Children's Lives City Trail:

This trail explores sites of significance for the history of children in central Birmingham. Running from Steelhouse Lane to Five Ways, it highlights a few of the many personal and institutional stories which illuminate how the care of poor children changed from the 18th century onwards. Photographs and documents from the Library of Birmingham’s archive collections also bring to life the experiences of children’s lives in the past.

Click here for a PDF of the City Trail (please note this can take from a second to a minute to load; dependent upon your connection speed).

Reading:

Carol Adams, Ordinary Lives a Hundred Years Ago (1982)

Mike Brown, Wartime Childhood (2009)

John Burnett (ed), Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (1982)

Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives

Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (1967)

Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500 (2005)

Hugh Cunningham, The Invention of Childhood (2006)

Anna Davin, Growing up Poor. Home, School and Street in London 1870-1914 (1996)

Carol Dyehouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (1981)

Julia Eccleshare (ed), 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up

Anthony Fletcher, Growing up in England. The Experience of Childhood, 1600-1914 (2010)

Juliet Gardiner, The Children's War (2005)

Harry Hendrick, Child Welfare (2003)

Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society 1880-1990 (1997)

English Heritage, Childhood (2005)

Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (2001)

Eric Hopkins, Childhood Transformed: Working-Class Children in Nineteenth Century England (1994)

Pamela Horn, The Edwardian and Victorian School Child (1989)

Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010)

Stephen Humphries, Hooligan's or Rebels? An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and Youth 1889-1939 (1981)

Stephen Humphries and Pamela Gordon, A Labour of Love: the Experience of Parenthood in Britain 1900-1950 (1993)

Roger Kershaw and Janet Sacks, New Lives for Old. The story of Britain's Child Migrants (2008)

Ioan and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children (1959)

Ioan and Peter Opie, Children's Games in Street and Playground (1969)

Roy Parker, Uprooted. The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867-1917 (2008)

Janet Sacks, Victorian Childhood (2011)

Shirlee Swain and Margot Hillel, Child, Nation, Race and Empire (2010)

Thea Thompson (ed), Edwardian Childhoods (1981)

James Walvin, A Child's World. A Social History of English Childhood 1800-1914 (1982)

John Welshman, Churchill's Children (2010)

Nicholas Whittaker, Toys Were Us (2001)

 

Online:

www.museumofchildhood.org.uk - website of the V&A Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green, London with information about their exhibitions programmes, collections and the history of childhood generally.
 
www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk - website of the London Foundling Hospital.

www.hharp.org - searchable database of records from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the Evelina Hospital London, the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow, with additional useful information about children's hospitals and health.

www.childhistory.org - history of childhood in the USA.

www.otherpeopleschildren.org.uk - an oral history of theraputic residential childcare c.1930-c.1980 from the Planned Environment Therapy Trust.