The Jewellery Quarter

The Argent Centre, Legge Lane

The area east of Icknield Street in Hockley is known as the Jewellery Quarter and has the greatest concentration of wholesale and retail jewellery manufacturers in Europe. Over a third of all British jewellery is made within one mile of Birmingham City Centre.

There is an early reference to jewellery manufacture in a survey of Birmingham made in 1553 when Roger Pemberton was named as a goldsmith living in the town. Already in the 16th century Birmingham's metalworking industry was well developed and producing cutlery, nails, swords and products related to horse transport. The general trend at this time was for heavier metal-bashing work to be concentrated in the Black Country, while smaller metal goods, which required a higher degree of precision and manufacturing skill, were made in Birmingham.

Known at the time as 'toys', they included a very wide range of goods such as badges, buckles and buttons, candle-sticks and candle snuffers, corkscrews, cruets, ink-stands, mirrors, seals, snuff boxes, sugar tongs, toothpick cases, watch chains, as well as swords and guns. (See the Gun Quarter.) And in addition to working in steel, brass, and copper, silver and gold were increasingly used. The move towards small but quality items was driven by the promise of higher profits. By 1780 a local directory listed 26 jewellers, though there were undoubtedly more. At this time the industry was spread across the town, which at that time covered the area that has become the City Centre.

The emergence of the Jewellery Quarter was the indirect result of the sale and subsequent development in the mid-18th century of the Colmore estate on the north-western edge of the town. The Colmores lived in New Hall, a large Jacobean house set in many acres of land on what is now the north-western corner of the junction of Great Charles Street Queensway and Newhall Street. In 1746 the Colmores, by a private Act of Parliament, had the restrictions lifted which had prevented them selling the estate, and the present grid pattern of streets between Colmore Row and St Paul's Square was in place by the end of the century. Although the street plan was very regular, the development of properties was fairly haphazard. Built on plots with 120-year leases, there was a mixture large and small buildings cheek-by jowl, houses for the wealthy and houses lived in by self-employed toymakers who increasingly used the garrets or outbuildings as their own workshops.

In 1777 with the area nearest the town moving downmarket, Charles Colmore set about creating a higher-class suburb lower down the hill by donating the land and £1000 to build St Paul's Church in the middle of a fashionable square. His aim was to cash in on the demand for houses by the expanding prosperous middle class outside the growing industrial town. In this he succeeded. A significant number of these 18th-century Georgian houses survive. However, the quality of the district was not to last long.

The Birmingham Canal to Wednesbury which had opened in 1769, was linked in 1789 to the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal which separated the new development from the town. Modern regeneration of the canals gives a misleading impression of their 18th- and 19th-century character. The canals were commercial highways and attracted industrial and warehouse building in urban centres wherever they were cut. Wharves were built at the west end of the Colmore estate, the Newhall Wharf coming right up to the site of the old hall itself. All along the Old Thirteen, the locks on the Fazeley Canal which lead down from the town centre towards Aston, there quickly sprang up warehouses, yards, wharfs, and factories powered by smoky and noisy steam engines. As the middle-class moved out, their houses were taken up by toymakers and jewellers moving down from the old side of the Colmore estate below Colmore Row to the area below Lionel Street.

By 1800 streets were being laid out on the hill above St Paul's Square between Camden Street and Warstone Lane, and by 1840 along Great Hampton Street as far as Hockley Hill and the town boundary. And it is from about this time that part of Hockley began to emerge as the Jewellery Quarter.

Jewellery-making, like gun-making, was a trade of great specialisation carried out by self-employed people often working on their own or with a small number of colleagues. This is still largely the case. Many were family businesses carried out in their own homes. Each business undertook only one small part of the overall process of making a piece of jewellery and then took it elsewhere for the next process to be carried out. Jewellery would pass through a number of hands before being sold. All the more important that the businesses should be close to one another. If businesses expanded, they would do so by building more outbuildings in the back gardens of the houses. Successful jewellers would eventually use up the whole of the house as a workshop and live elsewhere.

