ABSTRACT
School buildings hold many secrets. They are repositories of thousands of memories of events that took place in them. They hold within their walls the spaces in which learning happens. Birmingham, like other major cities in the United Kingdom, is full of such buildings and memories. Schools are everywhere in the cityscape, still operating as schools or occupied by new learning agencies or even commercial enterprises (see Figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3). Sometimes they are broken and abandoned to the elements; sometimes they have been transformed into expensive apartments (see Harwood 2010). They are or have been little beacons in their areas, pulling people in everyday and accumulating generations of meaning. Yet because they are so commonplace, these sites of memory are often invisible.
