As the evenings turn frosty and the longest night of the year approaches, we invite you to join us in warming your hands by the heat of the hearth! Join us for a ghost story writing workshop led by Black Country artist Fred Hubble, which will take place across a tour of some of West Brom’s finest Public Houses containing working fireplaces. During the workshop we’ll explore the legacies of the ever-rare pub fireplace, the implications of its disappearance, tied up in climate change, the commercialisation of pubs and gentrification.
The public house as a site exists as one of the last places where people publicly engage with log fires. This is in part due to the move towards a diminishing presence of hearths in people’s homes. There is a split between those who favour to not use wood burning stoves, as well as urban initiatives to cut fireplace usage in cities in favour of less polluting methods of heating, whereas in more rural settings fireplace use continues. The use of fireplaces in peoples homes has paradoxically returned, where infrastructure fails as a result of more severe storms the fireplace is a continuous refuge for heating homes and providing comfort in uncertain times.
The pub fireplace is a place of gathering, of temporary community, of warmth for those who may struggle to afford to heat their own houses. The fireplace in winter is a place for stories to be told, ghost stories are shared, remembered, re-told, made up on the spot. In Sandwell and beyond many pubs are losing their fireplaces through clean air legislation, a shift towards burning gas instead, redundancy through centrally heated buildings, through health and safety regulations. There is something of the ghost of fires past in the pub, and something lost in the losing of the log fire as a gathering space.
For the workshop we walked between three West Brom pubs; The Crown and Cushion, The Horse and Jockey, and The Old Hop Pole. Within these pubs there was an opportunity to have a drink (non-alcoholic or otherwise) and a seat by the fires we found. We discussed the history of the ghost story and its relationship to winter-time, from which we all composed ghost stories of our own. Each person in the workshop reflected on whatever kind of ghosts they wanted, ghosts of climate, of culture, of loss or completely speculative. We moved between three pubs following a classic story structure. The participants were encouraged to think about their stories also on the walks between pubs. That being said the stories constructed were often not linear at all.