A 1927 illustration entitled ‘Highways of Empire.’
Building on a previous attempt to open an Empire Shop in Birmingham in January 1931, the first franchise of The Empire Remains Shop opens in the heart of the post-post-industrial landscape of Digbeth. Conceived for the renovation period of the building, the Empire Remains Shop will take over the facade and windows to host a range of new commissions and existing works that employ food as a tool to assemble new sites and geographies, while exploring origins, destinations, and exchanges across the present and future of our postcolonial planet. Visitors to The Empire Remains Shop—Birmingham can take part in the rolling programme of visual and sound installations facing Fazeley Street, the railway, and the canal, to activate the site during the construction process. The series of works aim to uncover Birmingham’s past and present relationship to Empire through culinary, chemical, cultural, and agricultural extractions, inventions, and interventions, while exploring other possible futures.
This project marks the beginning of Grand Union’s reanimation of this building, reinstating the public’s relationship to this historic site. The franchise of The Empire Remains Shop is framed by our vision for what we hope this new home can be for the organisation, and Digbeth in the face of regeneration. The programme will be shifting and changing seasonally, but is intended to be flexible and responsive to the needs of our context and our development of the building. We want to conceive of this collectively, and use Junction Works as a base to unpack other histories in the city.
Birmingham overcame the unfavourable conditions of an iron-free, landlocked sprawl of market towns to lay the foundations for the industrial revolution. A lack of iron ore in its own sandy soil was counterbalanced by its geographical accessibility to nearby charcoal forests, where Blast Furnaces to make cast iron were being built for the first time. Its distance from the sea – and therefore from imperially-plundered resources – was also balanced by its convenient central location and active positioning as a ‘junction’, capable of colliding and sifting through the transfer of goods, bodies, and pieces of knowledge. The city’s inland harbour and extensive canal network brought Birmingham closer to the shores of Empire.
Birmingham’s reputation has been formed of such onshore-offshore collisions that pushed the city’s productivity and manufacturing capacity towards small items that did not require large vessels to be transported. From gas harnessed into light by locally-conceived steam machinery, to site-specific fine metalwork skills making the shackles and bullets that would build and hold military and colonial power; from chocolates and sauces made from the ingredients thrown up by empire, to dub reggae and bhangra (and Balti) sampled by the migrants who moved through it, the city embodies the clash between technological progression, social organisation, and cultural diffusion. Through its wide range of contributors, The Empire Remains Shop—Birmingham is a platform to investigate and explore the electrification of cities, programmed obsolescence, ballast bricks, the origins of Made Nowhere, petrol foods, unsounded factories, hostile environments, and much, much more.
Empire Shops were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British how to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the shops ever opened, they intended to make foods like sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica available and familiar in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in Birmingham today. A public installation by London-based collective Cooking Sections, The Empire Remains Shop hosts a critical programme of discussions, performances, dinners, installations and screenings. It traces the contemporary history of imperial fruit, sugar, rum, cocoa, spices, and condiments, as well as the economies and aesthetics that emerged from them. It attests the ways in which global food networks have evolved up until today.
