Right across the western Midlands from the sleepy northern market towns of Leek and Oswestry, to the little cathedral cities of Worcester and Hereford in the south, via virtually all of the towns that agglomerated and bleed into each other to form the West Midlands conurbation you are never far from a former art school.
Something which is made apparent by a prodigious historical research and contemporary photographic project The Art Schools of the West Midlands spanning the breadth of the sub-region undertaken by humanities academic John Beck and artist educator Matthew Cornford. The fruits of which are currently on display on the 4th Floor of Walsall New Art Gallery until 2nd July 2023.
I grew up near one of the later establishments: Bournville now in south Birmingham which opened in 1903. As a small child, when it was still used for arts education by what was then the University of Central England, I recall being taken to a sculpture exhibition there, part of a summer of public artworks held across the suburb which occurred in around the year 2000.
As an adult I have often attended talks and exhibitions held at, or closely affiliated with, the surviving university art schools and adult education departments that are a critical – and increasingly stretched and hacked at – part of the western Midlands arts infrastructure. These days they tend to be situated at the newer universities: Birmingham City, Coventry, Worcester, Staffordshire and Wolverhampton, where a mixture of central mismanagement and government funding led to swingeing cuts last year. Interestingly, forms of independent higher education art school do continue, for instance in Hereford, home to Hereford University of the Arts.
Away from these major centres in the region’s smaller towns and cities the legacies of the art schools created in the 19th and early 20th Centuries lives on in subtler ways.
A while back, prior to COVID-19, during a caesura in my professional life, I spent the late spring and early summer one year volunteering at the Blast! Photo festival mounted by Multistory right across Sandwell. For a couple of weeks my volunteering stints included invigilating the Girl Gaze and Asian Women & Cars: Road to Independence installations installed in a rundown red brick building, evidentially designed at the point when gothic was giving way to arts and crafts as the preferred style for civic buildings, opposite West Bromwich’s Town Hall where Multistory have their offices.
This venue was managed by the British Muslim School as well as being part of the premises of a travel agent. Its initial purpose however, was as the Ryland Memorial School of Art opened in 1902. This was West Bromwich’s local art school, a key part of the municipal quarter which grew up around the Town Hall, local library and other council buildings prior to the creation of Sandwell in 1974. One of the other volunteers at Blast! Could clearly remember starting work there in the early 1970s having just left school at a time when the building was no longer actively used for teaching instead housing part of the local education authority.
A legacy of a long vanished civic and municipal culture still providing education and serving the community generations after its original, comparatively short lived, purpose ceased. The building’s high ceilings and large windows mean that it remains a perfect venue for showing all manner of artworks and performances, something that Multistory took advantage of that summer, and potentially others could too…
It is the varied origins, lives and afterlives of these Victorian and Edwardian (occasionally slightly later) institutions and buildings which are the focus for John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s project.
The exhibition at Walsall New Art Gallery brings together contemporary photos of many of the former art schools across the region, alongside close-up photographs of the carvings and mouldings many of them were endowed with. In the centre of the room a rich trove of old photographic postcards and archival ephemera is displayed in glass cases granting visitors insight into the vibrant lives and creative education that were on offer at the art schools, to older children and adults alike in many cases, from Victorian times until they began to steadily amalgamate with larger organisations and close in the mid-20th Century.
Upon entering the exhibition viewers encounter a large map of the western Midlands with flags indicating the location of the art schools researched and recorded in the project. The overall impression is one of awe at the sheer scale of the reach of the institutions across the region and their density in the larger urban areas. Adjacent to the map are brief, but very detailed exhibition guides providing a potted biography of each of the art schools featured in the exhibition.
As the exhibition relays the purpose of the schools as they emerged over the course of the 19th Century and briefly flourished in the first half of the 20th were multifold. They can be narrated in very different ways. From the reasons for their foundation which varied slightly between locations from being a training ground for commercial and industrial artists, to a means of making towns attractive cultural centres in other locations, through to a wide reaching belief that the courses on offer would make citizens more discerning and rounded individuals. All rationales echoing down the generations that are familiar to defenders of arts education today.
In most of the examples documented it is striking that despite often being relatively small and in prime town centre locations the art school buildings survive, albeit sometimes in parlous states. In a few instances, most notably Birmingham School of Art in Margaret Street just off Colmore Row, they still serve their original purpose, the building remaining the core of a vibrant and lively university art school which lies at the heart of the city’s creative life to this day.
Elsewhere in the region the buildings remain part of the public realm as libraries, registration centres, or forming part of secondary schools and further education colleges. A few, for instance Moseley Art School in south Birmingham (a late survivor having carried on as a standalone institution until 1976), Shrewsbury Art School in mid-Shropshire, or Burslem School of Art in the Potteries have found new leases of life under charitable trusts, which maintain the buildings often for creative and educational purposes not dissimilar to those for which they were originally constructed.
Not all of the buildings have fared as well however, Burton-upon-Trent’s art school building having been sold by Staffordshire County Council is now partitioned into flats. Bilston and Brierley Hill’s art schools look set to follow the same path. A good use for an old building but one which means that access is necessarily lost to the public as a whole.
Elsewhere Wordsley, Bromsgrove and Fenton the buildings have been demolished to make way for a range of new commercial commercial and residential buildings, ceding the old buildings from the public realm entirely.
The story that John Beck and Matthew Cornford have uncovered is one of brief intense, creative activity in the town’s that constructed public art schools. Followed by a very familiar story of centralisation.
Telling, it is in the generally more isolated locations that constructed art schools, ones which have often been less exposed to changes in their economic fortunes due to the retreat of industry, the old buildings tend to retain some kind of public function, even if it has been many decades such art was taught in them. Likewise in the larger centres the presence of a local university or major further education college has also served to keep both the buildings and advanced arts education alive.
It is in the smaller centres in, or near; the major conurbations that the former art schools tend to have been lost to the public. Yet another unfortunate reminder of how the winds of economic change, processes of accumulation and grand top down schemes (whether by public bodies, private developers or both working in tandem) tend to ill serve such places which lack the advantages of size or relative isolation that benefit cities and smaller settlements in rural locations alike.
Leaving the exhibition I was struck by what a rich, albeit tangled and often threatened, legacy the flowering of municipal art schools in the western Midlands has bequeathed us. It is inspiring to think that where localities were once – albeit only for a few generations – able to support such institutions locally, they might once again. Bringing easy access to creativity, culture and accessible arts education back to town centres and the communities that use them. An inspiring legacy for today when commercial and financial imperatives as well as ongoing government cuts seem to conspire to shrink what’s left of the shared public realm in real time. Definitely one to go and see.
The Art Schools of the West Midlands is on at Walsall New Art Gallery until 2nd July 2023