Stanley Sellers, Vase: Queer modernisms in the Midlands and St Ives

Matthew Bliss

Collection: Birmingham Museums Trust

Keywords: Ceramics, Modernism, Post-war architecture, LGBTQ, St Ives

Prior to the refurbishment of the early 2020s, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s (BMAG) Industrial Gallery was home to an assortment of objects made by Birmingham manufactures, mostly dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These included John Hardman and Co.’s stained glass and fine metalwork downstairs, and ceramics on the upper balcony. Having visited not infrequently as a teenager, I remember the Gallery seeming like an afterthought, something idly passed through en route to the café. When BMAG reopened in 2024, the space was now home to a display titled ‘Made in Birmingham’. It is, to my mind, the most successful part of the refurbished museum. Made in Birmingham, per the museum’s website, sets out to ‘[look] beyond the stereotypes to examine the real Birmingham’ [1]. As an architectural historian, it was particularly heartening to see so much twentieth century architectural salvage (something Birmingham’s planning committees have been all too happy to create more of) ranging from icons like William Bloye’s sign for The Golden Eagle pub (demolished 1984) and the ‘HP’ lettering from the Aston sauce factory (demolished 2007), to more quotidian examples like the yellow plastic seats rescued from a Bull Ring café before its demolition in 2000.

In amongst all this, however, was something that confused me. On the left-hand side of the room as one walks in, almost in the centre of the hall, is a small whitish-blue pot, with bursts of red towards the bottom (fig.1). The interpretation label tells us the following:

Lots of people in Birmingham make things in their spare time as a hobby. Stanley Sellers was an architect who lived and worked in Birmingham. He collected ceramics and began making pottery after he retired.

Stanley was also a member of the Friends of Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, who support our work.

The label accomplishes two things: it frames Sellers as a Brummie, and it serves as an advert for the Friends. I found this object and its label curious because, having researched his life and work in my own time for several months by the time of the reopening, I knew that Sellers’ own pots were among the least consequential things – in the eye of the conventional art historian or curator – he left to BMAG upon his death in 2013.

Sellers was an avid collector of modernist ceramics. In 2015, BMAG dedicated an entire room to his collection in the space between the lifts and the Industrial Gallery balcony. Prominently displayed were 78 pieces by Lucie Rie, Bernard Leach and Joanna Constantinidis, and other notables associated with studio pottery. One display case was dedicated to Sellers’ own work, which showed clear inspiration from the rest of his collection (fig.2). But now, in 2024, none of the celebrity potters are on display; only Sellers, for the fundamental reason that he was from Birmingham and they were not.

Stanley Sellers was an accomplished potter, an underappreciated figure in the spread of modernist architecture in the West Midlands, and a bridging figure between several regional queer scenes. Stanley Sellers the Brummie is therefore only one possible interpretation of his vase and, by extension, the rest of his collection. It is also, not coincidentally, a narrative that is easiest to communicate to a non-expert audience and the one that requires the least amount of investigation into his life and work. I want to outline two other ways in which Sellers’ vase and other parts of his collection can be interpreted: his architectural practice and his sexuality. This is not simply biography for the sake of it; as we shall see, the long arc of Sellers’ life is what, ultimately, led to him creating this vase in the 1990s and its display in 2024.

Sellers and modernist architecture in the West Midlands

If one looks Sellers up online, one would scarcely realise that he was an architect (fig.2). Most traces of his existence are online auction listings (one of which amusingly describes him as ‘an architect and ceramic artist from Birmingham, Alabama’) and discussions of his pottery on the 20^th Century Forum [2]. Sellers was, though, an architect first and foremost. He was born in Small Heath in 1933 to Mel and Frank Sellers, the latter a toolsetter at Fisher and Ludlow, and went on to study at the Birmingham School of Architecture in 1950. Upon graduating in 1955, he joined the Coventry Architects’ Department, which had risen to national prominence in the preceding ten years under the leadership of Donald Gibson, a key figure in the city’s post-war reconstruction. Around 1960, Sellers was hired by the firm of James A. ‘Jim’ Roberts, Birmingham’s leading commercial architect of the 1960s. Roberts had taught practical ‘live projects’ at the School of Architecture in the 1950s, in which student designs would actually be built and used on sites in the region.

