8) which houses a number of rotating exhibitions. During my visit, it housed ‘Ozzy Osbourne: Working Class Hero’ which is a deeply resonant and timely tribute to one of the city’s most famous sons. Launched on 25 June 2025, coinciding with Black Sabbath’s historic homecoming concert at Villa Park, the exhibition charts Ozzy’s life from his humble working-class roots in Aston to his ascent as a global rock legend. The exhibition brings together an impressive and celebratory selection of his most prestigious accolades, including Grammy Awards, MTV awards, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honours, his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and recognition on the Birmingham Walk of Stars. Alongside the trophies and plaques, there are framed platinum and gold discs marking the millions of records he sold, offering a powerful material testament to Ozzy’s commercial and cultural impact. The exhibition is not just about shiny awards, it is also deeply personal. Through video installations in the nearby Pixel Studio (Gallery 9), archival photography throughout, and narrative panels, the gallery tells the story of Osbourne’s life: from a working-class kid in Birmingham to the global Prince of Darkness. There’s a strong emotional pull: the curators have leaned into Ozzy’s identity as a Brummie, and the show carries a civic energy, celebrating not just a musician but a local hero who never forgot his roots.
A standout piece in the exhibition is a striking, previously unseen photograph of Ozzy on stage during his final performance on 5 July 2025 at Villa Park, taken by the American rock photographer Mark “WEISSGUY” Weiss. Weiss’s image captures a triumphant, smiling Osbourne, saluting tens of thousands of fans, a powerful moment of closure, both for Ozzy as a performer and for Birmingham as his hometown. This photo feels both celebratory and poignant: it’s a rock-star farewell, but also the closing note of a life deeply rooted in his city. From a curatorial standpoint, the exhibition makes smart use of BMAG’s architecture. The gallery uses this corridor-like space with dark walls to give a sense of intimacy, almost like a backstage passage or a corridor leading into a concert arena. Display cases are centrally placed, showing off the awards, while walls are lined with bold, high-impact visuals: album covers, candid snapshots, and video stills. This blend of trophies and personal storytelling gives the exhibition two complementary dimensions, the public icon and the private, everyday person. The narrative arc of ‘Working Class Hero’ is well structured. It begins with Ozzy’s Birmingham origins (underscoring his working-class upbringing) and then moves through the phases of his career: early Black Sabbath, solo success, his evolution as a global rock star, and finally, his legacy. The inclusion of video materials adds life to the show: fans hear and see Ozzy in different contexts, which helps ground the bigger-than-life legend in lived experience. His raw voice, both literally and metaphorically, resonates throughout.
Of course, such a show raises some challenges. For a museum like BMAG, known traditionally for fine art, ceramics, and historical collections, a rock music exhibition demands a different curatorial approach. The team needed to balance the glitz of awards with authentic storytelling, avoiding the trap of turning Ozzy into a sanitised icon. By including gritty photographs, candid video, and lifespan-spanning context, the exhibition resists superficiality. However, some fans I spoke to expressed the desire for more personal artefacts, things like clothing, instruments, or handwritten lyrics (which are not prominently featured). I too expected more rock memorabilia such as stage costumes or handwritten set lists. This is a reasonable critique: for a figure as storied as Ozzy, the exhibition’s emphasis on awards and photos may feel less ‘intimate backstage pass’ and more ‘trophy case’. Still, part of the exhibition’s power lies precisely in its accessible public nature. Entry is free, which lowers barriers and invites fans of all generations to connect with Ozzy’s legacy. The fact that BMAG is offering a paying tribute in its gallery space enables rock fans who might not normally visit a traditional museum to see themselves represented. It’s a democratising gesture, after all Ozzy was working-class, and his museum tribute is not gated behind a paywall, reinforcing the hero of the people framing. The timing of the exhibition adds weight. Opening just ahead of Black Sabbath’s farewell concert and mere weeks before Ozzy’s passing, ‘Working Class Hero’ was positioned as both celebration and commemoration. The curators clearly understood that this is not only a retrospective but potentially a final major institutional recognition of Ozzy’s life. That foresight has proven poignant: after his death, the show became even more than a career retrospective, it is now a memorial space, a pilgrimage site for fans, and a physical archive of a legacy in real-time.
