Baskerville 2025
About the Project
2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the death of John Baskerville, the Birmingham printer, publisher, craftsperson, inventor, and freethinker.
We and the wonderful colleagues involved in the Baskerville Society and the Small Performances AHRC-funded research project around the Baskerville punches felt this would be the perfect opportunity to celebrate everything John did for print, explore who he really was and debunk some of the myths around him, and find a way to share the brilliant research taking place around his punches! You can find out more about the AHRC-funded research project on the Baskerville Punches website.
To do this, we embarked on our 2025 project which had multiple different strands.
Workshops
Across the start of 2025 we ran a series of workshops with young people in schools across Birmingham using the incredibly progressive themes in Baskerville’s will as a stimulus. Young people answered questions on how they wanted to be remembered, what they wanted for Birmingham today, and whose voices they felt we should be listening to and platforming. They provided some amazing responses, and it became clear that this exploration of Baskerville the man – as opposed to just Baskerville the craftsperson – was something we had to include in our show. As part of our performance, you will see the responses from young people around the room and displayed in word clouds. We felt it was important to extend these questions to our audiences, creating a further dialogue between past and present, old and young, Birmingham and Cambridge!
Thanks must go to the National Literacy Trust Birmingham Hub, for putting us in touch with such brilliant schools across Birmingham and helping make this possible.
Live Briefs
The responses from the schools are shared with audiences in a way that takes on board suggestions from postgraduate Digital Media and Creative Industries students at the University of Birmingham who worked on a live brief we set them as part of one of their modules. We asked these students to investigate ways that we could build an interactive exhibit around the above questions and our school student responses. Huge thanks to all the students who took part in this. Thanks must also go to undergraduate Digital Media and Communications students who responded to a separate live brief on ways to market the performances. There were some wonderful, innovative suggestions and it was clear that students took the time and were interested enough to take the initiative to understand the topic.
Student-Made Short Films
Across the spring of 2025 we created a series of short film scripts on the lives of John and Sarah Baskerville for first year students at Birmingham City University on the Digital Film Production programme. Each week, students took on various production roles to direct, film, and edit these eight short films. The films played a huge role in the research and development of our show and there is an opportunity to watch them in the pre- or post-show moments. Thank you to all the students that took part, threw themselves into the scripts, brought their own brilliant ideas and suggestions, and really got into researching and understanding who John and Sarah were.
You can watch these films in our YouTube playlist here.