What We Carried to Walsall

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!