Dear Patchers: After over four long years, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is finally (partially) open! The wait is over. With £20 million invested into it, you might expect to be dazzled by its new incarnation. If so, you might be disappointed. The reasons why? That’s today’s story. But before we get there, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra takes you to the movies in our suggestions for how to spend your weekend.
Things to do
Saturday:
🍎 There are several ‘Apple wassails’ happening in the West Midlands during the second half of this month. The ancient pre-Christian tradition is prominent in England’s cider-producing west: across Devon, Somerset, the Cotswolds, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. The Apple wassail traditionally involves groups gathering to sing to the trees in orchards for a good harvest in the coming year. This Saturday, you can help serenade the apples at events in Stirchley (at the Birmingham Brewing Company) or at Lickey Hills Country Park. On Sunday, there is another wassail at Highbury Orchard Community. Expect musical performances, Morris dancing, and yes, cider.
🧱 This Dispatch writer once made a Lego skyscraper so tall and ornate that he got a prize at primary school. Do the small multicoloured bricks also prompt boundless nostalgia in you? Hit up the National Conference Centre in east Birmingham this Saturday for a ‘National Brick’ event. Collectors, builders, and punters will all descend on the conference centre to share their love of Lego. Doors at 10:00 am. Tickets from £8.01.
Sunday:
☪️ Having spent much time over the last year staring at the infinite ceilings of Islamic palaces and mosques in Spain, Morocco, and the Middle East: this event has a particular appeal for the Dispatch team’s second staff writer. Artist Safira Ali leads an ‘Islamic Geometry for Beginners’ workshop this Sunday at The Pen Museum. Learn how to draw a mathematical 6-fold pattern and take a piece of artwork home with you. Doors at noon. Tickets are £26.00. Art supplies provided.
🎥 A CBSO (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra) speciality, catch ‘Music at the Movies’ on Sunday night at Symphony Hall. Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny shares his favourite film scores with the audience: from the Avengers franchise to Tolkien’s ‘Middle Earth.’ Ben Parry conducts. Doors at 7:00 pm. Standard tickets from £26. Concessions from £5.
If you are a millennial who grew up in the West Midlands, the chances are you will have spent some rainy afternoons in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. It might have been obvious, even as a child, that the neoclassical Grade II-listed building needed work. The grandiose red paint was flaking, the heating didn’t work and the curatorial programme was, to be generous, stale. I adored the place anyway. The worn out facilities didn’t dilute my enthusiasm for the museum’s vast collection of Pre-Raphaelite work (the largest in the world) or for its many treasures (the Romano-Egyptian mummy or the Congolese masks, amongst countless others).
Despite this, and out of concern for its collection, I was relieved to learn in 2020 that the museum was finally closing to undergo a major renovation.
It was to be “the biggest investment in the building’s infrastructure since it was first built in 1885,” according to Sara Wajid, one of BMAG’s joint CEOs. “Visitors will feel the difference immediately,” she added.
The renovation was much needed: once a jewel in the city’s crown, the grand Grade-II building in the city centre was visibly tiring. In an interview, Wajid revealed the local authority had invested £15 million which would be spent on the renovation, in addition to £5 million from Arts Council England’s MEND fund, including overdue structural improvements to the building itself: the heating, electrics, lifts and roofing.
As of October 2024 the museum has re-opened, albeit partially. It doesn't seem unreasonable to have expected a sharpening of ideas and better curation. What I found was a space that felt committed to decline.
