We will be joined by Matthew Vaughan of Donald Insall Associates, one of the world’s leading specialist architectural firms focused on the care, repair, adaptation and conservation of historic buildings. Established over 60 years ago the practice has pioneered a creative approach to conservation, centred on the belief that change is continuous and buildings are, in effect, ‘alive’.

This play is frequently celebrated as a stirringly patriotic call to arms. It is quoted at moments of national crisis and on the rugby field. However, Shakespeare’s play is more complex.

Do you want to write, but find it hard to get started or build momentum? Maybe your writing has fallen flat and your ideas feel tired, or you've got so many demands on your time and energy that writing feels like a luxury you can't afford. Wherever you're at, this course can help. Each week we'll explore a different way into writing through practical, playful experiments. You'll learn how to dismantle blocks to creativity, how to keep feeding your imagination, how to bring new life into your writing, and how to keep your writing going.

In this course, you’ll explore techniques that help you create compelling characters, believable settings and convincing dialogue. We’ll look at different ways of plotting, balancing detail and description, and playing with viewpoint to create different effects. We’ll consider how other writers create convincing narratives and apply what we learn to our own writing. Our classes are friendly and supportive, and we welcome new and more established writers.

BMI Scientist in Residence Dr James Dawson looks at the representation of comets in art, backed up with a sprinkling of science.

Everyone has a story worth telling. Whether you want to share yours with friends, family or a wider audience, this course helps you to capture the essence of important moments in your life. You’ll develop key writing skills, such as how to structure your stories and create vivid details. No previous writing experience necessary.

What is generally judged to be Alexandre Dumas’s greatest novel has generated a wide range of screen versions. Do the vicissitudes suffered by Edmond Dantes justify the theatricality of his actions? However much we may sympathise with his desire for revenge, there are challenging moral questions to be confronted.

In her day, Anna Mary Howitt was an artist, author and activist who was fully immersed in her cultural and social milieu. Identified by Marsh and Nunn as ‘the nearest thing to a female Pre-Raphaelite, tout court', Howitt established herself as among the great artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

In structuring his novel around one woman with three men wooing her, Hardy chooses symbolic names; his heroine Bathsheba is encircled by Gabriel Oak, Sergeant Troy and William Boldwood.

Join us as Margaret shows us how to create fabric strawberries to gift, use as packages for presents or to as Christmas tree decorations.

Despite their titles these two plays are individually complete. Both are tightly constructed and richly layered.

What was Chartism, how did it manifest in the Midlands, and why is it still worth talking about now?

Robert’s talk will encompass the casual ball play of ancient times through to the emergence of organised games such as royal tennis and its equivalents around Europe. He will tell of the popularity of rackets, a Victorian game for everyman and the arrival, in 1874, of lawn tennis in the form of Walter Wingfield’s Sphairistike and Gem and Perera’s Pelota.

We will be visiting Wolverhampton Art Gallery to see the Evelyn De Morgan exhibition, a rare opportunity to see the work of the female Pre-Raphaelite artist. Meet at the café at the Art Gallery at 11am.

Anne Amison was a volunteer guide in St Mark’s Basilica for a number of years. Her talk will share some of the insights gained from learning about this magnificent building, and explore the eastern influences on its architecture, the glorious mosaics, its impact on choral music

These plays, performed just one year apart, juxtapose different worlds.

BMI Artist-in-Residence Peter Tinkler is going to give a demonstration on the basic principles of colour theory, via the split-primary system of colour mixing. 

He is going to expand the range of primary colours from 3 to 6 and show how this is a much better way of learning the core principles of mixing colours.  Whilst also talk about the origins of some of our favourite pigments, and as you'll see, they have a rather 'colourful' past.

To accompany the Picture Show exhibition, Birmingham author, playwright and lifelong Erdington resident Patrick Hayes will lead an interactive talk considering the near history of Erdington from 1950-1980.

Join Sharon for another inspiring creative writing workshop. Please bring paper and pens.

This talk will concentrate on Joseph Chamberlain’s unique achievement in Birmingham. By turns he was a hugely successful businessman, a reforming educator – of children, working men and students – a charismatic, dynamic municipal leader, and the founder of a formidable and irresistible political base in Birmingham, while making it ‘the best governed city in the world.

Considered by many to be Wilkie Collins’ best novel, The Woman in White, was first published in serial form (1859-60)

Do you want to write, but find it hard to get started or build momentum? Maybe your writing has fallen flat and your ideas feel tired, or you've got so many demands on your time and energy that writing feels like a luxury you can't afford. Wherever you're at, this course can help

Britain’s landscape contains many stone circles, yet their original purpose remains mysterious despite extensive archaeological investigation, and perhaps it is their obscurity which makes them so fascinating.

Do we control our technologies or do our technologies control us? Is the invention of progress also the invention of disaster? In this talk Dr Brian Sudlow (Aston University) will consider how French intellectuals in the interwar period quarrelled about the merits of technology and its effects on western civilisation

Small Performances: investigating the typographic punches of John Baskerville (1707-75) through heritage science and practice-based research.

'Transatlantic Thoughts: Winston Churchill, Anglo-America and the 'Special Relationship' Revisited'

An Address by the 168th President of The Birmingham & Midland Institute, Professor Sir David Cannadine

This talk will re-evaluate an unjustly forgotten Birmingham titan. Neville Chamberlain was Britain’s most creative social reformer between 1910 and 1940, the country’s leading authority on Housing, the Poor Law, Health and Local Government.