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If you’ve ever been at a gig or festival and seen a threadbare old t-shirt from tours decades past and thought, ‘Christ, that belongsin a museum’… you might be right. In June 2025, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery unveiled a special exhibition dedicated to the life and career of Ozzy Osbourne. Titled Ozzy Osbourne: Working Class Hero, it has received around 450,000 visitors since it opened, and has now been extended to September.
“We knew from previous shows we’ve put on that something like this would attract a big audience,” says Toby Watley, Director of Collections and Estates for Birmingham Museums Trust. “But the level of interest has far exceeded what we were expecting. Older generations might bring along their grandkids or children to share that experience. So you can’t assume it’ll be a bunch of old rockers turning up; in August [2025] we had our busiest day in 10 years.”
Ozzy Osbourne: Working Class Hero traces its roots to Sharon Osbourne’s enthusiastic archiving of Ozzy memorabilia from over the years. The exhibition covers Ozzy’s solo career and early life in Birmingham, even including a few of his Grammy Awards.
“Sharon’s seen great importance in keeping everything in good condition for his fans,” explains Steve Hewlett, of Central BID Birmingham, who worked directly with the Osbourne family to bring the exhibition to life. “She’s got a huge collection in America, a huge collection in the UK; we had no idea just how much she’d collected. We knew the Back To The Beginning concert was coming up, so it was like, ‘The time is now.’”
The exhibition opened to the public for the first time on June 25, 2025, just weeks before Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s emotional farewell gig at the city’s Villa Park stadium. Although ticket prices for Back To The Beginning might have been eye-watering, early on it was decided in the Osbourne camp that the exhibition needed to be open to everyone. To that end, the museum’s website even offers visitors a chance to explore the exhibition digitally if they can’t go in person.
“Sharon insisted early on that this exhibition had to be free,” Steve says. “She thought it was incredibly important that this Working Class Hero exhibition is available to every single member of the public.”
Working Class Hero marks an important shift in the city of Birmingham’s bid to embrace its musical heritage in recent years, with everything from Black Sabbath Bridge to a giant mechanical bull named Ozzy and even an (unsuccessful, for now) bid to rename the city’s airport to ‘Ozzy Osbourne airport’. Toby is keen to point out that Birmingham Museum has hosted similar exhibitions in the past, however – including the Home Of Metal one in 2019.
“This project has been very different in focusing on Ozzy, his career and his achievements,” Toby explains. “It’s made it a unique experience for visitors, as a lot of this stuff is on public display for the first time. Sharon came to the opening and was actually in tears, because she’d never seen it displayed in frames and presented in a formal way as opposed to just clustered on shelves in a warehouse. It’s all beautifully presented and makes it look important because it is important.”
“Birmingham hasn’t done particularly well in celebrating its heritage over the years,” admits Jez Collins, founder of Birmingham Music Archive, an organisation dedicated to documenting and celebrating the musical heritage of Birmingham. “With Ozzy, it’s an odd one: he hasn’t lived in the city for decades, but he’s absolutely beloved here. Black Sabbath and Ozzy always retained their roots. It’s a global phenomenon, but there’s a real club feeling among the audience that you can easily identity if you’re a metalhead.”
With Ozzy Osbourne: Working Class Hero extended to September 27, the question is, ‘What comes next?’
“We know we could do an exhibition five times the size of this one,” Steve says. “We’re blessed that Sharon allowed us to see part of this collection, but we also know it could get bigger!”
“It’s more than just an exhibition,” Toby adds. “We have people coming because they want to be part of something, whether that’s signing
the condolence book or just being part of a bigger event.”
Sabbath might be Birmingham’s favourite sons, but they’re by no means the only world-conquering, influential act to emerge from the city.
“It’s amazing. It gives us a sense that there’s a real appetite for this [kind of thing],” Jez enthuses. “Sabbath are Sabbath, but there’s maybe another couple of bands from Birmingham who belong on that pedestal with them.”
A massive Napalm Death exhibition? You never know…
Ozzy Osbourne: Working Class Hero is open until September 27, 2026.
