Category Archives: Birmingham’s Heritage

Crucible of the Industrial Revolution

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Soho House, Handsworth, Birmingham

Soho House, Handsworth, Birmingham

The poet Robert Southey declared in 1807, “Probably in no other age or country was there ever such an astonishing display of human ingenuity as may be found in Birmingham.”

If any one location within the city epitomises this display of ingenuity it is three stops up the Metro tram-route from Snow Hill, where stood the Soho Manufactory, an integrated workshop, powered at first by water:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soho_Manufactory_ca_1800.jpg.

This was the work-base of a manufacturing genius, Matthew Boulton (1728-1908), initially a “toy” manufacturer, producing not playthings but miscellaneous small metal articles ranging from buttons and buckles to high-quality decorative products in steel, ormolu, Sheffield plate and precious metals.

Boulton is best remembered for his partnership with the Scottish inventor, James Watt, because between them they made possible the production and sale of stationary steam-engines for use in mines and mills.  As Boulton explained to James Boswell, “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – POWER.”

The steam engines were eventually prefabricated at the Soho Foundry, opened in 1796, while Boulton developed the Soho Mint (1788) to manufacture coinage resistant to counterfeiting.

He was also primarily responsible for establishing the Birmingham Assay Office (1773), the New Street Theatre (1774) and the town’s first hospital and dispensary.

He lived in elegant surroundings at Soho House (Samuel Wyatt 1766), a building full of surprises.

The exterior is not stone, but slate cladding covered with sand-dredged paint.  The glazing bars, some of which survive, were of “Eldorado”, an experimental metal supplied by James Keir, a Lunar Society member.

Boulton installed a practical steam-heated indoor bathroom and was supplied with a Bramah patent water closet in 1787. Evidence of the warm-air circulating central-heating system, installed c1810, can still be seen in the cellars, on the stairs and in one of the upstairs rooms.

Though the parkland surrounding Soho House has long since been built on, the main block of the house survives and is beautifully restored.

Its interpretation makes it easy to recreate the exciting, welcoming atmosphere of the eighteenth-century equivalent of Silicon Valley.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Temple of music

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Town Hall, Birmingham

Town Hall, Birmingham

Birmingham’s Town Hall is the equivalent of Liverpool’s St George’s Hall, designed solely as an assembly hall, and intended for the fund-raising concerts that supported the General Hospital.

Based on the Roman Temple of Castor and Pollux and designed in 1831-2 by Joseph Aloysius Hansom (whose name is indelibly linked to the cab he invented), this is the building that ruined Hanson, his partner Welch and the contractors Thomas & Kendall:  they were obliged to complete the contract for no more than £17,000, but the eventual final cost was around £25,000.  “Bankruptcy has been fixed as the price of my adventure,” Hansom declared.

The project took until 1861 to complete under the supervision of Charles Edge.

Hanson’s original design had a gallery round three sides of the interior, and was crowded by other buildings on the north and east sides.  As early as 1837 the decision was taken to rebuild northwards to accommodate the organ in its present position;  a further northward extension of 1849-51 brought the Town Hall to its present size, and only then was the north façade completed to match the south and the west podium refaced to match the east.

Subsequent alterations have not been kind to Hanson’s design.   Modifications to the lobby in 1890-1 reduced the size of the auditorium.  In 1926-7 two rear galleries were designed by Owen Williams to replace the original one and a redecoration scheme by White, Allom & Co completely obliterated Hanson’s ceiling.

The William Hill organ (built in 1834 and successively rebuilt in 1843, 1889-90, 1932-3 and 1984) was until 1922 owned by the Governors of the General Hospital, because it was primarily intended for use in their fund-raising Triennial Festivals which date back to the late eighteenth century.  It was the biggest of its time:   it had the first ever 32-foot pipe and the first part-pneumatic action;  it was the first four-manual pipe-organ (enlarged to five manuals in 1984) and it had the first full pedal-keyboard.

The Town Hall has always been the scene of prestigious musical events.  It was the venue for the premières of Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1846), Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius (October 3rd 1900 – “one of British music’s more famous disasters”), The Apostles (1903) and The Kingdom (1906).

The list of eminent conductors who have performed at the Town Hall runs from Mendelssohn, through Elgar, Sibelius, Dvorak, Bruno Walter, Sir Adrian Boult, Sir Malcolm Sargent and Sir Thomas Beecham to Sir Simon Rattle.  The inaugural performance of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was conducted here by Sir Edward Elgar on November 10th 1920.

