Museum of the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham
English Travel Gem is Victorian Ghost Factory Frozen in Time
Oct 4, 2009
The Smith and Pepper Company specialized in bangles and bracelets from 1899 until the Smith family members locked the door for the last time in 1981. Unable to sell the business during a recession, they took the gold and left behind everything else: ledgers in the safe, metal dies on the shelves, receipts on the hook.
They even left jars of Marmite and homemade damson plum jam, which have taken on lives of their own in the decades since.
Becoming the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter
In 1992, Birmingham city council approached the Smiths about buying the old red brick houses and the jewelry factory that their family built in the backyard. After stabilizing the buildings and safety-rigging the machinery, the city opened The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter in 1992. Admission is free.
Today, guides with jewelers’ backgrounds take groups through the time-capsule factory, demonstrating the Archimedes bow drill to bore a hole in metal and working a giant press to stamp out a metal medallion. Guides turn on the belt-driven lathes to give visitors a sense of the noise there must have been in this small workshop.
Tea Time: Sugar or Cyanide?
And don’t forget the tea break. One long-time employee did the electroplating, using cyanide in the process. She also organized the tea tray each day. Cyanide and sugar look nearly identical, but there are no reports of any mix-ups.
Museum of the Jewellery Quarter Captures Recent History
Birmingham has long been famous as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, a city that mushroomed on the strength of its workforce, factories and canals.
Precious metals have been worked in Birmingham since the 1300s, but the fashion for fancy buttons and shoe buckles exploded when King Charles Il returned from exile in France in 1660 and restored the monarchy in Britain.
The Jewellery Quarter grew throughout the centuries, with hundreds of small manufacturers and artisans working together in the tight confines of the Quarter. In the 20th century, shops began to open to the public.
Today, the Jewellery Quarter is the largest in Europe, with more than 1,500 businesses, a quarter of which are still active in the jewelry trade. An estimated 40 percent of jewelry made in England comes from Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.
The Jewellery Quarter also has the world’s busiest Assay Office, which hallmarks more than 13 million items of jewelry and precious metal each year.
Glittering Attractions Near the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter
Don’t miss:
- St. Paul’s Square, the last remaining Georgian square in Birmingham and one of the few in Britain. St. Paul’s, the Jewelers’ Church, commands the center of the tree-lined square, developed in the 1770s.
- The Pen Museum, celebrating Joseph Gillott’s invention of the machine-made steel nib in the 1800s. Birmingham was the center of pen manufacturing for more than a century.
- The Jewellery Quarter Dark Trail, featuring two historic cemeteries. Key Hill, opened in 1836, has historic gardens and atmospheric catacombs. Warstone Lane Cemetery, from 1848, is a Gothic design with more catacombs. The Newman Coffin Works in Fleet Street will be refurbished as a museum. The company made some of the world’s finest coffin furniture, including fittings for Sir Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales.
Touring Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter
The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter (Tel 0121 554 3598) is at 75-70 Vyse St.
The Jewellery Quarter Information Center is at 120 Vyse St., (Tel 0121 604 7700).
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