Handsworth Currency Competition

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2014/2015 commission as part of ‘New Expressions 3’, a major nationwide Arts Council initiative aimed at unlocking the creative potential of museums.1 General Public drew upon Soho House’s history as a mint as a context for producing a set of new Handsworth coins. Between August 2014 and February 2015, they ran a competition to find local people to have their profiles cast on the coins (‘Heads’) and designs for the other side (‘Tails’) – a strategy designed to write the local community into the history of the Soho House site. In this sense, the project aimed to identify and celebrate the achievements of contemporary ‘visionaries’ in Handsworth; individuals who are the modern day equivalents of the Lunar Society.

A set of three new Handsworth coins were produced featuring local people – Mykal Brown, Merrise Crooks-Bishton and Bhai Ji Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia. Designs by local children featured on the ‘Tails’ side of the coin.

4,000 coins were produced and distributed across Handsworth. The coins had a specific cultural value enabling free access for the coin bearer and their family to Soho House Museum (this was within the context of city-wide cuts to cultural funding and reduced access to museums in Birmingham). The coin launch attracted over 700 people, a new record for Soho House Museum. An exhibition accompanied the coin launch and presented archive material related to the three ‘Heads’ (and questioned what actually constitutes the ‘heritage’ of Handsworth).

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Every week we used to sit in a small cafe on the Soho Road called ‘Chat & Chaat’ pondering the project and its many problems over.2 Eventually, it all came together but for a long-time our proposal to ‘initiate a contest to design a new local currency for Handsworth’ looked hopelessly flawed – a case of ‘bad money’ rather than ‘good money’.3 The problems we encountered included: engaging a community we didn’t live in (many of whom didn’t speak English as a first language); a tight commission turnaround; a small local contingent who actively felt we shouldn’t have been there (the classic parachute artist syndrome: the artist parachutes into a community, performs a work and then leaves). There were also very practical issues relating to the production of the artwork (who would feature on the ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ sides of the coin? How should this be decided in a democratic and transparent way?).

The final problem was the (evolving) commission context itself. Ongoing cuts to Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT) – including reduced museum opening hours/access, staff re-structuring, internal politics – ensured it was a challenging time for Soho House. This affected the project as we responded with a quiet antiausterity agenda: literally making ‘money’ as a mechanism to increase museum access.

1 The commission was part of ‘New Expressions 3’. This establishes a national approach to collaboration between contemporary artists and museums. It explores how partnership working can be structured in the future to provide fresh approaches to collections and engaging visitor experiences across England. From spring to summer 2015, up to 20 artists will present specially commissioned work in partnership with 15 museums across the South West, Midlands and North of England. Taking museum collections as their starting point, projects will range from long-term interventions to one-off performances. www.newexpressions.org 2 Chaat means savoury snack in Urdu/Punjabi.

Left: View of Soho Manufactory, from Stebbing Shaw’s ‘History and Antiquities of the County of Stafford’, engraved by Francis Eginton Junior, 1801

3 ‘Good’ money is money that shows little difference between its nominal value (the face value of the coin) and its commodity value (the value of the metal of which it is made, often precious metals, nickel, or copper). On the other hand, ‘bad’ money is money that has a commodity value considerably lower than its face value and is in circulation along with good money, where both forms are required to be accepted at equal value as legal tender. During Matthew Boulton’s time, bad money included any coin that had been debased. Debasement was often done by the issuing body, where less than the officially specified amount of precious metal was contained in an issue of coinage, usually by alloying it with a base metal.

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We felt that we had partly won the commission because of our work with ‘The Balsall Heath Biennale’ (which hopefully showed we could work sensitively within a multi/inter cultural context).4 The difference with Balsall Heath was that we had lived there for seven years and the success of the project was partly predicated on this. Handsworth, on the other hand, felt like another city entirely.

The expectation with the Handsworth commission was that it would explicitly engage the local community. The commissioning brief stated: ‘The need to engage with the local community of Handsworth, one of the most culturally diverse areas in the country, is key to this project’.

