A new book uses 100 images to chart Birmingham City University’s 182-year journey from Victorian art school to multi-campus institution. The report looks at how BCU has helped train the city’s workforce, how its history has been overlooked, and what this push to reclaim its past says about Birmingham’s constant reinvention.
00:00BCU often gets treated as if it sprang up with the glass and steel at Curzon Street.
00:07The archive shows a longer line. It begins in the 1840s with a government school of design,
00:13moves through the old polytechnic era, then into university status in the 90s and the name it uses now.
00:20This book brings that journey into one place with a hundred images instead of dense text.
00:25It gives a sharper sense of what kind of institution Birmingham has lived with for nearly two centuries.
00:31It's a long history. It's quite a complicated history.
00:36And one of the reasons for telling it through a hundred images, as I've done in this book,
00:41is to reflect the diversity of its origins and some of the amazing achievements that students throughout the years have made possible.
00:50The pictures go beyond old buildings and group shots.
00:53They trace the shift from small specialist colleges to eight university training nurses,
00:59teachers, designers, engineers and musicians who mostly stay in this region.
01:04Behind the portrait sits a simple truth.
01:07Birmingham schools, hospitals, studios and small firms are full of people who came through these corridors.
01:13For a university teaching tens of thousands, the question is how far that influence has carried beyond campus walls.
01:21So it's the amazing imprint, I think, on regular life, you might say ordinary life, that so many of our graduates have had.
01:29And not just here, because BCU is of course a very international university as well.
01:34So we feel the effect of all of that design work in China, in India, all across the world.
01:40One of the things I always say to people is actually the influence of BCU students has been felt on pretty much every continent
01:48and in pretty much every way of life for people living on those continents.
01:54There's a sharper point beneath the celebration. If the history runs this deep, it raises the question why many still see BCU as a new or secondary option next to the older civic university of the road.
02:07A project like this can reclaim heritage, but it can also look like image management in a crowded higher education market.
02:14In a city where students are sold hard on branding, the line between honest history and polished profile can blur.
02:21That tension sits in these pages.
02:24Lots of institutions trace their roots back to colleges.
02:29So, yes, I mean, it's certainly true that in writing this book, I wanted to make people more aware, not just of the length of history,
02:36but of the diversity of achievements that students and staff have engaged in.
02:42I think there is a certain amount of snobbery to do with the way people view different universities.
02:50But the book makes the story very clear that many of the things that have come out of BCU and its constituent parts have been truly extraordinary.
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