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Heritage Action Zone - Peter Donnelly Photographer – Images of Brierley Hill & Round Oak Steel 1960’s

Brierley Hill High Street Heritage Action Zone

The High Streets Heritage Action Zones is a Government funded project aimed at helping the recovery of local high streets.

The project ran from 2020 to 2024 and focused on the Brierley Hill High Street Conservation Area and a series of building projects (repair, architectural reinstatement and the bringing of vacant property back onto use) and public realm improvements to the gateways into the Conservation Area (around the Brierley Hill Civic Hall and the Grade II listed Brierley Hill War Memorial).
 
Running alongside the project there was a cultural programme led by Brierley Hill Community Forum and a programme of activities designed to engage with the local community.
 

Peter Donnelly – Images of Brierley Hill from the 1960’s



Peter Donnelly was a renowned and highly awarded documentary photographer and poet who recorded the decline of industrial production and social change in the Black County during the 1960’s and 1970’s. With kind permission of his son, Simon Donnelly, we have gathered together a number of images and poems to create a pop-up display, part of the cultural programme led by Brierley Hill Community Forum designed to engage with the local community.

"As If It Were Yesterday" softback book 153 pages photographs and poetry including all from this series on Brierley Hill & Round Oak - available only on Amazon

"As If It Were Yesterday" softback book 153 pages photographs and poetry available only on Amazon
Birmingham & The Black Country Remembered 1962 - 1965

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Were-Yesterday-Birmingham-Photographs-Remembered/dp/1704391431

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Location: Brierley Hill, UK

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The Telegraph

Peter Donnelly's prize-winning essay offers a brilliant example of how local, and often unprepossessing, backgrounds can provide the material for an outstanding colour story. All his photographs were taken within a few miles of his home in Birmingham, Brierley Hill, at Blackheath, Bilston and Cradley Heath. He took them over a period of several months while on weekend walks along the deserted banks of the local canals. "Most evenings I never met a soul," Mr Donnelly recalls. "There was an air of isolation, and often desolation, over the whole scene, and this is what I have tried to capture in my photographs." The camera used was a Pentakon F and the film Agfa and Kodachrome.
by Dr Carl Chinn MBE
Peter Donnelly was born in Birmingham, educated at Corpus Christi junior school, Stechford and later at the holy rosary, Saltley. While at the Holy Rosary he took and passed a drawing examination for Moseley school of art at which he spent several years tuning his artistic talent.

On leaving the art school he joined Birmingham printers, Sam Currier & Son in brook street, St Pauls square, as an apprentice commercial artist. After completing his apprenticeship he left Sam Currier and worked at various printers and advertising agencies gaining valuable experience before starting with his working associate Bob Burns (typographer). Donnelly Burns Graphic Design studio was in Chapel Street, Lye before moving to larger premises in Cradley heath then Harborne.

Before starting the business Peter entered and won the Sunday Telegraph national photographic competition. He submitted an essay of photographs illustrating the demise of the Birmingham and Black Country canals with fellow photographer Norman Fletcher. To Peter and Norman, Midlands photographers and photographic societies seemingly had ignored the once great industrial arena that surrounded their everyday lives.

What an arena! what powerful exiting subjects for the camera; neglected canals, weed and web woven towpaths, old worn out narrow boats – redundant and half submerged in silted murky brown waters; steam trains rattling, hissing and bumping their waggons into line and the rail men who worked the line at that time.

Old foundries, run down factories and scrapyards – the industrial flotsam of a once great manufacturing region. Many six o’clock early morning starts were walked and many miles covered by Peter and his camera.

Now over 60 years later, photographs taken during those early excursions are being published - looking back at the time, long before the surge of change and reconstruction 1962 - 1965