If M is for Midlands Art Centre and Margaret… P is for pickaxes and princess.
Archive footage of the building of the original MAC Birmingham in the early 1960s shows young girls wielding pickaxes, spades and wheelbarrows in a community effort to create the city’s finest art centre.
Future history would prove that it was decades ahead of its time.
In scenes filmed less than 20 years after the end of the Second World War, girls and boys alike mucked in together on the muddy Cannon Hill Park site to get the lakeside construction job done.
The aim was to create what its visionary director called a place for the “process of cultural and emotional education.”
(Image: MACE – Media Archive for Central England at University of Lincoln)
But while another ‘M’ – Meghan Markle and husband Harry – have been in the news talking about their divisive decision to leave the Royal Family and Britain behind, Princess Margaret opened the Cannon Hill Trust art…