This was something re-iterated throughout the brief: 4. Aims • We want to develop a project which results in a significant new artwork, through the engagement of a group of young people, and which responds to Soho House • We want the artwork to grow from a process of engagement, so that it is shaped but not defined by it • We want to engage with local audiences so that Soho House ‘belongs’ to Handsworth, and so that the profile of Soho House is raised in the local community The language used in this brief, familiar to anyone working in the arts, raises a number of questions in relation to the commissioning process (and the response artists need to take

to such a brief). For example, what was our role within this context – artists or a ‘secret social service’? As there is a decrease in funding for social infrastructure, can artists be expected to fill the gap and bring people together? Andrea Phillips, speaking at Tate Liverpool’s conference ‘Community Arts? Learning from the Legacy of Artists’ Social Initiatives’, problematises the relationship of institutions, funders, artists and community engagement as follows: The institutionalisation of participation and engagement is now endemic within the structure of and financial organisation of arts institutions. Across the world, museums, galleries and biennials invite artists or handle artistic initiatives for the purpose of shaping their publics into temporary, qualifiable and quantifiable community.

The banalisation of community is pervasive within the cultural industries in the UK as elsewhere – a banalisation rendered complete through the hegemony of that which Wendy Brown recognises as the governmentalisation of ‘good practice’ within the structure of the arts. A banalisation, qualification and quantification demanded by state funding agencies and, increasingly, private patrons.5 Can you realistically engage local audiences through such a short-term intervention, to the point that they would feel Soho House ‘belonged’ to Handsworth? But more than this, does the Handsworth ‘community’ even exist as something singular and mappable?

4 Between 2011 and 2013, we developed a two-year multifaceted project in Balsall Heath, the inner city suburb of Birmingham where we lived, called the Balsall Heath Biennale.

This consisted of exhibitions, artworks, events, talks, a newspaper delivered to all 5,000 homes in the local area, area wide competitions, publications, a community garden and a local contemporary art school. Academics at Birmingham University used the Balsall Heath Biennale as a case study in a number of papers/presentations over 2013 as part of the Birmingham University led AHRC-funded project ‘Cultural Intermediation and the Creative Urban Economy’. www.balsallheathbiennale.com 5 Introduction: ‘Community Arts? Learning from the Legacy of Artists’ Social Initiatives’, Andrea Phillips www.biennial.com/journal/issue-5/introduction-communityarts-learning-from-the-legacy-of-artists-social-iniatives

Soho Road, Handsworth 1970s. Image credit: Tim Abbott

Top: Entrance to Soho House Bottom: A selection of the coins held in the BMAG collection

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The l a c lo In ‘The Lure of the Local’, Lucy Lippard makes the distinction between place and community: I often find myself conflating place and community. Although they are not the same thing, they coexist. A peopled place is not always a community, but regardless of the bonds formed within it, or not, a common history is being lived out. Like the places they inhabit, communities are bumpily layered and mixed, exposing hybrid stories that cannot be seen in a linear fashion, aside from those “preserved” examples which usually stereotype and oversimplify the past.

As community artists can testify, it takes a while to get people to discard their rose coloured glasses and the fictional veneer of received “truths”. Community doesn’t mean understanding everything about everybody and resolving all the differences; it means knowing how to work within differences as they change and evolve.6 Lippard’s phrase ‘preserved example’ can perhaps be applied to Soho House which to us felt like one of the last bastions of colonialism, sitting

somewhat incongruously within the intense multi-cultural Handsworth environment.

Soho House was the home of industrialist and entrepreneur Matthew Boulton from 1766 to 1809. Boulton was a key member of the Lunar Society, a group of Birminghamarea men prominent in the arts, sciences, and theology who met at Soho House. Members included James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley. Members of the Society have been given credit for developing concepts and techniques in science, agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport that laid the ground work for the Industrial Revolution.

Boulton founded the Soho Mint (coin production, not polos) which he soon turned into the world’s first steam powered mint as he attempted to improve the poor state of Britain’s coinage. Today, Boulton’s image appears alongside James Watt on the Bank of England’s new £50 note. Historically, Handsworth was in the county of Staffordshire and remained a small village from the 13th century to the 18th century when Matthew Boulton who lived at the nearby Soho House set up the Soho Manufactory in 1764 on Handsworth Heath. At its peak, the Soho Manufactory was the largest factory in the world being regularly referred to as ‘the 8th wonder of the world’. After becoming dilapidated, Soho House has been restored and is now a Birmingham Museums Trust heritage site (yet it sits within an area in which other period houses lie dilapidated or are re-used for other purposes).

