Bournville Modern Gazetteer Exhibition and Publication

Brief outline

Students and staff from the schools of art and architecture will work in partnership with the Bournville Village Trust and the new Library of Birmingham on the production of an exhibition and publication, which will take place at the Bournville Village in early spring 2014.

Students will rigorously research the site and question its origins, how it has functioned, what it has become, and how it is viewed as a precursor to twentieth century models of urban form. They will present new insights interpreting the site and otherwise inaccessible archival material, which will be presented to the public via an exhibition, publication and associated events.

I applied to be a part of the Bournville project and was chosen to be involved in the publication process, working along side An Endless Supply and two other BCU students from Art and Design and Architecture. I was really excited to be involved and to gain experience with professionals especially as I had never produced any kind of publication before.

Students across BCU including myself had already completed a project based around Bournville. We had various research and outcomes with a broad range of Art and Architectural work. These will form the structure and theme of the exhibition.

We set up an initial meeting to determine...

• A theme.
• Student work that is suitable for the theme/strong enough for the exhibition.
• Research into archive material 
• Title of exhibition and publication
• Possibilities of where we will exhibit 

After analysing student work and through our own research we decided that the theme would be a survey. A survey of Bournville and a survey of works in relation to Bournville.

We narrowed down works we liked and the fit into the exhibition and also made a further list of things we needed access to

1.

• Alisha's VIDEO, Blog
• Numan - Doors
• David - Point cloud
• Ross - Survey
• Sarah - The Mirror. Blog
• Clair - Declined. Blog
• Ella - women's rights. Blog
• Jess - Gypsophelia. Blog
• Isla - Essay.

2.

• Contact Clair Walton and find out if the original suggestion box exist.
• Find the archive photo of the woman who won the suggestion box 
• Get Alisha's poem in text.
• Ross survey - needs editing.
• Contact Isla for her essay.
• Contact Sarah and ask if she has the original text that she used for the mirror (digital)
• Jess photogram copies

We created an online word document to each suggest possibilities of names for the exhibition and publication.

These included:

• Significant Features
• Abstract Measures
• Audit
• Everyone Finds Something to Like
• A Great Deal to Like
• Model
• Model Village
• ‘120 acres’ (amount of land George Cadbury bought around the factory in 1893) 
• or ‘1000 acres’ (what Bournville is today)
• The Model Estate
• Industrial Tranquility
• Without Hostility
• Pleasant Surroundings
• Raison D’etre
• The Factory in a Garden
• “Suggestion Box”
• Work & Play
• 1½ 
• Bournville Experiment ( Mentioned in Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary by Richard C.S. Trahair)
• Site Survey
• Observations on an Archive
• Surveying the Surroundings
• How it was
• ‘A Model Village’
• Site specific
• Oberving the observed
• cross-examination

.

The majority vote meant that 'Significant Features' would be the title which suits the content perfectly.

Unfortunately we do not yet have copies of the works we would like to include digitally so I am unable to show examples
.
Further research lead us to look at the Bournville Works Magazines. These were published each year with a wide variety of content including events, sports results, photography competitions and more. I particularly enjoyed reading these in the previous project as they are very humorous in content.
We decided to take inspiration from these and create our publication in the same style as some of the later 60's copies that began to use colour.

We will use a black and white image of one of the works we would like to include to create a title page. We will present this on a brightly coloured background as in the BWM.

The final things to do are to collate the works digitally and to create an order for them to be presented in the publication. Myself and Valda are to put together a brief introduction to be published on the first page of the publication. We aim to print the publication in the first week of June and the exhibition will be held in the International Project Space in Bournville along with other events to be organised.

I have really enjoyed this process, it is unlike anything I have done before. I have enjoyed working with other students especially from other courses to find out the way in which they do things and also working with Robin from An Endless Supply who is experienced in producing things graphically who I have learnt a lot from.

(15 hours)