Dear Patchers: It was March this year when the cuts to our libraries were announced: a stonking £2.3 million would be subtracted from the budget. While no city could weather such large cuts easily, they seemed particularly cruel here: Birmingham has some of the highest rates of illiteracy in England. In the face of disheartening news, it can be tempting to disengage — but poet Liz Berry did the exact opposite, teaming up with novelist Catherine O’Flynn and a supergroup of other Birmingham literary heavyweights to put together a protest zine (which you can pick up for free at your local library). Liz writes today on her teenage love for zines — and why action is essential exactly when we feel most powerless.
You’ll find that below — but first, news of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery reopening and the ‘Midland Clawback Campaign’, in your Brum in brief(ing).
Brum in brief
🚨 The Serious Fraud Office is investigating a Birmingham hotel that opened in 2021 and is owned by Unite the union. £112m of members’ money was spent on building Aloft on Woodcock Street, up from the expected £35m cost when construction started in 2015. A KC-led inquiry commissioned by Unite’s general secretary Sharon Graham also identified a missing £14m, with Graham herself recently telling Politics Home magazine that a £30m overspend cannot be accounted for. The building has also been valued at about £30m, suggesting £83m has been wasted. The hotel was built under Graham’s predecessor Len McCluskey who welcomed her inquiry, tweeting at the time that it was “sensible and will answer any questions”. In an article on Monday the BBC reported that, due to the ongoing investigation, McCluskey's lawyer said it would be inappropriate for him to comment.
📝 In their first report to central government since being installed last year, Birmingham’s commissioners have said the City Council is letting down residents. Max Caller et al said they were “under no illusion that more issues will be uncovered” and, although they acknowledged every council was under financial pressure, they said this did not excuse the position the authority had found itself in. Council leader John Cotton said he welcomed the report, that progress was being made and Birmingham will “continue to engage constructively with the new Government”. Conservative leader Councillor Robert Alden, however, said “Labour’s salami slicing” has been both detrimental to services and failed to make the savings necessary to create a “modern institution fit for purpose”. Read the full report here.
🖼️ Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) will open its doors on Thursday for the first time since 2022 due to extensive work undertaken to improve the heating, lighting, roof and electrics. Although the Gas Hall has been open since February for the Victorian Radicals exhibition, visitors will have access to many more spaces including the Industrial Gallery which is currently home to the Made in Birmingham exhibition that explores Brum’s reputation as the ‘city of a thousand trades’. Also not to be missed are sketches and portraits by Curtis Holder, including his drawing of Birmingham Royal Ballet Director Carlos Acosta that was commissioned after he won Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year 2020.
💸 On Tuesday, the ‘Midland Clawback Campaign’ group protested outside the HSBC headquarters in Centenary Square and in New Street. ‘Clawback’ refers to the policy of reducing a company pension scheme for an employee when they start receiving their state pension. HSBC’s implementation of the scheme has been the subject of ongoing controversy, with some workers having to come out of retirement simply to make ends meet. The Dispatch headed down to the protest and spoke to campaigners. Buses drove past and beeped their support, receiving cheers in response as we were told “some of us risk losing 30% of our bank pension, which makes a huge difference when your pension is eight-grand rather than eighty.” Another impacted Brummie called the scheme “entirely legal but morally corrupt. None of us were told about this when we worked at the bank — I was there for over 40 years — I feel like I’m going to cry.” Earlier this year, a spokesperson for HSBC said they “understand this is an important and emotional subject” but that the clawback feature “is not discriminatory and it was properly communicated to scheme members”.
📰 Lunchtime read: Greg Barradale at the Big Issue has been investigating the growing UK synthetic opioid crisis. His first deep dive is about 21 deaths that occurred in Birmingham last summer — all people who took the same drug. Read it here.