When the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra moved to Symphony Hall in 1991 the Town Hall was little used and it closed in 1996.  After a radical restoration, involving the reinstatement of the 1834 single balcony, it reopened as a partner to Symphony Hall in October 2007.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Back-to-Backs

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Back-to-Backs, Birmingham

Back-to-Backs, Birmingham

Though the National Trust is strongly associated with preserving the lifestyles of grand houses, one of its finest restoration projects of recent years brings vividly to life the living conditions of very ordinary Birmingham workers and their families.

The Birmingham Back-to-Backs is a fortunate survival of early nineteenth-century terraced houses dating from 1802-31 on the edge of the city centre, south of New Street Station, on the fringes of Chinatown and the Gay Village.

Here in what was once Court 15 on the corner of Ince Street and Hurst Street, as many of sixty people lived in eleven cramped houses, almost all of them back-to-back or blind-back in layout, with the privies and wash-houses (which in Birmingham are called “brewhouses”) in the yard outside.

Four of the houses are recreated to illustrate specific periods – a watchmaker’s house of the 1840s, a glass-eye-maker’s house of the 1870s, a locksmith’s of the 1930s and (after the buildings had been declared unfit for human habitation) a tailor’s shop of the 1970s which eventually closed when its proprietor, George Saunders, retired in 2002.

There were 43,000 of these dwellings in Birmingham at the end of the First World War, housing 200,000 people.  By 1988, when Court 15 was listed Grade II, it was the only survivor.

After detailed archaeological and historical research and sensitive stabilisation and restoration by the Birmingham Conservation Trust, the Back-to-Backs were handed over to the National Trust.

The Trust has recreated the 1930s sweet shop on the corner, operates three of the houses as short-term rental properties, and opens most of the remaining buildings to the public on strictly timed-ticketed tours.

Here is a living memorial to the cramped, arduous but sociable lives of the millions of Britons and foreign immigrants who poured into the Victorian cities looking for work, and who are the ancestors of most of the current British population.

The Birmingham Back to Backs is not the easiest National Trust property to arrange to visit.  Details are at http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/birmingham-back-to-backs.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Jewel of the Jewellery Quarter

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Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Vyse Street, Hockley, Birmingham

Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Vyse Street, Hockley, Birmingham

Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter is where you can still see and feel the buzz of small metalworking trades making money.  It’s the most complete remaining sector of the multitude of tiny multi-occupant workshops that once produced the bulk of Birmingham’s prosperity.

Historically, the district is Hockley.  The Jewellery Quarter name is a form of tourist branding that goes with brown signs and drawing in visitors.  Unlike other industrial cities that celebrate their industrial history as heritage when actually the trade is dead, Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter still makes and sells quality jewellery.

It survived because the nature of its trades is such that they would not survive transplanting:  only a quarter of the businesses in the Quarter employ more than twenty-five people.

Some clearance took place in the sixties, and the eight-storey Hockley Centre (Peter Hing & Jones 1970-1), now largely occupied by service-enterprises rather than craftsmen, stands as a monument to the period.

In streets such as Vittoria Street, Hylton Street and Frederick Street, the houses, converted in the nineteenth century by adding “shopping” blocks stretching away to the rear, are interspersed with more architecturally ambitious purpose-built workshops and showrooms.

The jewel of the Jewellery Quarter is the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter [http://www.bmag.org.uk/museum-of-the-jewellery-quarter], which opened in March 1992 on the premises of the jewellery-manufacturers, Smith & Pepper, whose works, barely altered since the First World War, had been left virtually intact after final closure in 1980.

The place still feels very much as if the owners had locked the door and left it, though in fact it is meticulously conserved, and inevitable modifications have been made for visitor access.

The greatest attraction of all is to watch a live jewellery-manufacturing demonstration, showing that the old skills still survive and bring the place to life.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Terra-cotta city: Ikon Gallery

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Former Oozells Street School, now the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Former Oozells Street School, now the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery [http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/about/introduction] in the middle of Brindleyplace was formerly the Oozells Street School (Martin & Chamberlain 1877), one of the forty-one designs for the Birmingham School Board produced by Martin & Chamberlain between 1873 and 1898, in this case built to three storeys to make best use of a cramped site.

From 1906 it was the Pupil Teachers’ Centre for Girls, later the Commercial College Day Department and latterly the College of Food and Domestic Arts until 1967.

