Artlicks Magazine
August 2022
July 2017: I stepped in from the rain and made my way into the foyer of the Library of Birmingham, where I was directed to a queue waiting to ascend the escalators. Rather than wait, I made my way to a staircase behind a pair of fire-exit doors. The smell of pasties wafted from the café as I made my way up a fluorescently lit, concrete staircase to the archives on the fourth floor. I signed in, placed my bags in the locker, and took my seat at a table where a few cardboard boxes were placed. As I flicked through folders comprising the city’s LGBTQ+ heritage, venues including clubs, bars, and community centres became reduced to a seemingly endless supply of meeting minutes, financial records, and annual reports. While this gloss hinted at the struggles and resiliencies of community spaces on the margins, a lack of photographs paired with the knowledge that many of these sites were now demolished, made them feel more ephemeral than the social structures they were.
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Looking to forge a visual understanding of these spaces, I worked with Intervention Architecture and a small number of people who attended Birmingham’s longest-running LGBTQ+ venue, The Nightingale Club, on the exhibition The Club’s Conception (or How the Egg Was Cracked) at Recent Activity in 2019. Using only their memories, they sketched rough and undirected floor plans of the now-demolished structures, before walking me through their sketches as they shared stories, anecdotes, and snippets of gossip. This way of working now forms Queer Space Archive, a social and cultural initiative that hopes to retrace LGBTQ+ venues across Birmingham.
I recently went back to the archives and stumbled across a floor plan of the city’s Gay Community Centre which operated from 1976 to 1979 – one of the first of its kind in England. It was not a blueprint, nor did it include measurements that might suggest a practical use. The original building also remains in Digbeth – resilient on the cusp of Birmingham’s HS2 high-speed rail development where neighbouring structures have been demolished. Now formed of shop fronts and flats, the building stands seemingly unaware of its queer significance. So, what is the role of sketching from memory in retracing space when missing depictions are found, or when a building still stands?
Memory-based drawing is used mostly in the field of criminology studies, where researchers have praised its ability to aid witness accounts. In 2015, researchers Fiona Jack, Elise Martyn, and Rachel Zajac asked participants to view a video of an environment, before splitting them into three groups: the first with a photograph; the second with an existing sketch; and the third with the task of sketching the environment from memory.[1] This study found that giving participants a photograph or existing sketch was just as effective for recalling memory, however, those who sketched provided more accurate details.[2] The physical act of putting pencil to paper is thought to be behind the success of sketching past events or environments accurately, and this ethos carries through to autobiographical studies, where research has credited drawing past personal events with feelings of self-relevance and authorship.[3]
Since 2019, a quarter of Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ venues have closed permanently due to urban redevelopment, accelerated by the difficulties facing the hospitality industry during the coronavirus pandemic. While sketching will not remedy the displacement of Birmingham’s communities for unaffordable residential developments, I like to think of it as a way of recording past venues and using conversations around heritage to try and future proof the existence of spaces by and for queer people.
