Back to Backs

My interest in working-class museums took me to The Birmingham Back to Backs, where I was kindly allowed to sit and draw, my back against the door in the small upper rooms. The Back to Backs are a National Trust property. They are the last remaining example of ‘back-to-back’ homes built for poor, working-class people in the UK, with the houses at the rear generally of poorer quality than the front.

In the Birmingham Back to Backs the two properties facing the backyard form the substance of the museum. Each room has been restored to summon real families who lived in the properties. Through chronologically staged restorations, the museum takes us from the houses’ origins in 1789 to the 1970s. In doing so the museum includes the diverse histories of the inhabitants, including Jewish and Caribbean residents, their domestic lives and work. Historic ‘sacrificial’ items have been included across the space for visitors to physically engage.

In a top floor room, solid floorboards and soot-stained plaster reveal the eighteenth-century house. Simultaneously, reconstructive elements bring imagination into play. Three single beds and a workbench summon the cramped live/work conditions of an inter-generational adult family. Intricate tools on the workbench, and their position by the window, convey the family’s utilitarian use of light. Their reliance on natural light recalls the extractive nature of home-based ‘cottage’ industries – their sweated labour wringing the value out of sunlight.  

Whilst drawing the space, I become aware of the smallness of the opportunities it offered. The scope of the occupants’ daily lives captured from a single vantage point, made me feel like Goldilocks spying on the bears.

Clothes are laid out on the beds for visitors to try on. The heavy knitted socks elicit humour and corporeal connections: the beds sink down and feet touch the floor. The visitors’ relationships with these objects made me wonder about the inhabitants’ possessions. Were the rooms filled to the corners, or as sparse as this memory of them?

In the other house, a heavier bed from a later period holds a wood handled skipping rope and a doll made from the sole of a shoe. The toys generate thoughts about my father’s family living in London during the same period. In the absence of detailed knowledge of economically disadvantaged people’s lives, the common-place children’s items elicit shared nostalgia. 

Despite knowing the toys are recent additions, when I move them to better draw them, I can feel their pull: the doll smiling from under her ribbon and the skipping rope handles bound like lovers. Touch is singularly important in this museum.