It was while at Roberts’ firm – headquartered on the top floors of the Roberts-designed Rotunda high-rise – that Sellers would design his most notable buildings. He was responsible for much of Scala House (1964), a six-storey office block appended to the soon-to-be-demolished Ringway Centre and named after the world-class cinema in its basement. He also designed the Mander Centre in Wolverhampton (1968), a high-quality shopping centre now refurbished beyond recognition; and in the mid-1970s designed the Solihull Library (fig.3) and Core Theatre complex (fig.4) (now threatened by redevelopment), that very successfully combined Scandinavian design with the rustic qualities of the Snape Maltings concert hall in Aldeburgh, specifically through the extensive use of handmade ‘russet’ bricks [3]. In designing these buildings, Sellers played a quiet but key role in the story of modernism in the West Midlands, especially beyond central Birmingham.

Sellers’ work was persistently constrained by budgetary concerns, which limited his opportunity to incorporate the fine and decorative arts into the buildings he designed, as he so often wanted to. At the Mander Centre he was able to convince Mander Holdings to purchase a large Barbara Hepworth sculpture, Rock Form (Porthcurno) (designed in 1964, purchased and installed in 1968, relocated to Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2015). He attempted to persuade other clients to purchase further Hepworth sculptures on a roundabout at Five Ways, Birmingham, and at Solihull Library, but to no avail.

Sellers’ aesthetic preferences, visible through his collecting and his friendships, were for what Alexandra Harris has called ‘romantic moderns’ [4]. It was a humanistic modernism, drawn to the past – in Hepworth’s case, the ancient past. This variety of modernism was becoming somewhat old-fashioned by the late 1960s. Sellers’ choice of Hepworth was criticised accordingly at the time by local art lecturer Mike Travers. Travers, evidently a man of the avant-garde, questioned the inclusion of Rock Form at the Mander Centre:

Why does one place a sculpture in an architectural setting such as the Mander Square? As an ornament? Surely not. As an object of contemplative reverence? Hardly needed in what is hoped to become a thriving shopping precinct […] Is it necessary as a point of identification?

These questions do not seem to have been considered in the choice of the Hepworth sculpture. The piece looks uncomfortable with its artificially induced green patina, a ready-made antiquity, its self-conscious attention to surface texture as an end in itself. It appears rhetorical and crude in contrast with its surroundings of plate glass, steel, concrete and marble [5].

At the same time, Wolverhampton Civic Society criticised it as too modern, saying, ‘We just feel that a figurative piece would be enjoyed by more people in a shopping situation.’ [6] Sellers was forced to defend his choice in the local press and even on the BBC’s Midlands Today, memorably being quoted as saying the criticisms reflected ‘the small minds of small town people’ [7]. He went on to ask: ‘Should we have given up this exciting piece for perhaps the more up-to-date transient and immature work of a student, or for the works of lesser men or women just because they happen to be local?’ [8]. One wonders, then, what he would have made of the ‘Made in Birmingham’ exhibit: is his vase also being presented as the work of a ‘lesser’ artist who just happens to be local?

This episode in Sellers’ architectural career sheds some light on Sellers’ aesthetic tastes – a humanistic and romantic modernism. Direct evidence that his architecture and his pottery bear on one another is harder to come by, however. The most direct example I have come across is that, when returning to the new Loft Theatre in Leamington Spa later in life – a building he designed in the late 1960s for only £30,000 – Sellers recalled that he had wanted the upstairs to include space for exhibitions of studio pottery [9]. When designing Solihull Library in the early 1970s, it had included a small art gallery built to the specifications of the V&A’s travelling exhibitions, which had already been axed by the time the Library opened [10].

This lack of evidence is not too surprising, as post-war architecture’s relationship with the decorative arts, particularly ceramics, was strained. Modernists’ belief in the innate integrity of materials, particularly industrial ones, and their latent functionalism clashed with the dominant mode of ceramic art at the time, namely studio pottery, which often occupied an awkward position between useful, quotidian product and abstract art object. Laura Gray writes that mid-century modernism’s treatment of ceramics as ‘domestic’ and ‘ornamental’ compounded this situation, as ‘works with decorative and domestic associations were positioned as the antithesis of “fine” art’ [11]. When it came to modernist architects and their relationship with ceramics, Tanya Harrod writes, ‘The contacts made by [New Brutalist] architects with other areas of visual culture were unlikely to lead in the direction of craft’, i.e. studio pottery [12]. Sculpture, on the other hand, could be sited quite easily in a precinct or housing estate, with many New Towns in England and Scotland like Harlow and Glenrothes being treasure troves of post-war public sculpture to this day, and this is a situation reflected in Sellers’ own career.

