My secret love : Back to Back Houses.
The Birmingham Back to Backs are a place I feel genuinely drawn to. Not just because I’m a Brummy, (that’s a person from Birmingham for overseas readers!), but because I truly believe they are one of the most important social history sites in the United Kingdom, and I’ll even stick my head on the block and say… the world.
There are now three videos on the Birmingham Back to Backs over on my YouTube channel, Through Lucy’s Lens, and this blog post feels like the right place to put into words why they matter so much to me.
The photograph on this post was taken on my very first visit back in 2005. At the time, I was working in Birmingham city centre in a dull corporate job that drained the life out of me. Most lunch hours, I’d wander down to Hurst Street, peer through the railings, and watch the restoration work slowly taking shape. Just a quick peek was enough to keep me going for the rest of the afternoon.
It felt like a secret love affair — the homes of my ancestors. Not grand or fancy houses, but the places where millions of people in Birmingham, and other industrial cities across the UK, lived their lives.
My obsession with these homes started young. From about the age of five, I knew the address of the house where my mom was born on Nelson Street, and where my dad grew up on Upper Conybere Street in Highgate. I’d grill my grandparents endlessly, soaking up stories about drinking out of jam jars, sing-songs, steep stairs, childhood illnesses, rats, and silverfish darting out of distempered walls. I drank it all in and stored it away.
These homes matter to me because when they were demolished, a whole way of life went with them. Many people argue it’s a way of life best forgotten, but others, like me, cling to the sense of community. The court matriarch. The shared experience of life, death, hardship, and joy that played out in those often rat-infested slums.
Most of my family were moved into council housing in the 1950s and 1960s, and the story continued there. But it’s vital that the earlier chapters aren’t erased.
That’s why the Birmingham Back to Backs are so important.
Yes, they’re polished now. Too clean, perhaps. There’s no smell of overflowing privies or carbolic soap. But the history of the working classes deserves to be remembered, preserved, and explored. So future generations can walk through those rooms and imagine what life must have been like, just as I did as a child.
And look where that curiosity got me.
If you’d like to explore the Birmingham Back to Backs with me, I’ve shared three films over on my YouTube channel, Through Lucy’s Lens. They’re not just about the buildings, but the lives lived inside them, the stories that still echo in those walls. They are my most viewed videos and have even been used in schools in France, Germany and the United Kingdom - that blows my mind. I am sure episode 4 will come some day too … I don’t think I’ll ever stop exploring these spaces.