Moving to the right, is the Welcome to Birmingham gallery (Gallery 10) which showcases a number of objects which help to tell the story of the city, as part of the Spotlight on Birmingham display. Since BMAG is emphasising Birmingham’s complexity, vibrancy, and multicultural character in its reopening, this gallery includes interpretive material about the city’s personality. There are both object displays and panels that touch on key moments in Birmingham’s past, from its medieval origins to industrial growth, and up to more modern times, acting as a primer for deeper galleries (which are mainly upstairs). Given BMAG’s renewed commitment to telling stories about Birmingham as a complex, vibrant, multicultural city, this gallery does a great job of speed-running the highlights of community heritage, migrations of people, and civic change. It also acts as a primer for some of the artefacts and stories we saw earlier, which may have been missed by some visitors if they walked straight down the main corridor and got distracted by all the shiny stuff within Ozzy’s Working Class Hero exhibition. It provides a space for people to sit down and chill while also absorbing information about their local heritage.
There are still a couple more galleries downstairs before we head upstairs (don’t worry, we will get there!). The Wild City gallery (Galleries 12 & 13) is one of the most exciting new additions to the reimagined Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Introduced as part of BMAG’s phased reopening, Wild City provides a dedicated space for children and families, a gallery that isn’t just about looking at things, but about exploring, playing, and thinking deeply about nature in the context of urban life. Unlike traditional natural history galleries that focus solely on the wild, rural, or distant ecosystems, Wild City homes in on the environmental life right on Birmingham’s doorstep, past, present, and future. At its heart, Wild City is designed to help younger visitors (and their caregivers) connect with the idea that nature is not something remote, it is woven into the fabric of city life. The gallery’s interpretive narrative encourages children to think about the wildlife that exists in Birmingham, how that wildlife has changed, and how it might look in the future. Birmingham Museums In doing so, it creates an emotional and educational bridge between the museum’s broader cultural mission and environmental awareness. Rather than presenting nature purely as a spectacle, Wild City engages with nature as an integral part of civic identity.
One of the gallery’s central themes is nature in the city, not as an afterthought, but as a lively, evolving system. The displays invite children to consider the historical links Birmingham has had with animals: local wildlife, the roles animals have played in the city’s social history, and how human development has shaped (and continues to shape) biodiversity. Key objects embody this connection: perhaps the most striking is a portrait of the Official Rat Catcher to the City of Birmingham by Arthur Charles Shorthouse (1870–1953). This somewhat quirky but historically rich painting draws attention to a lesser-known but very human story, how city-dwellers historically coexisted with (and attempted to control) urban wildlife. Wild City doesn’t rely solely on museum artefacts to tell its story. The gallery is inherently interactive and family-focused: it includes children’s own artworks on its walls, giving space to young visitors’ creative responses to nature. The presence of a soft play area ensures that younger children can physically engage with the themes, play becomes a way of learning. By combining play with interpretive displays, Wild City genuinely becomes a space where families can dwell, explore, and discuss rather than rush through.
Another strength of Wild City is its temporal ambition. The gallery isn’t stuck in romantic ideas of ‘past nature’ but it simultaneously points to the future. There are elements that encourage children to think about how nature may evolve in Birmingham in the years to come: what species might thrive or decline, what environmental challenges the city may face, and how people can shape that future. This forward-looking perspective aligns with contemporary concerns about climate change, urban sustainability, and biodiversity, making the gallery not just historically sensitive but urgently relevant. From a design perspective, Wild City balances the needs of a children’s gallery with the aesthetic standards of a city museum. Its visual style is inviting, not overly didactic: interpretive panels and exhibits use accessible language and compelling images, while also highlighting the needs of often overlooked species. There are some limited taxidermy specimens within the gallery (the glare prevented me getting any decent photos), to help demonstrate what species visitors may find in their local environment. In historic city museums, galleries have often focused on art, history, industrial heritage or grand themes of national culture but Wild City brings ecology, family engagement, and environmental learning into the heart of the institution. It reflects the Museum Trust’s commitment to making the museum more inclusive, more relevant, and more responsive to current concerns.
We made it. The final gallery on this floor is one of the most striking and philosophically ambitious galleries in the newly reopened BMAG. This is the Elephant in the Room gallery (Gallery 20), is not named for a literal pachyderm but as a metaphor: it directly addresses what museum professionals sometimes have to address and overcome such as the complex, often uncomfortable histories behind how museum collections were assembled. Its formal name, The Roots and Routes of the City’s Collections, signals its mission: to explore how artefacts from around the world came into BMAG’s collection, and to provoke deeper reflection on colonialism, empire, repatriation, and the ethics of collecting. The gallery opens a dialogue rather than offering neat resolutions. Rather than simply displaying its global collections as exotic trophies, it asks visitors to question where these objects came from, who collected them, under what circumstances they were acquired, and what they mean now, both in Birmingham and in their places of origin. This is a critically important move in modern museology, acknowledging that many historical collections are entwined with colonial power, and that continuing to display them without context risks silencing the voices and histories that connect to those objects.