This is not to say that ceramic art was never incorporated into post-war buildings; one can point to Hans Coper’s stoneware candlesticks at Coventry Cathedral (1962) and (with Lucie Rie) monumental stoneware ashtrays at Hugh Casson’s Time-Life Building of the early 1950s [13]. In Birmingham there is the mosaic by John Piper in John Madin’s Chamber of Commerce of 1958. But these interventions – the use of artworks almost as an appliqué to architecture – were seen in those sections of British modernism more openly influenced by Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier (the ‘new brutalists’) as a means of ameliorating the impact of a modern building by emphasising its visual rather than structural elements. Coventry Cathedral – a building greatly admired by Sellers – was criticised by younger figures like Reyner Banham and Alison and Peter Smithson especially harshly for exhibiting this decorative tendency [14].

Sellers certainly exhibited a loyalty to this older generation of modernists – particularly Spence and his Scandinavian influences like Alvar Aalto – and their aesthetic mode, one with an ‘interest in decoration, in the use of natural facing materials, and in picturesquely informal planning’ [15]. He shared ‘Spence’s craftsmanlike approach to materials and his delight in rich surfaces’, something borne out by his reflections on Solihull Library:

As part of the Civic Centre there was a small extra allowance in the budget for enhanced finishes and by keeping the building simple in form it was possible to use more natural materials, the brick, travertine marble from Tivoli outside Rome, and copper cladding to the rooftop plant rooms. We had wanted to use Roach Portland stone but supplies were becoming difficult and it was also getting very expensive. The marble is in fact only a surface cladding. The windows are bronze anodised aluminium. As a result of using quality materials it had aged and weathered well [16].

Sellers, then, not only ‘delighted’ in quality materials (travertine and Portland Roach were recurring elements in his designs) but was convinced of their functionality. He was attentive to materiality throughout his career, something we might speculate drew him to ceramics in particular, as a craft of quite intense intimacy with one’s working materials. The flecks of red in his vase are notoriously difficult to achieve, with copper being a highly volatile pigment [17]. Sellers was no dilettante, rather someone with a lifelong interest in the qualities of different materials and their applications to artistic and architectural ends.

Exploring Sellers’ architectural practice does, as we have seen, go some way toward explaining his aesthetic preferences. It likewise explains his aptitude for ceramics via his lifelong engagement with the material aspects of building. Nevertheless, it does not fully explain why the vase exists in the first place, or how it ended up in a collection of so many other fine examples of post-war studio pottery. I next turn to a consideration of his sexuality, without which neither his architectural nor his pottery career can be properly understood.

Sellers and networks of queer artists in the West Midlands

Sellers’ sexuality was integral to the development of his career. By meeting and maintaining friendships with other gay men, he made personal and professional connections that would influence his architecture, lead directly to the commission of one of his best buildings, and fuel his lifelong love of studio pottery. This raises the question of whether Sellers’ vase can be defined, in any meaningful sense, as ‘queer art’. From my research, I would struggle to say any of Seller’s creative output was presenting a distinctly queer viewpoint – in fact, I think he would rankle at the suggestion that it was. While his sexuality was hardly a secret to his friends, family, and colleagues, he would probably not have wanted to be defined by his sexuality – particularly at a time when sex between men was criminalised. Consequently, there is a balance to be struck between ignoring his queerness and framing his life and work in those terms. What is abundantly clear is that the vase may never have existed, and Sellers’ career may have looked very different, had he not been a member of queer communities at that historical moment.

Sellers lived most of his life with his partner, Richard Butt, a Birmingham classical music impresario (involved for many years with the Birmingham Bach Choir) who worked as a producer for Radio 3. Sellers and Butt may well have been the first same-sex couple to enter into a civil partnership in Solihull, doing so in the registry office Sellers himself designed; they lived together until Butt’s death in 2010. Butt had a much louder and more outspoken personality than Sellers’s. It was Butt’s musical connections that got the couple friendly with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, themselves a gay couple who had founded the Aldeburgh Festival in 1947, whose Snape Maltings’ concert hall was a key influence on the design of Solihull’s Core Theatre. Sellers later described the influence:

[Solihull’s Core] Theatre inside and out leans heavily on one of my favourites, the Maltings Concert Hall near Aldeburgh, in particular the internal brickwork and wall lights and the external brick arches and slate to the roof and stage tower. Not long after it opened I brought Sir Peter Pears to see the Library and Theatre and he pointed out all the little “similarities”! [18].

