The world comes to Brum
The Commonwealth Games bring 72 nations to Birmingham — and the opening ceremony, with its raging bull, tells the city's own story of industry, migration, and unity. The very communities this archive celebrates take centre stage, watched by over a billion people.
Alexander Stadium
The opening ceremony — Birmingham tells its own story to the world
In the summer of 2022, Birmingham welcomed the Commonwealth Games: seventy-two nations and territories, thousands of athletes, and the biggest event the city had ever staged. Streets filled with flags and volunteers; Victoria Square, the Town Hall, and the rebuilt Alexander Stadium wore the city's colours; and for eleven days Birmingham was the centre of the sporting world.
Victoria Square
A city dressed for the world · July 2022
The opening ceremony told a story every Brummie recognised. A ten-metre mechanical Raging Bull — built with chains evoking the women chainmakers of the Black Country — was hauled into the stadium in a pageant of the city's industrial past, its migrations, and its many communities. The bull became an overnight icon, mobbed by crowds when it went on public display: Birmingham, at last, telling its own story its own way, to a global audience of many millions.
The Games left more than memories — a renewed stadium, a festival of culture across the city's neighbourhoods, and above all a surge of civic pride in exactly the diversity this archive exists to honour. If 2022 showed what Birmingham's story looks like on the world's biggest stage, City of Many Voices exists to make sure the individual voices within that story are never lost.