By Liz Berry
I’m standing by the huge litho-printer, watching the zine fly through it: the fluorescent pink map of Brum and the withdrawn stamp of the back cover glowing. It’s mid-September and I’m on a mission. Tomorrow, I’ll begin a journey to every single library in Birmingham — from Northfield to Shard End — to deliver 2,100 free zines. Our city’s libraries are under threat from cuts, and we have to do something to make a noise about it.
That our protest against the library cuts is taking this form makes sense: zines have always been important to me. As a young teenager in Dudley, in that dreamy slow time just before the internet, all I longed for was to be a writer, but sitting in Springvale Library waiting for my mom to finish work or lying on my messy bedroom floor copying poems in the back of my English book, I’d wonder how I could ever get there — that mysterious cool writerly place — from here. It was zines that taught me how.
Knowing I loved poems, my dad began bringing home small poetry magazines that he found in bookshops or sent for by post from the small ads: Terrible Work, Tears in the Fence, the street-poetry fanzine Rising, Magma. Poetry has always had a rich grassroots culture; it’s still one of my favourite things about it. There’s no money in poetry (spoiler!) so a different kind of energy emerges; you get collectives, small presses, journals which nurture scenes and new poets.
It was in the back of one of these little magazines that I saw an advert for Girlfrenzy, a feminist zine. I sent off my money and a self-addressed envelope, and a week later Girlfrenzy landed on my doormat in a brown envelope with a handwritten note inside. I hid it under my bed, and I knew that something new was opening up to me. It was a world away from the shiny girls’ magazines I was used to, with their fashion tips and adverts for Clearasil. This was rawer and more rebellious, unafraid to stick two fingers up to the idea of perfect girlhood. It was the life I’d been dreaming of — girls reading, writing and making whatever they wanted on their own terms — and I wanted more.
I started gathering zines whenever I could, mostly about feminism, poetry and music. I convinced my dad to help me start a poetry zine for young poets. We called it a zine so it felt like the rebellious little sister of a more formal literary magazine. We put ads in the back of Melody Maker and Poetry Review and in true DIY zine spirit I made the artwork for the first issue by cutting and sticking illustrations from out-of-print books. I did everything at home in our back room, after school and in the holidays, all by post and a landline, and never once did I question my right as a 14-year-old comprehensive schoolgirl to make a zine and build a little community around it. That’s what zines give you: voice and empowerment at times when you might otherwise feel you have none.
Zines have always had this power. From the very earliest days of the printing press, people have made self-published pamphlets and broadsheets, often to share information and ideas in times of unrest and revolution. In the punk era of the ’70s and ’80’s, zines gained new popularity and force. The punk ethos is so beautifully tuned to the zine: non-commercial, non-mainstream and made on a shoestring by anyone who has the enthusiasm, they’re the perfect platform of expression for marginalised voices. You need almost nothing to make a basic zine: just your dreams and a single A4 sheet of paper.
I came to zines in the era of Riot Grrrl and have collected them from across the decades, but zines are far from a thing of the past. This year I took my sons to the Brum Zine Fest at The Hive in the Jewellery Quarter, where zine makers from Brum’s diverse communities were sharing their work and running workshops. In a digital world, the act of making seems even more fundamental and precious.
It was this spirit that powered Brum Library Zine. In March this year, when the scale of Birmingham City Council’s proposed cuts for libraries was revealed, I felt full of despair. After declaring bankruptcy in September 2023, Birmingham City Council had been forced to approve what were thought to be the biggest budget cuts in local authority history. Among cuts to youth services, adult social care and arts grants, a proposed £2.3 million was to be cut from the library services budget, meaning reductions in opening hours, community libraries being ‘co-located’ out of council buildings, and up to seven libraries being closed entirely unless community groups could step forward to run them. The council was launching a consultation to invite residents to “help shape the future of the library service”.
