Public Monuments and Sculpture

Established in 1991, the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association (PMSA) is a registered charity that brings together individuals and organisations who share an interest in the history and preservation of Britain’s public sculpture and monuments.   

In 1993, they set up the National Recording Project, which set out to record all the public monuments and sculpture in the UK through several regional archives centres based in universities. Birmingham City University was one of the first of these, building on the work on public sculpture in Birmingham that Professor George Noszlopy had been working on since 1982. The project received a major boost in 1998, when the PMSA was awarded £470,000 from National Lottery Funds to develop a national database of public sculpture and monuments. They continue to collaborate with Liverpool University Press on the associated  series, which includes four volumes on the Western Central Counties region (Birmingham; Warwickshire, Coventry and Solihull; Staffordshire and the Black Country; and Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire) that were written by staff at BCU. The PMSA also established the much-respected (published by Liverpool University Press) and have delivered conferences, events and publications in collaboration with English Heritage, the UK Institute of Conservators and other similar organisations

Much of this collection is made up of photographs and slides of public sculpture and monuments in those Midlands counties covered by the published volumes written at BCU between the mid-1990s and 2007. However, there are also copies of some of the books in the  series; paper files containing research notes on individual sculptures, including a copy of the sculptor William Bloye’s sales ledger; and floppy disks of different versions of the database for the Western Central Counties.