🍔 The Little Chefs of the West Midlands, a lost Handsworth cinema, & Women's Land Army archive

Nostalgia news from Birmingham Live

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Welcome to your Thursday nostalgia newsletter! Here are three stories that were published in our section in the last week.

The lost joy of a Little Chef breakfast at services and roadsides everywhere

When you wander into the motorway services, blinking your eyes and stretching your legs, you see a handful of familiar names. Fast food giants like McDonald's, Burger King, KFC and more have all set up shop in these places, luring hungry travellers with the calories needed to keep going.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, you could find another name in that roster. It was one that began in Britain before all of them. Little Chef.

See the rise and fall of Little Chef here.

The fancy Handsworth cinema torn down for shops and offices

Birmingham used to be absolutely littered with cinemas. Today we have to get on a bus or train to one of the multiplexes, but once upon a time you'd have a "local" in the same way you do a pub.

It was the arrival of those multiplex cinemas that killed off the "local". The 70s and 80s saw a great many of them go out of business and get demolished or converted into something new.

Handsworth had its fair share - read about one of its lost cinemas here.

Discover your ancestors' wartime efforts in new Women's Land Army archive

Tens of thousands of records relating to the crucial role of wartime 'Land Girls' have been published online for the first time.

A new collection of more than 90,000 digitised Women's Land Army cards from The National Archives can now be searched through on family history website Ancestry. The UK Women's Land Army Index Cards 1939-1948 collection contains records of employment for those who served in the Women's Land Army from 1939 to 1948.

Find out about this newly available family history resource here.

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