Among the most prominent and thought-provoking items in the gallery are the Sultanganj Buddha, a 6th-century bronze statue from India, and a 22-foot-long Inuit kayak. The Buddha, particularly, carries powerful symbolic weight: it embodies spiritual heritage, colonial encounter, and the tensions of displacement. Its journey into BMAG’s collection raises questions about how religious and cultural artefacts travel across borders, and how they are recontextualized in a Western museum space. Alongside these are mummified animals, which provoke equally difficult conversations not just about death and reverence, but about how natural history collections were often built through imperial networks and scientific exploration. By placing these specimens in the gallery, BMAG encourages visitors to think ethically about how specimens were collected, about who had the power to name and classify them, and about how museums deal with human remains and sensitive cultural material.
The design of the gallery itself is central to its message. According to the museum and designers, the curatorial team wanted to create a space that feels open but honest, where difficult stories can be told in a way that is not alienating. One clever visual metaphor used in the gallery is crates and packing boxes, many of the objects are presented as if they have just been unpacked, emphasising their journey, displacement, and the physical logistics of how they arrived in Birmingham. This staging breaks from more traditional glass-case or pedestal art layouts and instead foregrounds process, movement, and transformation. The graphic and interpretive design also plays a large part in making the tricky content accessible. According to the designer (Design Penguin), panels are shaped like speech bubbles, giving the sense that the objects themselves are speaking to visitors. The colour palette, too, is carefully chosen: pink tones (historically used on maps to denote the British Empire) are paired with gold, nodding both to historical cartography and to the richness often associated with collections, but also underlining the weight of colonial history. According to Birmingham Museums Trust, many visitors had asked for more transparency about how the museum acquired its objects. In this way, Elephant in the Room is not just an academic exercise: it’s a public, civic gesture. The museum is deliberately creating space for conversations that might previously have felt too big about empire, ethics, repatriation, and how to responsibly care for global heritage.
Critically, The Elephant in the Room doesn’t just look backwards: it also gestures towards the future. By naming and confronting difficult legacies, the gallery encourages visitors to think about what modern museums should be doing. Should more objects be repatriated? Should museums collaborate more with source communities? How should institutions reconcile the historical imbalances of power that gave rise to many collections in the first place? These are not rhetorical questions: they are central to the gallery’s mission. There is also a pedagogical function. For schools, students, and young people, the gallery offers a powerful ‘teachable’ space, one where they can learn not only about objects and material culture from across the world, but also about ethics, colonial histories, and global interconnection. By embedding these themes in a permanent gallery, BMAG commits to a long-term conversation, not a one-off exhibition. It is a huge leap forward to see a museum like this taking responsibility and trying to decolonise its collections in a responsible way. By creating a gallery explicitly devoted to provenance, colonial history, and ethics, BMAG is acknowledging its own role in historical systems of power. It’s saying: heritage is not neutral, and neither are museums. These are not just collections, they are conversations, and they demand ongoing engagement.
Okay, we finally made it. It is time to go up the stairs and visit the final galleries in the museum. These are the Birmingham History Galleries (Galleries 38-42) which currently house Birmingham: Its People, Its History, which is an overview of Birmingham from the Middle Palaeolithic (250,000 years ago) to the present day. There is of course a huge span of time to cover here with some time periods receiving more attention than others. The gallery reopened to the public as part of BMAG’s phased programme on 2 May 2025 after refurbishment, but its origin as a major, reimagined history project dates back to the museum’s 2012 redevelopment. The galleries occupy significant floor space within the museum and bring together more than a thousand artefacts drawn from the Trust’s human-history collections, presented in a way that privileges people’s lives over abstract chronologies.
