The Birmingham Popular Music Archive was established by Jez Collins to recognise and celebrate Birmingham’s rich musical heritage. To enable Birmingham to take pride in its musical heritage, to bring visitors to the region and create reasons to visit the city and environs.
In celebrating, preserving and sharing Birmingham’s Music Heritage, the volunteers plan to build the archive to inspire the future. Believing that music provides memories, shared experiences, and self-expression, this project was designed to install Musical Maps at Birmingham city and neighbourhood stations. Celebrating and recognising the world class musical heritage of Birmingham and inspiring civic pride whilst creating visitor attractions for the city.
The locations highlighted on the Musical Maps include venues, record shops, radio stations, musician’s local history and fascinating musical facts and locations. Crossing all communities, users can engage and build new knowledge about Birmingham and the city’s popular music and social history.
The maps highlight music history, heritage and culture across the West Midlands Railway network and the visually stunning art-music maps will create instant connections with passengers and act as a storytelling tools.
The community vision to inform travellers of the musical routes of world-famous artists originating in the West Midlands will highlight Birmingham’s long hidden musical secrets and tell them to visitors from near and far. And the Music Maps are stunning works of art in their own right.
The launch of the Music Maps was an outstanding success with the unveiling of the scheme undertaken by reggae legends from Birmingham, UB40. Media coverage was intense and positive, cutting across public, academic, media, business and culture audiences.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/26/ub40-unveil-wooden-maps-birmingham-musical-heritage