Most of the 19th century was a boom time for the Quarter, from where fine jewellery was exported throughout the extensive British Empire. After the First World War business began to contract, and bomb damage during the Second World War cast doubt on the viability of the district.

The Birmingham School of Jewellery has had a beneficial influence in maintaining and developing the jewellery trade here. Started by the Birmingham Jewellers & Silversmiths Association in a branch of the Municipal School of Art in Ellen Street, the present building in Vittoria Street opened in 1890 in a converted goldsmith's factory of 1865. The school was expanded in 1911 and 1993 and is now part of the Art & Design faculty of the University of Central England, now Birmingham City University.

The Hockley Centre, the Big Peg opened in 1971. After World War 2 the Quarter was bomb-damaged and anyway contained a good deal of badly-maintained sub-standard property. Built in a typical utilitarian 1960s style, it was designed as a flatted factory for some 150 firms displaced by the development. It was part of a radical approach to poor quality buildings in the city whereby everything old would be replaced by new high-rise.

Unfortunately the rents in the Big Peg were far higher than the jewellers' old properties and many of them went out of business. The building was largely occupied by businesses with no jewellery connection, and no more developments of its kind took place. With the revitalisation of the quarter at the end of the 20th century, the Big Peg has been refurbished and now houses a variety of arts-based and jewellery businesses.

Vyse Street

From the late 1970s a regeneration of industrial Birmingham took place focussing on the service economy with developments such as the National Exhibition Centre NEC in 1976, the National Indoor Arena NIA in 1981, the International Convention Centre ICC in 1991. There was pedestrianisation in the City Centre and opening up of public spaces and canals. A new interest was also taken in the Jewellery Quarter which was now seen not only as an industrial asset, but as a retail tourist attraction.

Until 1980 the Jewellery Quarter was a manufacturing district largely supplying wholesale products to retailers. Some jewellers in the Warstone Lane area opened retail shops at the front of their premises. Business boomed and in the past 20-30 years this has created the Golden Triangle, the retail district of the Jewellery Quarter around Warstone Lane, Vyse Street and Augusta Street.

In 1980 the Jewellery Quarter was designated an Industrial Improvement Area, and grants were made available to modernise and restore old properties. Much of the Quarter is now protected within a Conservation Area. Many properties have been renovated and new properties built, most of them in keeping with the character of the district. There has been a concerted effort to bring high-quality residential housing into the area and some of the old buildings have been converted into fashionable wine bars and restaurants.

Birmingham Assay Office

The Birmingham Assay Office

Before 1773, all jewellery made in Birmingham had to be sent to the assay offices in either London or Chester to be hallmarked. The Birmingham manufacturers, notably Matthew Boulton, found this unacceptable and organised on behalf of Birmingham and Sheffield to petition Parliament to allow the creation of local assay offices. Despite strong opposition by the London trade, a bill in Parliament was successfully passed into law. While Boulton was in London lobbying Parliament, he stayed at the Crown & Anchor. It is believed that a toss of a coin determined that Birmingham's assay mark should be an anchor, while Sheffield's would be a crown, subsequently the white rose of York. London's mark is a leopard's head.

The Assay Office originally opened upstairs at a public house in New Street, moving to Bull Lane in 1782, Little Colmore Street in 1799, Little Cannon Street in 1815 and to its present purpose-built premises in 1877. The Assay Office is now the busiest in the world testing and hall-marks some twelve million items of gold, silver or platinum every year.

Well worth a visit - Smith & Pepper's.
The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter on Vyse Street is set up in the former premises of Charles Smith and Edwyn Pepper, who opened a large factory (by jewellery standards) in 1899. Remarkably, when the business closed in 1980, all the tools and machinery, benches and paperwork were left untouched until the building was restored as a working museum by the City Council as the Jewellery Quarter Discovery Centre c1990.

See also Hockley.