Structurally, the history galleries are organised as a series of interconnected acts or zones that allow visitors to move both chronologically and thematically. The design frames Birmingham’s story as a long arc: from a small medieval market settlement and early craft-specialisms through to the explosive urban and industrial growth of the 18th and 19th centuries, and then on to twentieth-century transformations including war, suburbanisation, and post-war immigration, up to contemporary civic life. This dramaturgical approach helps the gallery avoid a dry timeline and instead offers a narrative that foregrounds change, continuity and human agency. The physical layout deliberately mixes dioramas and models (for example, a model of Birmingham in the year 1300) with immersive media, personal objects and documentary photographs so that visitors can both survey and enter the city’s past. One of the gallery’s signature interpretive moves is its insistence on social history: the everyday lives, trades and communities that made Birmingham. Rather than centring only great men, civic elites or monumental inventions, the displays foreground workers, craftspeople, domestic life and political movements. You’ll find material culture connected to household life, clothing and tools alongside objects connected to civic leaders and industrialists, the combination underlines that the city’s development was not inevitable or monolithic but the product of many thousands of lives and decisions. This human-first framing is evident in the selection of objects and in the gallery’s label writing, which often uses first-person testimony, oral histories and community narratives to bring the city’s past into vivid relief.
The industrial era is inevitably a major focus. Birmingham’s transformation into the workshop of the world, a place of metalworking, jewellery, small-scale manufacturing and engineering ingenuity is explored not as mere technical history but as social transformation. The gallery links tools, finished objects and trade paraphernalia to the lives of the people who made them: the small-scale workshops, family firms and labouring communities distributed through the city. Images, factory photographs and personal items help visitors imagine the rhythm of work, the gendered division of labour, and the social effects of urbanisation. This emphasis avoids both triumphalist boosterism and sentimental nostalgia: it recognises industrial achievement while also addressing the costs, disruptions and inequalities that accompanied rapid growth. The galleries are rich in individual, memorable objects chosen for their ability to tell multiple stories. The medieval model of Birmingham, for instance, is a visual anchor that helps visitors imagine the city at a small scale and introduces themes of trade, urban form and medieval civic life. Other highlighted items, local trade tokens, decorative metalwork, domestic ceramics, and personal effects, are used to trace both local craft traditions and global connections. The curators deploy smaller, domestic objects precisely because they open conversations about consumption, identity and everyday culture; they make the distant past tangible in the here and now. For students and casual visitors alike, these small things often become the most evocative parts of the visit.
The gallery does not shy away from difficult histories. Sections address Birmingham’s role in empire and the global networks of production and exchange, and the displays have attempted to reckon with contested stories around race, labour conditions, and the city’s uneven prosperity. Earlier scholarly commentary noted debates around representation (for example, how black history and the legacies of slavery are treated in civic museums), and BMAG has sought to make interpretive choices that surface these complexities rather than bury them. The more recent gallery refreshes and the addition of explicitly reflexive galleries elsewhere in the museum (such as The Elephant in the Room) demonstrate an institutional willingness to engage with provenance and uncomfortable historical dynamics in a public-facing way. Interpretation in the galleries is multimedia and multi-voiced. Traditional object labels are supplemented with oral history extracts, recorded testimony, archival film, and curated text that invites reflection and questions rather than merely supplying facts. The gallery’s designers use theatrical lighting in dioramas and touchable replicas for school groups to provide layered learning modes. This inclusive design helps the space serve different audiences: families, school parties, researchers and casual visitors. The museum explicitly aims to be an educational resource as well as a civic memory bank, and the gallery programming (workshops, guided talks, school packs) amplifies the gallery’s use in formal and informal learning contexts.
From a design and funding perspective, the galleries are the product of long-term investment: the major redevelopment around 2012 was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Arts Council England and other backers, enabling a thoughtful rehang that prioritised interpretive quality as well as conservation standards. The 2012 opening (and subsequent refurbishment and phased reopening culminating in 2025) are evidence of an institutional commitment to keeping the galleries up-to-date, accessible, and relevant. The investment allowed BMAG to incorporate contemporary museological techniques (co-curation, digital/sensory interpretation) alongside robust conservation for artefacts that span a millennium. That said, the gallery’s breadth is also a practical challenge. Covering nine centuries of urban life necessarily means selection and omission: curators must decide which communities, trades, events, and objects get prominence. Some have argued that earlier iterations could do more to centre minority histories or delve deeper into the international flows that connected Birmingham to the world, while supporters stress the gallery’s inclusive intent and the practical limits of any single permanent display. BMAG’s recent programmatic choices (adding reflexive galleries and contemporary commissions) suggest the institution recognises these gaps and is attempting an adaptive strategy, keep a stable spine for core history while creating flexible spaces for debate and updating.