6 Lippard, Lucy R. 1997. ‘The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society’. New York: New Press.

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The concept of super-diversity draws attention to the interplay of factors ranging from legal rights, labour-market experiences, age profiles, religious backgrounds, etc., and it calls for the importance of going beyond the analysis of conditions of multi-ethnicity when analysing diverse urban areas.7

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Over the twentieth century, like many innercity areas, Handsworth underwent a series of transformations and is now a densely populated inner city area of Birmingham. In the 1960s and 1970s it became home to large groups of newly arrived immigrants from the Caribbean and India. Today it is known as an area of ‘super diversity’. Over the last two decades in the UK, the arrival of migrants from many different countries, combined with longer established minority populations, has resulted in an unprecedented variety of cultures, identities, faiths and languages. This is referred to as ‘superdiversity’.

We met with Dr Susan Wessendorf – a Social Anthropologist specialising in migration and diversity – who happened to be working in Handsworth at the same time as us. She is currently a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) at Birmingham University. Handsworth she explained, was a superdiverse area that was now characterised by a ‘diversification of diversity’:

Indeed, she suggested that inner city areas such as Handsworth were now defined by a ‘normalisation of diversity’ – what she called a ‘commonplace diversity’ which is an integral part of life in any ‘super-diverse’ context. Within Handsworth, diversity is the norm. Different ethnic groups share a physical environment but they in effect live parallel lives. Their stories and narratives are culturally contingent and there is no singular ‘community’ as such. Drawing upon Lippard’s terminology, Handsworth exemplifies the idea of ‘communities as bumpily layered and mixed, exposing hybrid stories that cannot be seen in a linear fashion’. Across the local area, layers of history accumulate in dense proximity to one another. Road names have historical weight – Boulton Avenue, Scholars Close, Watt Road.

Yet within 50 yards of Soho House is the site of a former cafe that was the HQ of the notorious street gang the ‘Burger Bar Boys’, whose titfor-tat shootings and ruthless violence against their rivals the Johnson Crew gave Birmingham the unenviable title of the UK’s gun and gang capital in the 1990s. On this site now resides the Nishkam Centre Primary School, one of the cities outstanding schools. The Nishkam Centre are a Sikh faith organisation who have a significant presence in Handsworth and they have meticulously restored the building to it’s original Georgian splendor.

7 http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/commonplacediversity-stable-and-peaceful-relations-across-myriaddifferences-in-hackney/

Heads Up

Gurdwara Sahib, Soho Road

We began to investigate Handsworth properly in autumn 2014. It’s fair to say at this stage we were pretty ‘green’ to the areas social and political complexities and our knowledge was largely based upon popular cliché. As the novelist Salman Rushdie remarked in 1986, ‘If you say “Handsworth”, what do you see? Most people would see fire, riots, looted shops… and helmeted cops… a front-page story.’ We produced a project newspaper (announcing the competition and call-out for ‘Heads’ nominations) with a print run of 5,000 copies which we distributed over a two-month period as we tried to familiarise ourselves with Handsworth.8 By and large, several months of concentrated engagement fell mainly on deaf ears: we only had four ‘Heads’ nominations and these were for the ‘usual suspects’ – self-elected guardians of the local area who purported to speak for the entire community. Our aim was to locate some of the ‘unsung heros’, people who were significant yet less well known. We intensified our research efforts into the local area and created a list of 65 people/organisations to contact who had a relationship to the local area: we posted them all personalised letters inviting them to nominate a ‘Head’. By this point in the project – partly

because of the local politics – we had made the decision to use the democratic platform of the open competition/public vote to decide the ‘Heads’ (in a way it didn’t matter to us who featured on the coin; it was the mechanism of the coin that was important to us). This more direct approach worked: nominations began to arrive.

The individuals with the most nominations for the ‘Heads’ side of the coins were put forward for an online public vote.9 Between Monday 2 March and Sunday 8 March, 1,341 people took part in the online public vote. The three individuals with the highest number of votes were Merrise CrooksBishton, Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia and Mykal Brown. These three individuals were the ‘Heads’ for the new Handsworth coins.

8 The highlight was visiting Professor Black’s extraordinary studio in Oaklands Community Centre. Olton Brown, known to everyone as Professor Black, has been making carnival costumes for 20 years. He is the only full-time carnival costume maker outside of London.