After years of neglect in the blighted Broad Street area, it was redeveloped for gallery use and its saddle-back ventilation tower rebuilt by Levitt Bernstein Associates (1997).

It’s a superb conversion, for the most part using the original classroom spaces, with modern access needs, including a glass-sided lift, carefully inserted.

Its excellent Café Ikon [http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk/about/visiting/cafe_opus] is open to visitors without entering the gallery itself, and is a particularly pleasant place to sit on warm days.  It’s a good idea to beware of the teapots, though:  they’re good to look at but come adrift in the act of pouring.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Birmingham’s Catholic Cathedral

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St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham – viewed from the old Snow Hill Station (1977)

St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham – viewed from the old Snow Hill Station (1977)

Birmingham’s Catholic St Chad’s Cathedral was conceived in a white-heat enthusiasm following the Emancipation of Britain’s Catholics in 1829.

It was the first major work of the architect August Welby Northmore Pugin, built 1839-41 for around £20,000.

Pugin himself gave an “ancient German carved oak figure of the Blessed Virgin and Child…said to have been the first image of the Blessed Virgin exposed for public veneration in England since the Reformation”.

John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury gave £1,000 towards the construction-costs and a fifteenth-century brass lectern from Louvain, along with an elaborate set of High Mass vestments.

It was one of the first Pugin churches in which he installed, despite opposition from Cardinal Wiseman, one of the rood screens about which he quickly became notoriously obsessive.

Pugin’s total plan was only fully complete when the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor was constructed to a design by Sebastian Pugin Powell in 1933.

St Chad’s became a cathedral on October 27th 1850.  Edward Ilsley, who had been bishop since 1879, became the first archbishop when the see was elevated in 1911.

During the Birmingham blitz, on November 22nd 1941, an incendiary bomb penetrated the south-aisle roof and burnt a radiator which extinguished it.  This remarkable incident is commemorated in the replacement roof-panel, which is marked “Deo Gratias”.

This romantic North German structure once towered above Birmingham’s Gun Quarter until 1960, when the surrounding buildings including Pugin’s Bishop’s House across Water Street were demolished to make way for a bleak stretch of the inner-ring road.

In 1967 the rood-screen was taken down and transferred to the Anglican church of Holy Trinity, Reading and in the same remodelling the lectern given by Lord Shrewsbury was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of New York for £105,000:  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/471867.

St Chad’s is still an awe-inspiring place, but it’s no longer seen as Pugin visualised it.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Pugin and the Gothic Revival’ tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Birmingham’s Anglican Cathedral

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St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham

St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham

The parish church of St Philip was designed by Thomas Archer in 1709 and consecrated in 1715.  It was intended to serve the new northern streets, then called High Town, away from the ancient parish church of St Martin in the Bull Ring.

Archer was an interesting character, brought up in Henley-in-Arden, the son of the MP for Warwick, and as Groom Porter to Queen Anne he effectively held a patent to tax gambling across the nation.

St Philip’s was his first attempt at church-design and he went on to build St John’s, Smith Square, in London (1712-30) and St Paul’s, Deptford (1714-28).

He gave up architectural work when he was appointed Controller of Customs at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1715.  He died in May 1743 worth £100,000, which he bequeathed to his youngest nephew, Henry Archer, MP for Warwick.

As well as knowing the right people to make a lot of money, he was an exceptional designer.  Sir Nikolaus Pevsner & Alexandra Wedgwood point out that St Philip’s was “the first English church since St Paul Covent Garden to be designed by an architect who had seen for himself major Continental buildings”.

Its form is rectangular yet subtly varied and makes lively use of Doric and Corinthian orders.

The tower, which was not completed until 1725, is immediately recognisable by its scrolls and octagonal dome and may have inspired Cuthbert Brodrick’s tower for Leeds Town Hall (1853-8).

Archer’s original plan was to surmount his tower with a large cross, but this was replaced by a boar’s-head weathervane to acknowledge Sir Richard Gough’s influence in obtaining the £600 donation from King George I that enabled the lantern to be finished.

Money talks.

The Victorian architect J A Chatwin (1830-1907) extended the original chancel, adding extra Corinthian columns and a stepped entablature in white and gold to Archer’s square piers and round arches.  Ian Nairn described Chatwin’s work as “grand-slam Classical”.

Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1838-1898), who was born at Bennett’s Hill a short walk away and had been baptised in the church, designed for the three windows of Chatwin’s apse a triptych of the Nativity, Crucifixion and Ascension in William Morris glass, and subsequently gifted the design for the West Window which represents the Last Judgement.

St Philip’s became the cathedral when the Anglican Diocese was formed in 1905.

Incendiary bombs destroyed the roof in 1941, and the Cathedral was restored in 1947-8 by Philip and Anthony Chatwin, the son and great-nephew of J A Chatwin.

This must be one of the most intimate and welcoming of all the English cathedrals.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Terra-cotta city: Bell Edison Building

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Former Bell, Edison Building, 17-19 Newhall Street, Birmingham

Former Bell, Edison Building, 17-19 Newhall Street, Birmingham

One of the finest terracotta buildings in the centre of Birmingham is this rhapsody of ornament by Frederick William Martin (1859-1917), whose partnership, Martin & Chamberlain, was one of the leaders of the local ‘terracotta school’ of architects and best-known for their board schools and other public buildings.

It was originally the Bell Edison Building (1896), Birmingham’s first telephone exchange and headquarters of the National Telephone Company.

Its decoration is a riot of beasts and foliage with turrets, Dutch gables and chimneys enlivening the skyline.

The exchange equipment was originally installed on the top floor, where up to two hundred operators could connect callers.  Female operators had their own entrance and cloakroom.

The decorative wrought-iron gates are by the Bromsgrove Guild.

It was modernised as an office block, Exchange Buildings, with an additional floor by Mark Humphries Architects in 1994.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Snow Hill revived

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Snow Hill Station, Birmingham (1975)

Snow Hill Station, Birmingham (1975)

The absurdities of Victorian railway competition are only equalled by the profligate waste of the railway closures in the 1960s.

Birmingham’s two main stations lie at right-angles to each other, on different levels and several hundred yards apart, because three entirely separate and competing companies built the lines into Birmingham.

The Great Western Railway’s Snow Hill Station, first opened in 1852, developed into a magnificent red-brick and terracotta structure of 1911-12 behind J A Chatwin’s grand Great Western Hotel of 1875.

In 1961 a scheme was published to turn Snow Hill into “the most modern railway terminal in Europe”.

As late as 1964, during the electrification of the West Coast Main Line, it handled 130,000 trains and 7,500,000 passengers, compared with 175,000 trains and 10,000,000 passengers at New Street.

Later in the 1960s many former GWR services were closed or diverted to the redeveloped New Street, except for Stratford and Warwick local services which terminated at the suburban-relief station at Moor Street, south of the Inner Ring Road.

The Great Western Hotel was demolished in 1971.  Snow Hill Station itself remained derelict after the last train-service finished in 1972, became structurally unsafe and was eventually cleared in 1979.

However, from 1987 the Moor Street services again ran through the reopened tunnel, and a new Snow Hill Station was incorporated in the unlovely Colmore Court office-development.

Since 2001 the Birmingham to Wolverhampton service of the West Midlands Metro has used a platform of Snow Hill station as its city-centre terminus.

So, apart from the fact that more trains run from Moor Street than Snow Hill, and the second London service runs to Marylebone rather than Paddington, there are relatively few significant differences in the availability of services now than there were in 1960.

Hindsight is a wonderful luxury, but I can’t help wondering if the planners’ plans really added up correctly in the 1960s, any more than the haphazard eccentricities of Victorian laissez-faire did 110 years previously.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.

Great Western Arcade

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Great Western Arcade, Birmingham

Great Western Arcade, Birmingham

Birmingham’s finest shopping arcade, the Great Western Arcade, was built, as its name suggests, on the girders which were installed to cover the open railway cutting leading into Snow Hill Station in 1874.

Designed by the Birmingham architect W H Ward, it lost its top storey, its dome and the original design of the entrance to Colmore Row in the Birmingham blitz.  Sympathetically refurbished by Douglas Hickman of the John Madin Design Group in 1984-5, and further restored in 2009, it remains one of the pleasantest of Birmingham’s shopping experiences.

Even if you dislike shopping and shops, one of the great pleasures of central Birmingham is the Victorian Restaurant [http://www.greatwesternarcade.co.uk/shop-detail.php?ID=15] in the Great Western Arcade – an ideal place for breakfast, lunch or tea, preferably on the first floor, looking out on to the gallery and a glazed roof that could be Victorian, but isn’t.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s Birmingham’s Heritage lecture, please click here.