At her last visit, Gina gave us a talk on her childhood in Birmingham Back to Backs. In the Swinging Sixties, Great Britain led the world in fashion and music.

The Seventies were a sadder decade. Much of the old city disappeared under the bulldozers and new council estates sprang up. The new Central Library exemplified this style of Brutalist architecture in a grey, concrete city. The decade was marked by strikes and strife, change and conflict.

The new council estates offered higher standards of living to the former inhabitants of the Back to Backs. Gina experienced not only the trials and tribulations of being a teenager, but also the delights of youth clubs, coffee bars, and Birmingham City Centre.

Birmingham survived this troubled decade and came out of it with her indomitable spirit intact. This is the story of one family during that decade. It is also Birmingham’s story. And it may also be your story.

Speaker biography

Gina grew up in the 1960s, a time when Birmingham was known as The Workshop of the World, and the City of a Thousand and One Trades. In many ways, the Sixties were a Golden Age: the fashions, the politics, the music, the hairstyles, the World Cup. But there was tragedy too: thalidomide, accidents in factories, poverty, a heavily polluted city.

Gina passed the Eleven Plus in 1968, and went to a King Edward’s Grammar School. From there, she went to University thanks to the grants system, the first of her family to do so, and became a teacher and librarian for Birmingham and Sandwell.

When she retired, she looked around for books to read on growing up in a working class community in Birmingham in the 1960s, and could find very little. “And so I decided to write my own,” she says.

The Girl from Guildford St, a memoir, was published by Brewin Books in 2018, and Tales of Guildford St, a family saga, was published in 2020. The author calls them “love letters to Birmingham and her people, a tribute to a time that is gone.”

The author’s latest book, A Grammar School Girl, takes up the story from 1968, when her family moved to a new Council estate, which offered higher standards of living, and when she began to attend King Edward’s Grammar School, Handsworth.   From here, she progressed to University, the first in her family to do so, thanks to a Council grant, and later worked for forty years as a teacher and librarian.

More Meetings ...