Hidden Gems of Birmingham - Our Birmingham Heritage Week Events!

Our team had been wanting to be involved in Birmingham Heritage Week since last year. Now that we have been working together for a while, we thought it would be the perfect year to enter our first events. The organiser, Irene de Boo, has been incredibly helpful over the last year in helping us organise our thoughts! We’ve got a lot of plans to introduce new people to Birmingham’s heritage and history, so keeping our events in line with our resources was pretty difficult.

We chose to deliver tours because we believe in immersive experiences. Seeing things is the best way to get to know them. On top of that, outdoor tours were a safe way to include as many people as possible in our events. 

As for our venues, we had been interested in touring the Chinese Quarter in Birmingham for months. Our business aims to celebrate the international culture of the city, and the Chinese Quarter has a fascinating, but underexplored, history. The University of Birmingham campus is equally interesting, but its location at the edge of the city means that non-students tend not to be able to visit easily. 

We have an incredibly diverse team in terms of their experiences and talents, so it was a true team effort to mark out the tour, write the copy for it and arranging everything so that guests could sign up and easily find the starting point. 

There is a lot that goes into giving a tour that doesn’t come up until the day; for example, certain accessibility issues that wouldn’t get noticed until we’re actually at the location. The Chinese Quarter is in a busy location that meant we needed to find a microphone. This wasn’t something we’d initially considered, but it made the tour a lot easier for the guests to hear and saved our guides’ voices!

On The Day

We had a lovely day for our Chinese Quarter tour and great attendance. It was a new part of the city even for some of our guides, but our team supported one another and the tour was very successful. We’ll definitely be returning to this area next year! 

This is the first tour of the Chinese Quarter featured in Heritage Week before. It was very exciting for us to introduce this area to the festival. A new tour is always difficult because it takes giving the tour to really figure out the logistics of moving a large group through a public space. 

The weather wasn’t quite so nice for the Edgbaston campus tour, but it was still a wonderful evening and our guests were engaged in spite of the weather. Using the iconic Old Joe as our starting point, we took our guests around the Guild of Students - which represents over 30,000 students at any one time - The new Green Heart, the university library, and the Blue Plaque Trail. 

We’d like to give a special thanks to Keith Bracey (aka The Brummie Bard) for reading one of his excellent poems about his time as a University of Birmingham undergraduate student. It was a great way to round off the tour and the rest of our guests loved to hear from him. 

What was great about giving walking tours is that we could be outside and fully emersed in the work we were doing. Research can only get you so far when it comes to heritage work, so it was great to be out and about and actually showing guests parts of the city that they might not have seen before. 

Would We Change Anything Next Year? 

We’d love to include a bit more video content, as we have an incredible team of videographers and designers. 

We also hope to expand next year and run our tours on more than one date, or potentially expand into other areas of the city. We’ve found a lot of success working with local students, and we’d love to work to include students even more in next year’s Heritage Week. 

Language is really important to the work that we do, and it’s crucial to making heritage accessible to the international community. Along with translating our written content, we’re hoping to be able to offer tour content in alternative languages. 

Let us know what you’d like to see from us next year at Birmingham Heritage Week 2022! You can get in touch with us on Twitter at @atlasofbham and Instagram or Facebook at @atlasofbirmingham.