Category: Audience Development

As part of the Museum’s National Portfolio Organisation funding, we are developing a partnership with local touring theatre company, Black Country Touring – you may remember we hosted them last summer for their Life’s a Beach project. We will be working with Black Country Touring both at the Museum and across the Black Country to share the stories of our local communities through performance and first person interpretation.

Over the next few months, during the development phase of BCLM: Forging Ahead, members of Black Country Touring will be working with various Museum staff, volunteers and consultants to explore the potential for theatre, performance and first person interpretation on our site. The first pilot performances will be devised and integrated into August’s Summer Evening programme, in some of our shops with the aim of developing this into a wider performance involving pieces onsite and in shops across the Black Country.

We’ll be launching our public call-out for memories and objects relating to the Cape Hill branch of the West Bromwich Building Society (WBBS) pre-1960 on Monday 5 March.

Do have any personal stories about this WBBS branch that was at 31, Cape Hill, Smethwick (opposite the present-day branch)? Perhaps you held a savings account with them or got your first mortgage there? Or maybe your family or friends worked there?

If you, or anyone you know has anything you would like to share to help in our recreation of the West Bromwich building Society, please pop in and see the Collections team in the Rolfe Street offices.

We’re particularly keen to hear the memories of those who moved to Smethwick from outside the UK during this period. This was a time when housing was a political, economic and cultural issue and finding somewhere to live was often challenging. We are keen to hear how new arrivals found somewhere to live, how they saved to buy a home, and about the difficulties they faced. If you have a story to tell we would love to hear it.

A bit about WBBS

The West Brom was formed as the West Bromwich Permanent Benefit Building Society in 1849, at Paradise Street Methodist schoolrooms in West Bromwich. Societies like this were formed to enable the working classes to afford home ownership and in turn receive a vote, whilst sharing the profits of the venture. The Society grew in strength between the wars, opening a new headquarters, the “Home Of Thrift” in West Bromwich High Street, and branches in Handsworth, Smethwick, Great Bridge and Oldbury. By its centenary year in 1949, the West Brom had over 1.5 million depositors, still helping people to save to afford their own home.

The building we are recreating from 31, Cape Hill, was built in the late nineteenth-century as part of the Post Office on the corner of Windmill Lane, and was taken over by the Building Society in 1931. They moved their Smethwick Branch from Waterloo Road to this more prominent site and refaced the building with a new stone façade. It remained open until around 1970, when the branch moved across the road to its present position.

Why WBBS?

Telling the story of the Society in this period will enable us to show the importance of mutual help and savings to the ordinary residents of the Black Country, and how central to everyday life the idea of home was.