From the beginning, the guide is all the more authentic, in one of those small houses, where a few people were crammed into the square meters of the square, a kind of wolf world and a longing for him grew.
Birmingham, the second largest British city in the very center of England, has an illustrious industrial history behind it. At the end of the 18th century, the town and its factories moved to the town and its factories in search of work. The city was not prepared for their march and the people had nowhere to live. Construction standards did not exist at that time, so typically red brick houses with tall stairs were built without order and storage after printing. To this day, only pr. Eleven of them stand together around a yard about a square meter in diameter and form a museum dedicated to the history of tenement housing in Birmingham.
The name Back to Backs refers to the unusual architecture of the attached semi-detached houses, none of these houses had their own entrance from the street and the only way to get there was through a passage to the yard. The premises of the tenement houses are so small that it is necessary to adapt to them even tours with one guide, at most five people inside.
In 1795, the industrial revolution began, work was done from six in the morning to seven in the evening. Everyone worked, children from the age of five. There were no bicycles, there were no days, Wesley evokes the atmosphere of the turn of the century during a tour of the houses that were completed around 1814. There was no police, there was no public lighting on the street, there were pigs and blood everywhere, and this house was out of danger, like the area that today it is a step away from the center of Birmingham in the heart of the German quarter.
Each house is dedicated to one family that lived in it, and exactly one like it. The atmosphere of the second half of the 19th century is captured by the Jewish house of the Levy family, where the father of the clock lived. Around 1850, there were 700 people in Birmingham, who fled here as well as to the cells of England before the pogroms in Eastern Europe. Next door Herbert Oldfields made glass eyes for people and stuffed guests, his neighbor Thomas Mitchell was a draftsman and his family lived in the house for a hundred years. While the first house has only candles and a fireplace, a real fire was burning in it, the last house has an electric stove and linoleum.
Every bird chose him, and when you didn’t like him, they threw you out on the street and beat you up. Therefore, half of the families housed female tenants, who shared a table with them, but also beds and water in the bath, when everyone washed once a week, describes the harsh history of Birmingham Wesley. I’ll bet, my dear, that I slept in the same bed with more men, not you two together, he turns with humor to the two adult members of the tour. As he had already shared a bed with two women at the same time, and so many people.
The last residents moved out of the makeshift houses, where only cold water flowed under them, in 1966. According to him, it is not clear why they were not the same as the rest of the houses around the demolition site, but they finally became a cultural monument in 1988. An archaeological survey a year later showed that it is a real rarity, and the city even bought the land from a private owner with the help of a public collection. In 2001, the complex was taken over by the National Trust, a public benefit organization engaged in building and selling monuments with the help of Polish donations, donations and estates.
Ron comes here with about 20,000 entries, and that’s really good considering the size of the area. Two days a week, we do bike tours with Ashton and Nicol, who work at Back to Backs.
The memorial has eight employees and 18 volunteers who organize tours, an information center and a second-hand book store. People who want to support the museum bring books for sale. The sale of them goes towards the renewal and development of the arel.
We are glad that Back to Backs managed to be saved and we hope that people will travel here and beyond, who will capture the history of Birmingham, including the employees of the store and the info center, there was a bell above its door, and the walls are decorated with bars with historical bells.
