Afro Housing Self Build Scheme

From the collection of

MACE is the strategic lead organisation for screen heritage for the East and West Midlands regions. An independent charity based at University of Lincoln, MACE preserves and makes accessible a collection of more than 100,000 historic moving images representative of the diverse cultures and histories of communities throughout the heart of England from the Lincolnshire coast to the Welsh border.

Afro Housing Self Build Scheme (ATV Today)

Media Archive for Central England
Small Heath
1974-11-28
Sound
5m

New houses for a new future? A self build housing project for Afro Caribbeans is introduced in Birmingham.

Ben Leigh of the Afro Caribbean Association for Economic and Social Security tells Wendy Jones about a unique scheme in Small Heath, Birmingham where a group of young black families have built their own homes from the ground up. Noel Mullings is amongst those who have sacrificed every spare moment to set up his family for the future. For most of us, who will avoid DIY at all costs, the thought of building a house in your spare time is a mind boggling prospect.

Black Lives

Portraits of public and private lives against the shifting social climate of 20th century Britain.

Black communities, like many Global majority groups, have long been ill-served by a mainstream British media accustomed to reflecting predominantly white, middle-class lives - a problem entrenched in the second half of the 20th century with the rise of television. Yet a rich tapestry of work from across the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, film and TV, made for (though not always by) black people, does exist. This selection contains many surprises – some joyous, some sobering, some heartbreaking – and highlights the often painfully slow progress in addressing negative representations and stereotypes on screen. Impassioned and sometimes violent dispatches from the front line in the fight for racial equality can be found here, but so too can records of progress: in the pioneers breaking new ground in culture, politics and sport, and in the more mundane glimpses of everyday life. And this story is not just London’s story: the selection takes a journey around Britain, to a Nigerian wedding in 1960s Cornwall, an ‘African village’ in Essex and a Caribbean restaurant opening in West Bromwich; Newcastle