My Hometown

I was born and grew up in the outskirts of Birmingham, UK in a place called Castle Bromwich. According to this local history the name Bromwich means “settlement in the broom”, broom being a yellow flowering bush that grew in abundance in the area. Castle was subsequently added to distinguish the settlement from the other bromwiches in the area.

The castle was a 12th century wooden motte and bailey construction to the north of the church. The remains of the motte can still be seen today, between the M6 and the Collector Road and is known locally as “Pimple Hill”. There was an extensive archaeological dig of the “Pimple Site” prior to the construction of the Collector Road in the 1970s. I remember this well as their were rumours of a gold ring being found during the dig.

During World War II, Castle Bromwich aircraft factory, situated on the west side of the Chester Road in Castle Vale, made Spitfires and components for Lancaster bombers, at its peak turning out 320 Spitfires and 20 four-engined Lancaster Bombers each month. Production continued until 1945.

My parents moved to a new estate in Castle Brom’, a short walk away from the old village, in the mid-fifties where my mum lived for the following sixty years (my dad died in 1978).

I was born in 1958 so grew up in the sixties and seventies with my teenage years corresponding to the period 1970 to 1978, a time of lurid wallpaper, silly hairstyles and burly men warming their hands around braziers but fabulous music!

As I have related elsewhere towards the end of the 1970s I became interested in photography and in particular what I now know to be street or social documentary photography largely inspired by this book discovered in the Castle Bromwich library.

After faffing around for a couple of years with a Praktica camera, around 1978 I invested in a Nikkormat FT2 and a couple of half decent lenses and set out to ‘document’ my hometown, Castle Bromwich and its surrounds including Birmingham.

Having recently acquired a film scanner I’ve been rediscovering the images that I made in this period of my photographic journey, a sample of which I have included here.