Work Experience with Multistory 12 July 202312 July 2023

This week I’m doing work experience with Multistory and this blog tells you more about my time here.

On the 10th July we visited Smethwick library to see The Community History and Archives held there. The aim was to find out information on the working women in West Bromwich and Wednesbury. 

These were some of the books that I found interesting because they tell us the local history of Wednesbury.

This book was written by Ian M.Bott and it’s about how the town has changed over the years. It shows before and after photos of the roads and how time has influenced the modeling of buildings. For example, the photograph below is one of the pages in the book, it shows the Victorian and Edwardian houses that were demolished so a huge Morrisons could be built in its place which was opened on the 26th November 2007 by Sir Ken Morrison.

Here is another page of the book that shows how the street has changed over the years. In the first photo it shows the fire-practice, but it got knocked down and has been replaced with Church Hill Gardens

There were many other remodelings to look at in this book, such as the buses and how they have really changed throughout the years. Before, the ‘buses’ were trams and this shows how technology has progressed over time as well.

This photograph shows a remodeling of the railway station, but this one isn’t really that much of a big difference compared to the others because this one started as a railway station and was just updated to a new and better station. It was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1854. 

Walk along the high street

Another part of my work experience was to walk along West Bromwich High Street to look at the exhibition that the Photography students at Sandwell college did as part of Multistory’s Green Roots project. The exhibition is called ‘Change Is Coming’ and is about the photography students being more aware of the environment around them. They were asked to take 3 photographs of nature around West Bromwich. The students were really involved in this exhibition because they got to choose the photographs they liked the most and then they stuck their own posters up themselves. This also allows the public to see the exhibition and read the students poems which hopefully inspires them to be more aware of the nature around them.

Alongside the student’s photographs are poems by the Sandwell Visually Impaired group. Below are some of my favourite examples as they capture the beauty of nature perfectly.