Bohemianism and the arts provided spaces in which queer people could congregate and socialise without attracting unwanted attention; Ian Massey characterises St Ives in the 1950s as such a place, in which a relatively tolerant attitude existed, but it was unclear whether this was tolerance for queer sexuality or sexuality submerged beneath a general bohemian lifestyle [19]. When considering Sellers’ lifelong reticence to openly describe himself as ‘gay’ or ‘queer’, it is worth remembering that he came of age in the 1950s, a period of intense public vilification of homosexuality and heightened police harassment of queer pubs and clubs [20]. Sellers’ life as a gay man was consequently lived in peripheral, bohemian spaces, or spaces that were not explicitly gay. In the Midlands, the Umbrella Club, an arts club founded in 1955 by members of the Coventry Architects’ Department (including Sellers) was known locally as a social spot for queer professionals [21]. On his commutes between Coventry and Birmingham, Sellers was also a regular visitor to the Astley Castle Hotel, popular with regional bohemians and gay men alike for its simultaneous remoteness and convenient ten-minute drive from the M6 [22].

But the most important of these spaces was St Ives. How Sellers ended up in the Cornish art colony is unclear, but it was possibly a gay connection that led him there. Far from prying eyes and with a long-established bohemian atmosphere, bolstered by an influx of young artists following their idols Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Naum Gabo, St Ives in the 1950s possessed a queer scene centred around the sculptor John Milne. Milne, originally from Salford, was an abstract sculptor known for his powerful, primal and often phallic forms, most often in polished bronze. While at Salford Art School, he formed a relationship with Cosmo Rodewald, a significantly older and wealthier classics lecturer at Manchester University, who bankrolled Milne’s career and initiated him into his gay world. Writing about Milne, art historian Ian Massey has suggested that ‘For young gay men from less privileged backgrounds then, figures such as Rodewald […] were significant, facilitating an introduction to a necessarily covert society.’ [23] Milne goes on to quote an anonymous interviewee from the 1960 book, A Minority, who said:

As a boy from a very poor home, homosexuality has been a great help to me. Not only have I met many excellent people that I couldn’t have met if I had not been homosexual, but also my homosexual friends have helped to educate me. It’s been like going to university, except the university has come to me [24].

Being a gay man in the post-war decades was, as we well know, often a life defined by secrecy, repression, and harassment. But, as Milne’s and indeed Sellers’ biographies show, it could also open up opportunities for young working-class men, with sexuality acting as a common link across class lines.

At St Ives, Milne worked as an assistant in Hepworth’s workshop for around eighteen months before developing an independent career. He lived in Trewyn, a large house bought for him by Rodewald, on the grounds of which Hepworth had her studio, a living arrangement prompting Milne to occasionally joke: ‘Darling, everybody else has fairies at the bottom of their garden – I’ve got fucking Barbara!’ [25]. Milne operated Trewyn as a boarding house during the holiday season, one frequented to a large extent by gay men; Francis Bacon stayed there in the summer of 1959. Sellers was among the more frequent visitors and became very friendly with both Milne and Hepworth, corresponding with both regularly until their premature deaths in the mid-1970s. He and Milne also accompanied each other on annual trips to Greece throughout the 1960s. Sellers became an avid collector of Hepworth’s work, with the small bronze Single Form (Sun and Moon) (1966) (fig.6) from his collection on display in BMAG’s Industrial Gallery’s balcony and a large lithograph titled Two Marble Forms (Mykonos) (1969) (fig.7) – possibly given as a housewarming present to Sellers by Hepworth personally (see fig.8) – remaining in storage.

Sellers’ only known relationship from his time in St Ives was in the early 1960s, with Julian Nixon, a serial heartbreaker in the gay scene of Southwest England. Nixon’s life as a gay man in the 1950s throws Sellers’s into relief. While doing his National Service, Nixon had been arrested along with fourteen other men (one of whom committed suicide immediately after the verdict) and convicted of gross indecency at 22 years old. Massey writes:

The case in which Nixon was involved was just one of many “chain” prosecutions that resulted from the arrest of a number of men after they had been named by others. Police often urged those arrested to name their homosexual contacts, implying that doing so would result in leniency by the judiciary (it did not) [26].