I grew up in the libraries of the Black Country (my mom was a librarian) and now run a reading group for adults in my local library in Kings Heath, so I know first-hand how much libraries mean to their communities and the many ways they support people. Birmingham is one of the areas in the country facing the biggest challenges with literacy; according to Literacy Trust, many of the city’s wards fall in the top 10% of levels of illiteracy in England. Under council proposals, children living in areas of high deprivation like Aston and Nechells would face a choice of walking more than two miles or finding money for public transport to reach their new ‘local’ libraries. I live here and have chosen this city as the home for my children; I don’t want it to go backwards towards a darker, less equal past. So for the first time in ages, I knew I had to use whatever small power I had to protest.
Looking at the news online, I saw the writer Catherine O’Flynn had written a long wistful thread on social media mentioning a dream project she’d once had: to visit every library in Birmingham and write a short piece about each one, making a sort of a gazetteer of the city libraries.
Immediately I messaged her back: Do it! Library fanzine.
A few days later we sat together at my kitchen table in Kings Heath looking at a bundle of zines and small magazines. A friend had just gifted me her mum’s collection of radical feminist zines from the 80’s, and we loved their ethos: lo-fi, DIY, passionate. We knew that if we wanted a library zine to happen then we had to act fast before the council’s consultation process was completed and that we also had to make as big a noise as possible about what was happening to libraries in Birmingham.
We started thinking of Birmingham-connected writers we could invite to join us. Poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists…this city has such a rich literary landscape! We sent out emails, explaining what we were hoping to do: 35 libraries, 35 micro-residencies, 35 new pieces of work celebrating each community library. Ah yes, and there was no funding at all; writers would need to give up time and juggle their other commitments and stick to strict deadlines, and the whole thing was to be fuelled solely by the love of local libraries. Not the easiest sell! We were overwhelmed by how rapid and how positive the responses were. A message from Casey Bailey, former Birmingham Poet Laureate, summed up the energy:
You’re speaking to my heart with this one!
Absolutely count me in.
We had all 35 writers within a week. We honestly couldn’t believe how lucky we were. I’d see Catherine on the school run or text her at work: Kit de Waal’s in! Mark Billingham’s in! The list was dazzling.
We asked our writers to let us know if there were libraries that they felt a special connection to, or if they were happy to go with a lucky dip. Some writers, like Jonathan Coe, Casey Bailey and Nafeesa Hamid, chose to visit their local or childhood libraries, while others, like Luke Kennard and Bohdan Piasecki, were venturing to parts of the city and libraries they’d never visited. It was exciting — we felt like old-school newspaper magnates sending correspondents off to their postings and receiving their dispatches and photos. June was a buzz of libraries and writers and campaign energy building.
Each writer’s response to the task was unique. There were poems, short stories, memoirs and even a very tiny play by Anna Metcalfe set in Selly Oak Library! Helen Cross discovered Bartley Green had been home to Jinny The Giant, once the world’s tallest woman, and in Glebe Farm poet Sue Brown remembered the welcome the library had given to her parents, newly arrived in Brum as part of the Windrush generation. Jasmine Gardosi wrote a poem inspired by the evening in 1914 when the Suffragettes set fire to Northfield Library, leaving a copy of Christabel Pankhurst’s book in the charred ruins with a note: “To start your new library…” The stories were often very moving; there were so many ways that our writers’ lives had been shaped by libraries. “I wouldn’t be a writer without Quinton Library,” wrote novelist Mike Gayle, “I couldn’t.”
We asked Tom Hicks, the artist behind Black Country Type, to work on the design for us. Tom’s a librarian, and we’ve worked together before on photo-poetry zines, so I knew his eye would be perfect. Working with graphic designer Alfie Hicks, the pair began painstakingly sourcing images from old Birmingham library books, including date stamps, library cards, microfiche and even a West Midlands Travel bus ticket from the year 2000 which was still being used as a bookmark! We chose hot pink as our ‘pop’ colour, inspired by those beautiful old-school punk colours and the brilliant ’80s feminist girls’ magazine Shocking Pink.
We all felt strongly that the zine should be a physical object rather than a digital one, something cool and lovely to hold in your hands and keep, and something you could find only by visiting a library. We also really wanted to make the zines free for the public, that money should be no barrier to accessing it. As everyone involved — writers, artists and proofreaders — kindly contributed their time and work for free, the only thing we needed to pay for was printing and paper costs. We launched a crowdfunder and raised over £1,000 in five days.
