I had 40 minutes between trains at New Street on Wednesday morning so went to Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. It's a fairly short walk away in Chamberlain Square. I seriously whizzed round.
The building closed for a humungous refit in March 2020, taking advantage of grant money and the pandemic. It mostly reopened in October 2024 although most of the ground floor is still out of bounds. There is currently a paid-for exhibition downstairs in the Gas Hall, although the lady on the front desk wasn't busy and assumed I wasn't going in before she told me it was £9.
It's all quite steppy to get in at the moment, arriving in The Round Room to face a diverse display called One Fresh Take. I spotted a Bridget Riley, some Victorian penguins, an Epstein winged bronze and Cold War Steve's excellent Benny's Babbies in which the Crossroads handyman peers out from behind the Bullring. The overbridge crossing Edmund Street is in all-black mode, lined by an over-running all-black Ozzy Osbourne retrospective brightened with gold discs and GQ awards, which continues to bring in crowds who wouldn't normally be seen in a gallery. Good start.
Wild City is new with perhaps too much 'ooh look a pigeon', but I'm neither a child nor a family so very much not target audience. The Art Gallery rooms are much better with the city's renowned collection of Pre-Raphaelites and much graceful brushwork displayed in well-spaced gold frames. If gold's your thing then walk right to the back to see the Staffordshire Hoard, a record-breakingly large stash hoard of Anglo-Saxon metalwork uncovered in a field near Lichfield in 2009. It dazzled, but I did not have time to be talked to at length by its curators.
Aha there's an upstairs, this being Birmingham: Its people, Its history. Most city museums have something similar, a run-through civic history from prehistoric times to the modern day, just not always on this scale. But being Birmingham it only really takes off in the 18th century with the Midlands Enlightenment, then majors on all kinds of tradesmanship, expanding suburbs and the obligatory WW2 bit. I found the Elephant Room on the way out with its motley ethnography but decided to skip the gift shop, which is annoying because on the other side of that was the Industrial Gallery with its giant HP Sauce sign and I totally missed all that. Definitely something to return to. And I'll tell you tomorrow what I did with my 60 minutes between trains at New Street on Wednesday evening.
