Echoes of Birmingham: A Glimpse into 1967’s Urban Wastelands

June 18, 2025

Echoes of Birmingham: A Glimpse into 1967’s Urban Wastelands

Birmingham 1967: Life in the Wastelands

In this powerful photograph from 1967, recently scanned from an original print, we’re transported to the derelict streets and wastelands of post-industrial Birmingham. The image captures the raw reality of life in the inner city during a time of widespread social and structural change. Crumbling brickwork, graffiti-stained walls, and abandoned buildings set the stage, while a young boy in motion injects fleeting energy into an otherwise desolate landscape. Taken in the heart of Birmingham, this photograph serves as both a historical document and an emotional time capsule—reflecting the gritty beauty, resilience, and evolving identity of the West Midlands during the late 1960s. A poignant reminder of how far the city and the Black Country have come, and how these forgotten corners still shape the cultural memory of our region today.

A Rare Glimpse into the Post-War Streets of the West Midlands

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Were-Yesterday-Birmingham-Photographs-Remembered/dp/1704391431

Comments

The Telegraph

Peter Donnelly's prize-winning essay offers a brilliant example of how local, and often unprepossessing, backgrounds can provide the material for an outstanding colour story. All his photographs were taken within a few miles of his home in Birmingham, Brierley Hill, at Blackheath, Bilston and Cradley Heath. He took them over a period of several months while on weekend walks along the deserted banks of the local canals. "Most evenings I never met a soul," Mr Donnelly recalls. "There was an air of isolation, and often desolation, over the whole scene, and this is what I have tried to capture in my photographs." The camera used was a Pentakon F and the film Agfa and Kodachrome.

by Dr Carl Chinn MBE

Peter Donnelly was born in Birmingham, educated at Corpus Christi junior school, Stechford and later at the holy rosary, Saltley. While at the Holy Rosary he took and passed a drawing examination for Moseley school of art at which he spent several years tuning his artistic talent.

On leaving the art school he joined Birmingham printers, Sam Currier & Son in brook street, St Pauls square, as an apprentice commercial artist. After completing his apprenticeship he left Sam Currier and worked at various printers and advertising agencies gaining valuable experience before starting with his working associate Bob Burns (typographer). Donnelly Burns Graphic Design studio was in Chapel Street, Lye before moving to larger premises in Cradley heath then Harborne.

Before starting the business Peter entered and won the Sunday Telegraph national photographic competition. He submitted an essay of photographs illustrating the demise of the Birmingham and Black Country canals with fellow photographer Norman Fletcher. To Peter and Norman, Midlands photographers and photographic societies seemingly had ignored the once great industrial arena that surrounded their everyday lives.

What an arena! what powerful exiting subjects for the camera; neglected canals, weed and web woven towpaths, old worn out narrow boats – redundant and half submerged in silted murky brown waters; steam trains rattling, hissing and bumping their waggons into line and the rail men who worked the line at that time.

Old foundries, run down factories and scrapyards – the industrial flotsam of a once great manufacturing region. Many six o’clock early morning starts were walked and many miles covered by Peter and his camera.

Now over 60 years later, photographs taken during those early excursions are being published - looking back at the time, long before the surge of change and reconstruction 1962 - 1965