An early-winter ghost story workshop in three West Bromwich Public Houses
About the Event
As the evenings turn frosty and the longest night of the year approaches, we invite you to join us in warming your hands by the heat of the hearth! Join us for a ghost story writing workshop led by Black Country artist Fred Hubble, which will take place across a tour of some of West Brom’s finest Public Houses containing working fireplaces. During the workshop we’ll explore the legacies of the ever-rare pub fireplace, the implications of its disappearance, tied up in climate change, the commercialisation of pubs and gentrification.
The public house as a site exists as one of the last places where people publicly engage with log fires. This is in part due to the move towards a diminishing presence of hearths in people's homes. There is a split between those who favour to not use wood burning stoves, as well as urban initiatives to cut fireplace usage in cities in favour of less polluting methods of heating, whereas in more rural settings fireplace use continues. The use of fireplaces in peoples homes has paradoxically returned, where infrastructure fails as a result of more severe storms the fireplace is a continuous refuge for heating homes and providing comfort in uncertain times.
The pub fireplace is a place of gathering, of temporary community, of warmth for those who may struggle to afford to heat their own houses. The fireplace in winter is a place for stories to be told, ghost stories are shared, remembered, re-told, made up on the spot. In Sandwell and beyond many pubs are losing their fireplaces through clean air legislation, a shift towards burning gas instead, redundancy through centrally heated buildings, through health and safety regulations. There is something of the ghost of fires past in the pub, and something lost in the losing of the log fire as a gathering space.
Activity
For the workshop we will walk between three West Brom pubs; The Crown and Cushion, The Horse and Jockey, and The Old Hop Pole. Within these pubs there will be an opportunity to have a drink (non-alcoholic or otherwise) and a seat by the fires we find there. We will briefly discuss the history of the ghost story and its relationship to winter-time, from which we will all compose ghost stories of our own. Each person in the workshop can reflect on whatever kind of ghosts they want, these can be the ghosts of climate, of culture, of loss or completely speculative. We will move between three pubs following a classic story structure, the beginning, middle, and end. The participants will be encouraged to think about their stories also on the walks between pubs. That being said the stories need not be linear at all, but our journey between pubs and their fireplaces will be.
Schedule: 2.30pm - Meet at Crown and Cushion (2 Lloyd St, West Bromwich B71 4AT)
Access: If you have any access requirements you would like us to be aware of, or any allergies or dietary requirements, please get in touch with us asap, by emailing info@multistory.org.uk, or calling / texting / Whatsapping: 07922 571832.
This event is free and is open to all artists, creatives and those working in all areas of the arts and the creative industries. Pre-booking is required.
About Fred
I am an artist-researcher and my practice is concerned with looking into our relationships to place, to time, to climate and to culture. My current practice explores seasonality through relationships that incorporate the experience of being, with and alongside seasons, the recognition of sequence within lived experiences in different climates, and the tension between climates / phenological / meteorological / solar / cultural events around which we build culture. Within my practice I explore the tensions within those relationships as well as the speculative opportunities that they provide through folk knowledge and folklore. I am interested in how the frameworks of these relationships and how through the act of noticing we may be able to reframe, de-stabilise and re-scale our relationships to the climates and bioregions in which we live, hopefully making for more sustainable arts practices as well as for more present ways within which we can interact with the environments, processes and beings around and within us.
https://frederickhubble.com/
About BCN
This event is hosted as part of BCN (Blast Creative Network), Multistory’s artist development programme that offers artists in Sandwell and the wider Black Country a free annual programme of talks, workshops and social events and is a space for mutual support and knowledge sharing. It was set up to provide artists in the local area with opportunities for critical engagement and collaboration outside of formal arts education. The BCN programme informs, and is informed by, Multistory’s wider arts programme that is co-produced with artists and communities living in Sandwell.