9 They were: Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia, Mykal Brown, Mohammed Idris, King G Mall, Father David, Hector Pinkney, Kash ‘The Flash’ Gill, Mother Linda Isiorho, David Winkley, Apache Indian, Merrise Crooks-Bishton, Giani Sukha Singh, Pat Mills.

The three heads Merrise Crooks-Bishton Merrise Crooks-Bishton has been involved in literacy and community education work in Birmingham as teacher, publisher and consultant, for more than 40 years. She worked as Education Development Officer for Handsworth Alternative Scheme which was set up to assist the Probation Service to provide alternatives to custody for young black people living in Handsworth. She founded Handprint, a community education project based on Soho Road that published books which were culturally relevant to people of African Caribbean heritage. She also published a magazine called Survival produced with the help of women living and working in Handsworth.

Mykal ‘Wassifa’ Brown WASSIFA is one of the UK’s most famous inner city Sound Systems established 1972 in Handsworth, Birmingham. Founder, selector and front man Mykal “Wassifa” Brown uses music as a platform to uplift, motivate and empower communities around the world.

Bhai Ji Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia Bhai Ji Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia is the Chairman and spiritual leader of Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha, UK (GNNSJ) – a Sikh faith-led organisation working for the wellbeing of all communities by developing a dynamic civic agenda. Under his leadership over the span of some twenty-five years, the Nishkam Group has become a major player in the social and economic development of Handsworth.

Clockwise from top left: Survival Magazine, published by Merrise Crooks-Bishton (the magazine presents topics such as fashion, child care, diet, literacy and health issues from an African Caribbean perspective. It was produced with the help of black women living and working in the Handsworth area); MSS (the local Sikh community co-operative on the Soho Road); Gurdwara Sahib, Soho Road; Langar, Gurdwara Sahib, Soho Road (Langar is the term used in the Sikh religion for the common kitchen/canteen where food is served in a Gurdwara to all the visitors, without distinction of faith, religion or background, for free).

Wassifa Soundsystem in Handsworth (1970s) & Wassifa Showcase calendar featuring Mykal Brown

Archive material relating to ‘Handprint’, Merrise Crooks-Bishton’s community education project based in Handsworth that produced books and teaching materials with themes designed for Black adult literacy students during the 1980s

Symbolically, we were happy with the ‘Heads’ side of the coins as the production of the coins literally embedded a broader range of faces into the museum’s archive.10 It could be suggested that the predominance of white men in the history of Soho House gives local people little traction when imagining the relevance of this history to their own lives. As Noha Nasser argues: History, personally and collectively, tells us where we came from, and who we are.

Interpretation is an important concept when heritage has up until now been forged by nationalist interpretations of the past. The dominant culture is based on a white, AngloSaxon and Christian identity, asserting ‘Englishness’. Tensions will undoubtedly arise when new settled cultures challenge these purist notions. Within the current climate, increased recognition of the contributions of cultural communities allows for the redefinition of purist interpretations. Now is the time to acknowledge that history is not fixed but changing. The emerging history of a multicultural country is yet another layer in the narrative of this country’s heritage.11 10 Grant Kester in his seminal book ‘Conversation Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially Engaged Art’ states how empathy from artists is an important feature in collaborative work and recognises that skill is needed to enter a community with a project: ‘The first occurs in the rapport between artists and their collaborators, especially in those situations in which the artist is working across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or class. These relationships can, of course, be quite difficult to negotiate equitably, as the artist often operates as an outsider, occupying a position of perceived cultural authority.’ (Kester: 2005). We made the decision that the three people whose heads were to feature on the coins, previously unknown to us, would have imput into the final artwork - i.e. the coins. This led to two moments where tension arose over the coin designs. The first related to the length of Bhai Sahib’s beard. As a Sikh it was essential that he had the entirety of his beard included on the coin. Unfortunately this meant that his head was much smaller on the coin than we would have wished. Another one of the Heads decided they didn’t agree with the slogan on their design and felt uncomfortable with putting their face to the message. It had to be changed at the last minute. Due to the tight deadline on getting the coins produced for the launch event we were unable to find a substitute slogan that we were entirely happy with. We felt these compromises with the aesthetic qualities of the artwork were necessary for the success of the wider project.

