Cathy Come Home + Housing Problems
Cathy Come Home + Housing Problems
Wednesday 18th September, 2024
Timings for the evening:
18:30: entry to the exhibition and ground floor of the back-to-back houses
19:45: Housing Problems
20:15: Cathy Come Home
The evening ends at 21.30.
The Birmingham Back to Backs have been telling the stories of working-class housing and people in Birmingham for the last 20 years.
As part of the Moving Stories exhibition programme, the Back to Backs are hosting a special outdoor screening in the courtyard, showing two influential films about housing.
Directed by Ken Loach and produced by local boy Tony Garnett, Cathy Come Home is a BBC TV play about a young family living with the threat of being thrown out on the street. Partly filmed in back-to-back housing in Hockley, it was instrumental at the time in raising consciousness about homelessness.
Housing Problems is a short documentary made with Stepney residents in 1935. The residents were living in poor conditions and in the process of being rehoused, and the film broke new ground as a documentary sharing the voices of 'ordinary' people.
Moving Stories is an exhibition by Place Prospectors at Birmingham Back to Backs. It explores the next chapter in Birmingham's social housing story, featuring work made by Jayne Murray in collaboration with residents being rehomed from tower blocks in Druids Heath as part of a regeneration programme by Birmingham City Council.
