Updates
Thank you to everyone who has pledged so far. Your support means more than you know, and it is about to work harder. We have switched the campaign to keep-what-you-raise. That means nothing is contingent on hitting our full target: every single pound pledged is kept and goes straight into printing the hardback of What We Carried to Walsall and producing the free digital edition. The honest version of the plan is simple. The more we raise, the more copies we print, and every copy goes free to Walsall libraries and community spaces, including Caldmore Community Garden, Creative Factory, Walsall College, The New Art Gallery and the Local History Centre. This book carries the stories of the South Asian families who came to Walsall and Smethwick's foundries in the 1960s. The Guardian called this work "the Edward Hopper of the Black Country" last month. Now we want it on shelves where those families and their grandchildren can actually find it. The campaign closes at the end of July. If you have been meaning to pledge, now is the moment. And if you have already given, sharing the link is worth just as much. Thank you.
Short summary This is a book about the people who came to Walsall and stayed. Hardback, free digital edition, going out to schools, libraries, and community centres across the town. Built from a multi-year heritage project. Project description For two years, we worked across Walsall recording the people who came here from somewhere else, and the people whose families have been here for generations. Long-settled residents. Recent arrivals. Students at Walsall College. Families in Caldmore, Palfrey, Pleck and The Butts. The project built film sets, made new photographic work, and recorded first-person accounts that don't exist in any archive. That work was funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. It's on the walls at Walsall Art Gallery now. This book is a keepsake. It's how the work goes home with people. What We Carried to Walsall pulls everything the project produced into a single hardback. Photographs. Testimonies. The methodology behind how trust was built across very different communities. Free digital edition lives permanently at reindmig.com. Printed on FSC-certified recycled paper with vegetable inks. Why back it The people in this book handed over the parts they normally don't. The disorientation of arrival. The years of feeling watched. The moment something shifted. Several of the contributors are in their 80s. These accounts don't exist anywhere else, and they won't be recorded twice. The book also gives the people who made it something solid. Walsall College students worked on it. Families gave photographs that had never left a drawer. The publication names every contributor and documents the method. It sits on a shelf when the exhibition comes down. That's what we're asking you to fund. The thing that stays. Please do support us on this journey!
Imagine. Create. Fund. Proud to be Walsall.