11 ‘Redefining heritage and identity in conservation’ (2007) Context, Vol 102, pp 20-22

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The ‘Tails’ aspect of the competition was co-ordinated through workshops in local schools.12 As with any coin-based commission, the temptation was to produce the designs ourselves, but we decided there was something more interesting (and unpredictable) in the coins featuring designs by local children.

You don’t normally see wiggly lines on a coin (perhaps with good reason) and we decided this was something we would like to see. The over ambitious project brief proposed to the (often very young) children was to produce a coin design & slogan that captured Handsworth. The level of imagination was very high, particularly in relation to re-imagining local histories and sloganeering. One favourite coin design featured ‘Matty Bolutty and Jim Watt’ (Matthew Boulton and James Watt), whilst another announced ‘Handsworth Libry – Handsworth is the best city in bermingham’. Our personal favourite ‘This Dog is Spying’ ultimately proved too surreal to use. Over 200 entries were submitted by local participating schools. Four winners were selected whose designs and names went onto the 4,000 new Handsworth coins.

12 The participating schools were: Holyhead School, Grove Primary School, Future First School, St Theresa’s Catholic Primary School, Handsworth Girls School.

Launch of the Handsworth Currency Competition exhibition, 23 May 2015 at Soho House. The Three Heads are mobbed by crowds and photographers

Clockwise from top: ‘The Three Heads’ outside Soho House; Wassifa Sound System’s first handmade speaker unearthed after 40 years in Mykal Brown’s mothers basement; the three ‘Heads’ give speeches to the gathered crowds; visitors queueing up outside Soho House, 23 May 2015

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4,000 new Handsworth coins were produced in May 2015 featuring the profiles of Mykal Brown, Merrise Crooks and Bhai Ji Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia. The coin dies were produced by Howard Brothers Engravers based in the Jewellery Quarter and the coins were stamped by Thomas Ball LTD on the Matthew Boulton Industrial Estate in close proximity to Soho House.

Whilst celebrating the three individuals who have all made contributions to improving the social and physical fabric of Handsworth, the coins had a ‘cultural value’ focused upon opening up access to the museum for the local community.

There was also the wider context of city wide funding cuts causing a reduction in public access to heritage sites such as Soho House. Our interest was in the mechanism of the coin as an object with symbolic value and potential for exchange and we negotiated with Birmingham Museum Trust the best offer we could: the coins would allow free access to the museum for the coin

bearer and their family on certain days.13 In May 2015, 2,300 coins were distributed via 10 frenzied school assemblies as well as through community groups participating in the project. A further 1,000 coins were available to the general public for free at the coin launch. The project therefore aimed to find new ways for the local Handsworth community to interact with Soho House and in drawing together old and new narratives of Handsworth – the old history of coin production providing a way to celebrate a contemporary Handsworth – we hoped that the coins ‘use’ value might create a new relationship between community and institution.

13 The full cultural offer of the coins was as follows: free entry for the coin bearer and their family to Soho House over the launch weekend 23–25 May and half price entry thereafter until 1 November 2015; half price entry for the coin bearer and their family to 4 other heritage sites in Birmingham (Aston Hall, Blakesley Hall, Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Sarehole Mill) until 1 November 2015; free children’s craft activities at Soho House throughout the summer holiday.

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Over 700 people attended the launch event on 23 May 2015, a new record for Soho House Museum. The accompanying exhibition presented archive material relating to each new Handsworth ‘Head’. This included magazines/ pamphlets produced by Merrise Crooks-Bishton in the 1970s, handmade carpentry tools used by employees of MSS (the local Sikh community co-operative on the Soho Road) and Mykal Brown’s Wassifa Sound System sound clash trophies. Mykal Brown also unearthed Wassifa Sound System’s first handmade speaker that had been sitting in his mum’s basement for 40 years. This, along with the other objects within the exhibition, asked questions around what constituted ‘heritage’ in Handsworth today?

Returning to Noha Nasser, this re-defining of the meaning of heritage is something that she explores in her pertinent 2007 article:14 ‘Since the 1950s, large numbers of workers from the Commonwealth and other parts of the world settled in this country. The

settlement process has seen the addition of new typologies and aesthetics in religious and community buildings; the internal and external adaptations of historical buildings; and the establishment of distinctive commercial zones. Recognising multiculturalism as a force for change in the built environment is yet another chapter in the heritage of this country.

