A new exhibition, with works by veteran documentary photographer Nick Hedges, will be on display at National Trust’s Birmingham Back to Backs this month. The archive images uncover some of the shocking realities of living conditions in Birmingham in the 60s and 70s and displays them at the last remaining court of back to backs in the city.
Born on the outskirts of Birmingham, Hedges studied at Birmingham College of Art from 1965 to 1968 – for his final project he worked with Birmingham Housing Trust on an exhibition about the city’s poorly housed. After graduating, Nick was employed as a photographer and researcher by housing and homelessness charity, Shelter. Nick’s ‘slum clearage’ photography for Shelter campaigns during the late 60s and early 70s highlighted the eye-opening reality of housing for some. The images produced for Shelter served towards a broader catalyst for change, increasing public awareness and debate around housing rights.
From 28 March, visitors will have the chance to view both the Shelter campaign images he captured between 1968-1972, as well as the Birmingham Housing Trust images Hedges took as a student. Through a partnership with the Library of Birmingham, both original prints and reproductions are on show for visitors to see until September 2025.
Commenting on his body of work, and the new exhibition, photographer Nick Hedges says:
“As a young photographer, I was shocked and appalled at the conditions that families were forced to live in. Houses with no bathrooms, shared outside loos, houses suffering from dampness, crumbling decaying interiors. Families were trapped with no hope or sense of when they might be moved. The housing trust was able to rehouse a few of the thousands, but the housing crisis covered every major city in Britain. For different reasons that crisis still exists today.
“These images are part of people’s history, and interpreting our past can help us understand our present and predict our future. Which is why I’m happy to be working with the Birmingham Back to Backs to share these images with their visitors.”
Commenting on the exhibition, Isobel Grove, Senior Programming and Partnerships Officer at Birmingham Back to Backs, said:
“The Birmingham Back to Backs represent working-class living conditions in the city from 1840 onwards. This exhibition helps build this picture for visitors, showing the realities and conditions of life for some in the late 1960s, when just a handful of back-to-backs across Birmingham were still inhabited.
“Nick not only has a strong personal and professional connection to Birmingham but has seen first-hand how life was for the last back-to-back residents in the city. It was clear how important it was for us to share his work, which is a vital part of Birmingham’s social housing history, at Back to Backs, the last surviving example of some of the homes Nick was invited into to photograph and share.”
In 2004, Nick donated his entire collection of Shelter negatives, contact sheets, and prints to The Library, Birmingham.
The Library of Birmingham’s Head of Archives, Peter Dore, said:
“Nick Hedges’ incredibly poignant photographs are some of the most striking images in the Library of Birmingham’s vast photography archives. They tell an important part of the story of the housing and people of the city. It’s fantastic to be working with the Back to Backs on an exhibition that will bring these powerful images to new and wider audiences.”
The exhibition opens Friday 28 March and runs until the end of September 2025. It’s free to enter and visitors don’t need to book a tour of the Back to Backs to go into the exhibition space.
Viewing times are Tuesday and Wednesday 1pm – 5pm, Thursday to Saturday 10am – 5pm and Sundays 10:30am – 5pm. The entrance to the exhibition space is through the second-hand bookshop, located on Hurst Street.