Our Lives, Our Stories launched at Nortons in Digbeth on Thursday 12 February 2026. Social historian Carl Chinn describes it as a living archive – built around personal histories from Birmingham, the Black Country and beyond.
Some of the most important parts of Birmingham’s story were never written down. Not because they were unimportant, but because they looked ordinary at the time. The routines, the graft, the family life, the setbacks, the humour. The things that shape a place from the ground up.
That is what Our Lives, Our Stories is trying to hold onto.
The podcast launched at Nortons in Digbeth on Thursday 12 February 2026, with guests gathering to mark the start of a project Carl Chinn describes as a living archive for the region.
Ordinary lives, taken seriously
The principle behind the series is simple: the record should not only be filled with the loudest voices or the most visible names.
“It’s really important that we grab hold of people whose stories are not normally recorded.”
Recognisable figures will always draw interest. People listen to names they already know. But the aim here is wider than that.
“Every person has a story to tell.” Chinn also pointed to the “democratisation of history”, and the belief that history should be “egalitarian”.
It is an idea that runs quietly through the whole project. Not polishing a version of the region. Recording it, as it is, in all its variety.
What these episodes are meant to capture
Chinn set out an ambition to collect stories across Birmingham and the Black Country, with the option to reach further afield over time.
The scope is grounded, and deliberately broad: “stories about work… the streets… housing… family… sports… music… everybody’s lives.”
It is a list that makes sense to anyone who knows the West Midlands. This is a region shaped by industry, movement, neighbourhood identity, and family networks. The podcast is built to preserve those everyday forces, through the people who live with them.
When memories are complicated
Personal history rarely arrives neat. People carry emotion alongside detail. Two people can recall the same moment differently.
“Memories can be very complicated,” Chinn noted. In oral history, “somebody’s got a memory that’s very different to somebody else’s of the same events”.
For Chinn, that difference is part of the work. It “doesn’t invalidate that memory”. Instead, it becomes something to assess and understand, including why a memory might differ.
That matters because so much everyday life was never formally recorded in the first place. For many families and communities, what survives is what people can still describe, still place, still feel.
Birmingham, as locals recognise it
Chinn also talked about how Birmingham and the wider West Midlands are often viewed from the outside.
“The problem we have… is that outsiders tend to just drive through. They pass us, they don’t stop.” He also argued that negative stereotypes are repeated “on the television and through the media”.
Then came a line that landed as both pride and reminder: “There are many peoples in Birmingham. But there is only one Birmingham.”
It fits the podcast’s wider purpose. If a place wants to be understood properly, it needs a record that reflects its full human reality – not just the parts that fit a storyline.
A project made for the long view
Thinking decades ahead, Chinn’s hope is that listeners will gain “a more rounded appreciation” of “the lives of a wide variety of people in Birmingham, in the West Midlands”.
That is what a real archive does. It keeps the detail that usually gets lost: how people lived, what shaped them, what they were proud of, what they endured, what they laughed about, and what changed around them.
If Our Lives, Our Stories stays true to that promise, it will not just document the region’s past. It will preserve its human texture – while the people who can tell it are still here.