Why has it not been recognised as such?…

The issue of redefining the meaning of heritage was discussed a 2006 conference sponsored by English Heritage, ‘Your Place or Mine’. There is growing recognition that traditional definitions of heritage have long been constructed to portray a national story of wealth and power. ‘ Whilst Soho House and the legacy of Matthew Boulton represented one Handsworth history, the Wassifa speaker offered a very different interpretation of what constituted a contemporary Handsworth heritage.15

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14 Noha Nasser argues: ‘No longer is heritage led by a single view of what is of value for conservation. Multiculturalism brings shifting perceptions of what buildings and places mean.’

‘Redefining heritage and identity in conservation’ (2007) Context, Vol 102, pp 20-22.

15 Looking through Mykal Brown’s archive material with him, he talked about the ‘concept of Handsworth’ - the idea that Handsworth had a cultural or symbolic value that travelled around the world. Mykal was primarily alluding to a Handsworth style or music (if you think of all the famous musicians who have emerged from the area) but the idea of something linking Handsworth together might equally apply to what the three ‘Heads’ winners all had in common: education. Or more specifically, alternative, self-initiated forms of education: through a sound system, street level literacy project or the creation of new schools across the local area built by volunteers.

Images above: Exhibition at Soho House showing archive images and objects relating to the 3 ‘Heads’ including tracksuit and hat worn by Mykal Brown during early Wassifa events

It’s always difficult accessing the legacy of any project. Immediate results were an additional 2,000 coins been ordered by the Nishkam centre for the benefit of the Sikh community in Handsworth. There were also a series of pop-up projects at Soho House by local groups we had worked with (who began to see the potential of the visitor centre as an exhibition space after seeing our exhibition). The coins were also now in the archives of Soho House, Birmingham Museums Trust and the British Museum collection. During the launch weekend, over 1000 people had also visited the museum, many for the first time. Within the context of BMT reductions on museum access, we felt the project had actively resisted this. The coins also had a potential future offer connected to them: with 4,000+ coins now in local circulation the museum could attach an annual cultural offer to them.16 Ultimately though, what we really liked about the coins was that they might take on a life of their own – in the playground (who knows) or in the local community more widely.

Coins are a very quiet public artwork, but they have a longevity that continues to appeal…17 16 Following the commission, we were encouraged to propose a further idea by Soho House but this was rejected outright by BMT because of lack of funds. Our idea, ‘The 24-Hour Boulton Buffet: A 24-hour conversation about Handsworth’ would have involved Soho House opening for 24 hours and hosting a series of public talks, conversations and presentations that had a relationship to Handsworth – its past, present and future contribution to the world. The idea referenced the fast-food outlets and shops of the Soho Road that are open 24 hours a day and we hoped it might activate Soho House as a site of contemporary radical conversations within the historical context of the Lunar Society.

17 We would like to thank everyone who helped make the project a success: Soho House, Ollie Buckley, Rachael West, Samina Kosar, Andy Horn, Kate Stoddart, Sherri Stafford & pupils at Holyhead School, Laura Cressey and Grove Primary School, Future First School, St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School, Handsworth Girls School, Mykal Brown, Merrise CrooksBishton, Bhai Ji Bhai Sahib Mohinder Singh Ahluwalia, Ranjit Singh Dhanda & Nishkam Centre, Simon Harper and the New Expressions Family, Arts Council England, Birmingham City Council and Birmingham Museums Trust.

3020: Archeological Dig, Sohodonia It is the year 3020 and archeologists are undertaking a new archeological dig on the Birmingham mountain now known as Sohodonia. They uncover a range of unusual items – bits of dining table, tatty candle stick holders, a fossilised Apache Indian Album and a box of coins all displaying the same slogan: ‘Exchange this Token for History & Culture at Soho House, Handsworth’. The Archeologists scratch their head: were museum’s once open to the general public?

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Images courtesy of the Nishkam Centre Archive (p7, 9); Birmingham Museums Trust (inside front cover, p4); Tim Abbott (p3); Merrise Crooks-Bishton (p9, 10, 11); Mykal Brown (p10, 11); Stephen Burke (p8); Jaskirt Dhaliwali (p4, 13, 14,15, 16, 17)