Brum Library Zine was printed in mid-September by Mission Print in Stirchley. Alan, our printer, was wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and told me how he’d lived near almost every single library in the zine. He let me help to stack the paper for the machine and put my eye to the magnifying glass to check the alignments. There’s something deeply moving about seeing a project all the way through from first idea to final ink on paper, that fundamental feeling that making things is good for you and that doing something, even something small, is better than doing nothing, especially when what you love is under threat.
The next day, Catherine and I began what we came to call our ‘Brum Library Odyssey’. With a boot full of zines and stickers, and our sandwiches in tinfoil on the dashboard, we visited every single library in Birmingham to deliver the free zines. From tiny Carnegie jewel Bartley Green to the Victorian grandeur of Handsworth, what struck us was how varied Birmingham is, each community and each library so distinct. We saw story times, book groups, art clubs, coffee mornings, school visits, people getting help to photocopy and fill in forms, people joining the library for the first time and others who’d been library members for over 80 years.
As we sat in Aston Park eating our lunch (every single library in Birmingham now closes for an hour at 1pm due to cuts to staff numbers) we talked about our city, what we hoped it had in its future, what we wanted for our children and the children growing up in the areas we’d seen. Catherine’s childhood library, Bloomsbury, once housed in a large beautiful red brick Victorian palace, is now nothing more than a few bookcases in a corridor in Nechells POD, a busy community centre, open only two days a week. What, she wondered, would it mean for the children of Nechells to know that no-one thought they had the right to all the reading and dreaming a library can offer?
We launched the zine at Stirchley Library on 21 September. The library was packed with people of every age. Zine writer Malachi McIntosh read his prose poem about visiting Balsall Heath Library with his young son, who sat watching from the front row. “Are all the pieces in the zine about me?” he'd asked, wearing his pink ‘Libraries Give Us Power’ sticker. Yes, we said, thinking of all the kids we’d seen on our library visits, of our own kids. The love radiated out through the rainy afternoon.
The response to the zine has been beyond anything we could have dreamed of back in April. To hear from readers and librarians how much a piece has meant to them is an honour — as is being gifted with people’s own library memories and stories. It’s also been a brilliant and positive way of rallying support for the Birmingham Loves Libraries campaign. We encouraged people to attend the consultation meetings (400 people turned up to champion Harborne library), made templates to help people write to their MPs and councillors, and spread the word through radio interviews and articles in local and national press. Copies of the zine are now held in august institutions like The British Library, The Bodleian, The National Poetry Library and the Glasgow Zine Library. The council’s consultation has now closed and we’re awaiting the final plans for the library services so we’ll know then what pushback will be required next. But we’ll be ready.
That’s the most important part of Brum Library Zine for me: reminding people that we don’t have to stand by quietly while decisions are made for us. It can feel like that sometimes, that everything’s shit and stacked against us, and probably it is, but then I remember that zine ethos: don’t wait for someone to give you permission to speak, just do it. Your voice is as valuable as anyone’s; together our voices are even more powerful. Libraries are owned by the city of Birmingham for its people. They are ours, and they can be at the heart of our communities if we fund and nurture them properly. As the very cool T-shirt Punks and Chancers and Tom Hicks designed for us says: Libraries give us power!
So how can you help your library now? Love it and use it. Maybe you have all the books you can dream of and a busy life where you’ve plenty of places to feel welcome, but the true test of a city is how it cares for its most vulnerable people, so think of those who really do need our libraries: the story times, the book clubs, the quiet space to work and dream, the help to access education, a place to be warm when the rest of the world feels cold. That’s the kind of Birmingham I want to live in. As zine writer Keiran Goddard says, so beautifully, about his childhood library, Shard End: A better future is both possible and necessary. And in my brighter moments I also think it is inevitable.
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