People and Parliament: Connecting with Communities launch event
14 September 2010 (updated on 14 September 2010)
The People and Parliament: Connecting with Communities project celebrates its latest collaboration with community groups in Birmingham today, investigating the story of the right to vote.
Launch event
An event to launch a Right to Vote city trail leaflet will be held at the Central Library Theatre in Chamberlain Square, Birmingham at 1pm on Tuesday 14 September. Two films made by community groups will also be screened.
Local groups worked with Birmingham Archives and Heritage, Parliamentary Archives and Parliamentary Outreach to investigate Birmingham's contribution to the fight for the right to vote.
Community research
Over the last six months three Birmingham based community groups, including Year 8 and 9 students from Four Dwellings High School, Quinton, adults from the Northfield Library Reading Group and a young people’s group from Kingstanding, have undertaken research at the Archives in the Birmingham's Central Library and at the Parliamentary Archives at the Houses of Parliament.
Their research focused on key Birmingham figures instrumental in campaigns to extend voting rights in the 19th and 20th centuries, including Thomas Attwood, born in Halesowen in 1783, founder of the Birmingham Political Union and the city's first MP.
The activities of suffragettes in Birmingham in the early 1900s and their burning down of Northfield Library in 1914 inspired the student group to make a film about the Birmingham suffragettes.
People and Parliament: Connecting with Communities
The Right to Vote is part of a project called People and Parliament: Connecting with Communities which is run by the Parliamentary Archives and Parliamentary Outreach.
The project aims to explore the ways in which Parliament has affected communities and how people have influenced Parliament by using documentary material held at Westminster and in the regions.