Nixon was made to spend a year in a mental institution. His case makes it clear why Sellers would choose not to draw attention to his sexuality; he was shy anyway, but the constant threat of prosecution would have dissuaded him even further. In 1965, gambling debts forced Nixon to leave St Ives – having already left Sellers for a solicitor – and move to Leamington Spa with the studio potter Reg Moon.

At the time, Sellers was designing one of his major commissions. The Loft Theatre had been gutted twice by fires in 1958 and 1964, and after the second fire, it was decided to build an entirely new, custom-made building – something few ‘little theatres’ can boast. Sellers was a theatre lover who had designed sets for several small theatres, including Highbury in Sutton Coldfield, Kenilworth’s Talisman, and the Loft itself [27]. Not only that, but he had been hired by the theatre’s director Bob Collingridge, himself a gay man who knew Sellers from local social circles.

As for Moon, he had been a classmate of Milne’s at the Salford School of Art. Having been introduced to Sellers in St Ives, he moved to the Midlands and founded the Torquil Pottery in Henley-in-Arden in 1960. Sellers’ papers held at the Birmingham Museum Collections Centre contain envelopes upon envelopes of auction catalogues, receipts from the Penwith Society of Arts, mostly for studio pottery that he would bequeath to BMAG decades later [28]. As his archive progresses, these start being replaced with Torquil catalogues and receipts. Sellers’ lifelong fondness for and collecting of studio pottery, mostly that produced in and around St Ives, was intimately linked to his memories and life as a gay man in post-war Britain. It may well have been this personal interest and history that spurred him to produce his own pots in retirement, taking pottery lessons at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham (1962).

The vase on display at BMAG and the rest of his works in storage display a clear Japanese influence, specifically Japanese stoneware or ‘raku’ ware, or at least a Japanese influence as filtered through Bernard Leach via Shoji Hamada. None of his pots have figurative elements, instead expressing themselves purely through form, colour, and texture, putting his work directly in conversation with pieces in his collection by Lucie Rie or Joanna Constantinidis. This was recognised by BMAG’s curators when, in 2015, an entire display case was dedicated to Sellers’ own works alongside those of his more famous peers in his collection.

Concluding remarks

That Sellers went largely unsung in his own life is a testament not only to his shy nature and what often feels like a national conspiracy against Birmingham as a site of cultural production, but also the biases in architectural history (and art history more broadly) against the study of ‘minor’ figures and the ‘minor’ arts [29]. But in the end, Sellers’ vase is not displayed because of his role in Birmingham’s architecture or because of his role as a queer artist and craftsman. It was selected because he was a Brummie, one who never abandoned the city of his birth. The display of this pot, then, along with the rest of the ‘Made in Birmingham’ exhibit, has a remarkably similar spirit to the original purpose of the museum and the Industrial Gallery: to serve as inspiration for local artisans and craftspeople [30]. The difference being that whereas in Victorian Birmingham the exemplars were, for example, Italian or Indian decorative arts and crafts, the ‘Made in Birmingham’ exhibit encourages today’s visitors to reflect on Birmingham’s own more recent past.

I hope to have shown, should Sellers’ vase or any of his other works or collection be displayed again, that there is a lot more we can say about them. He was not simply a Brummie; he was a Brummie architect and a queer Brummie. His ceramics did not come from nowhere, instead reflecting a professional and personal history deeply tied to the societal changes of the post-war decades. What, then, do we do with Sellers’ pots at BMAG? His story and what makes his collection interesting beyond their aesthetic value is too vast to fit on a standard object label; certain aspects of his story are therefore erased, even if not malevolently so. The short label of ‘queer art’ is also one I am not convinced Sellers would have been entirely happy with, and neither does it tell the whole story. I am not a curator, so I do not have the answers to these questions of display and interpretation, but it is clear that the complex and interconnected contexts in which he created, commissioned and collected will need to be addressed if more of Sellers’ collection is to go on display.