For visitors, practical considerations matter: the gallery’s design allows multiple modes of engagement so you can move through it in ninety minutes or linger for a whole afternoon. Schools and learning groups will find it particularly rich: the museum supplies curriculum-linked materials and hands-on sessions that make abstract historical processes concrete. Accessibility is an ongoing priority, and BMAG publishes visitor information about lifts, step-free routes and facilities so the galleries are usable for a broad audience. The location within BMAG also makes the history galleries easy to combine with other highlights such as the Industrial Gallery, Wild City, or the Round Room for a fuller sense of Birmingham’s cultural landscape. You can of course just take the whole museum in during one day or focus on specific objects/narratives depending on your needs. Looking at the gallery’s cultural purpose, it’s worth noting that civic museums like BMAG perform three functions simultaneously: they preserve tangible heritage, they interpret identity, and they host civic dialogue. Birmingham: Its People, Its History accomplishes all three to a substantial degree. It preserves objects ranging from medieval metalwork to industrial tools, it interprets identity through stories about work, migration and community, and it invites dialogue by presenting contested histories and encouraging visitors to ask what kind of city Birmingham wants to be. That combination gives the gallery a contemporary resonance: it’s not merely a place to look back, but a forum where the past informs current debates about belonging, diversity and urban futures.
If BMAG’s hits read like a greatest-hits record, its quieter strengths are often just as rewarding. The industrial and local history galleries give a patient, detailed account of Birmingham’s transformation in the 18th and 19th centuries into a manufacturing powerhouse. The Industrial Gallery’s tiled floors, decorative ironwork and historical machinery make the space itself feel like part of what it’s describing. Those galleries are where the museum’s civic mission is clearest: they are not simply nostalgic cabinets but argue, effectively, that the city’s innovations in metalwork, jewellery and mass production shaped not just local life but global consumer culture. The displays are occasionally dense with objects, and a visitor needs time and curiosity to get the most out of them, but they are rewarding for those who want to understand the material conditions behind Birmingham’s rise. It is because of this industrial connection that there are few natural history specimens on display in comparison (to my dismay) but of course, that isn’t the purpose of this museum.
Recent years have not been easy for BMAG. Like many public museums, it closed during the pandemic; more consequentially, the complex infrastructure of the Council House and adjacent buildings required substantial rewiring and refurbishment, keeping large swathes of the museum closed for extended periods. The museum’s reopening has been phased (starting with flagship galleries and the Gas Hall and moving through additional spaces) and the phased approach has its pros and cons. On the positive side, careful, staged reopens have allowed the team to present newly refurbished spaces with focused interpretation and community engagement. On the other hand, some visitors still encounter closed rooms and partial collections, which can be frustrating if one expects a complete encyclopaedic visit. The trust has been transparent about the phased plan and the long road to full reopening, which helps set expectations. A museum of BMAG’s scale inevitably faces questions about prioritisation: what to put on permanent display, what to rotate, and how to keep core narratives fresh. I felt that the recent curation has struck a reasonable balance between conservation concerns and lively interpretation. New displays demonstrate the museum’s desire to be nimble and locally engaged. These spaces are useful because they allow contemporary voices, smaller-scale commissions and thematic shows that respond to city life, and they prevent the museum from becoming an ossified shrine to a single historical period.
The building’s proportions and its sequence of rooms are impressive: you move from the formal Round Room into high, light-filled galleries, and the architectural drama enhances the objects. Signage and interpretation have been upgraded in many areas, with clearer object labels and more accessible text panels. However, some parts of the museum still benefit from an extra layer of wayfinding: the building’s complex plan and retained Victorian circulation can confuse first-time visitors, and the phased reopening means that online pre-visit checks are advisable. On the plus side, the tearoom and shop are well placed and the museum’s location in central Birmingham makes it easy to combine with other cultural stops. Make sure you make the most of them on your visit! A serious museum today is as much about stories as objects, and BMAG’s stories are both local and global. If you’re thinking of a visit, plan to give BMAG time. The museum’s scope rewards slow, curious exploration. The museum is centrally located, has reasonable opening hours, and the trust provides online resources and floor plans to help prioritise what to see. No museum is neutral, and BMAG (like all major public museums) must continually work to decolonise its narratives and reflect contemporary ethical standards around provenance, representation and partnership with source communities. As BMAG continues to reopen and reinterpret its galleries, watching how it addresses these challenges will be one of the most interesting long-term stories for cultural observers and visitors alike. I look forward to visiting again in the future and seeing what else has been opened up for display. If you visit in the near future, please leave a comment about your favourite element of the museum and why. I’d love to hear from you and get a better understanding of your visit.
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