Matthew Bliss is a tutor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following: Maialen Maugars for comments on the history of BMAG; Alistair Fair and Geraint Franklin for their expert help during the research process; Ellen Brown for forwarding me Stanley’s letters to Hepworth; the staff of Coventry Archives and the Birmingham Museum Collections Centre; Matt Houlbrook, Mo Moulton, and Katherine Wallace for their advice on queer life in 1960s Birmingham; Ian Massey for his invaluable expertise on queer life in St Ives; and Rob Gill of Gosford Books for his incomparable knowledge of all things Coventry. Thanks above all to the friends and family members of Stanley’s who agreed to speak with me, namely Graham Allen, Peter Durkin, Sue Moore, and James Whitehead.

Notes 

[1] Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Highlights. Industrial Gallery: Made in Birmingham’, https://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/birmingham-museum-and-art-gallery/highlights/industrial-gallery-made-in-birmingham, accessed 11 August 2026.

[2] ‘Stanley Sellers’, 20^th Century Forum, https://www.20thcenturyforum.com/t13062-stanley-sellers; Stanley Sellers, Mid Century Ceramic Teapot, https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1637456120/stanley-sellers-mid-century-ceramic, accessed 11 August 2026.

[3] ‘Solihull Library and Arts Centre’ [recollections by Stanley Sellers], Solihull Library R.027.4, 2008.

[4] See Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, 2^nd edn (London, 2010).

[5] Vigilant, ‘Knocking Holes in Hepworth Sculpture’, Wolverhampton Express and Star, 2 April 1968, p.4.

[6] ‘Society replies to critic’, Wolverhampton Express and Star, 5 April 1968, p.16.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Sue Moore, interview with the author, 21 July 2025.

[10] ‘Solihull Library and Arts Centre’ [recollections by Stanley Sellers].

[11] Laura Gray, ‘Gross domestic product: Contemporary British ceramics and the subversion of the monument’, in Imogen Hart and Claire Jones (eds), Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe: Seventeenth Century to Contemporary (London and New York, 2020), p.270.

[12] Tanya Harrod, The Crafts in Britain in the 20^th Century (London and New Haven, 1999), p.355.

[13] Ibid, pp.352–3, 361–2.

[14] Ibid, pp.362-4; Louise Campbell, Coventry Cathedral: art and architecture in post-war Britain (Oxford, 1996), p.273.

[15] Ibid, p.254.

[16] ‘Solihull Library and Arts Centre’ [recollections by Stanley Sellers]. The shortage of Roach Portland was likely down at least in part to its increasing popularity in London developments of the 1960s and 1970s, where it was valued for its ability to exhibit surface decoration without being mere ornament. See Lino Bianco, ‘Portland Stone and the Architectural History of London: An overview’, Mesto a Dejiny, 6, no.1 (2017), pp.41–3.

[17] See here, along with several images of pots with remarkably similar glazes to Sellers’: Lucy Farley, ‘The Use of Copper Red in Chinese Ceramics’, Guest & Gray, n.d., https://www.chinese-porcelain-art.com/pages/articles-top-level/antique-chinese-ceramics-and-works-of-art/the-use-of-copper-red-in-chinese-ceramics/, accessed 11 August 2026.

[18] Harrod, The Crafts in Britain, pp.362–4.

[19] Ian Massey, Queer St Ives and Other Stories (London, 2022), pp.104–8.

[20] Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, 2005), pp.34–6.

[21] According to Coventry cultural historian Rob Gill, correspondence with the author, 23 July 2025.

[22] James Whitehead, interview with the author, 20 July 2025.

[23] Massey, Queer St Ives, p.45.

[24] Quoted in ibid, p.46.

[25] Ibid, p.201.

[26] Ibid, pp.82–3.

[27] On these, see for example: on the Highbury, ‘A Successful Pooh-Bah’, Birmingham Weekly Post, 29 January 1954, p.15; ‘Vintage Comedy – Sparkling Production at Highbury Theatre’, Birmingham Daily Post, 23 June 1954, p.23; on the Talisman, ‘After The Film, Here’s The Original Play!’, Leamington Spa Courier, 18 November 1960, p.5; and on the Loft, N.K.W, ‘Sparkling Satire in Loft Ustinov Play’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 15 May 1959, p.4.

[28] Birmingham Museums Trust Archive, Stanley Sellers Bequest Papers, ‘Receipts’.

[29] Timothy Brittain-Catlin writes about this tendency in Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture (Boston, 2014).

[30] Stuart Davies, By the Gains of Industry: Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery 1885–1985 (Birmingham, 1985), p.12.