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Reviews
| The Birmingham Jewellry Quarter: An Architectural Survey of the Manufactories. By John Cattell, Sheila Ely, and Barry Jones. Swindon, England: English Heritage, 2002. xiv+294 pp., illus., maps, notes, gazetteer, bibl., index. $72 hb (ISBN 1-873592-48-5).
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An understanding of the industrial past quite often has much to do with architecture. Industry and the buildings that house it are inseparable, especially when found within a tight urban compass of factories, associated small businesses, and workforce housing. The functional imperatives of industry interweave the aesthetic and structural concerns of buildings.
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Nowhere is this interplay more evident than in the neighborhoods crowded with the jewelry-making enterprise in Birmingham, England, "the city of a thousand trades" (p. viii). The National Monuments Record Centre of English Heritage has added a fine volume to its distinguished line of books that chronicle the built heritage of the British countryside. English Heritage's traditional reliance on glorious photography of walled gardens in full bloom, baronial country estates, and gilded drawing rooms is tested by the inclusion of grimy workshop interiors and the squalid alleyways of central Birmingham, but these illustrations meet the challenge in unflinching color.
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The production of small metal goods has been underway in the Birmingham area for centuries, due to a confluence of fuels, raw materials, markets, and workforces. Only the precious metals and gems have required importation. Gold and silver bracelets, watch chains, pen nibs, metal buttons, badges, buckles, spectacle frames, jet ornaments, coffin and door hardware, silver teething rings, powder compacts, spurs, and a host of other niceties have issued from Birmingham workshops. In 1884, 472 city firms specialized in the making of brooches alone; and in the quarter's heyday around 1913, some 70,000 locals found employment in the jewelry trades (p. 26). The scale of manufacturing firms, however, remained small. In 1947, 60% of the quarter's jewelry output sprang from firms with fewer than 10 employees (p. 24).
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Authors Cattell, Ely, and Jones pass a historian's comb through the quarter six times: historical origins; jewelry-making processes; transformation of workshops into factories; internal shop order and operations; the quarter in local, national, and international contexts; and a building-by-building illustrated gazetteer, discussing all jewelry-relevant aspects of the external character and internal deportment of structures that stand today.
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A considerable text chronicles the ongoing evolution of Birmingham jewelry workshops from small ateliers squeezed into the domestic quarters of homes to purpose-built jewelry factories shoehorned into narrow blocks that retain a dominantly residential character. "Long after the merchants of Leeds ... had abandoned their town residences and backyard warehouses and dye houses, the Birmingham jewelry-manufacturer still lived above the shop" (p. 52). Annealing hearths provided heat to many a home. The once-stately Birmingham gardens sprouted jewelry-making workshops. Windows and doors were bricked up to subdivide quarters and decrease visibility from the street, creating a dense warren of jewelry works that endures to this day.
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Chapter 5, devoted to local, national, and international context, jumps around from London goldsmithing and Sheffield silverware to Pforzheim cuckoo clocks and beads in Jablonec, Czech Republic, but somehow overlooks the vast tradition of home-based metalworking in the greater Birmingham area, beyond a mention of Matthew Bolton's Soho Manufactory. The absence of that rich regional context from this book best betrays the patrician leanings of English Heritage. The desolate landscape south of Birmingham, the Black Country, was once dotted with small-scale, home-based light manufacturing, not unlike the domestic light metalworking traditions found in Birmingham neighborhoods but without the glint of eye-catching jewelry. In the grimy villages of Dudley, Wolverhampton, Bromsgrove, and Worcester, thousands of filthy hovels were lit by forge fires—day and night—at which men, women, and children worked at small anvils to convert iron rod into hand-wrought nails, chain, key rings, hinges, metal toys, and screws.
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This is a beautiful book for the community of structures and systems it sets out to address. Chapter 4, "Processes Involved in Jewellery and Small Metalware Production," is of special interest to readers of this journal. Casting, forging, stamping, drawing, pressing, piercing, punching, spinning, soldering, filing, electroplating, lapping, tumbling, and polishing each receive explications married to examples of surviving apparatus in specific shops in the quarter. The door-to-door inter-relationships among this community of machine processes and bench skills, often carried on in domestic quarters, broke down during and after World War I. Factories arose to produce munitions, carpeting, and costume jewelry, and yet the community remains. Prince Charles himself lays down the dilemma in the book's introduction:
Today's challenge, I am happy to say, is not one of enticing residents back into this marvellous neighbourhood, but rather how to continue with the Jewellery Quarter's regeneration with a sensitivity that can ensure that its historic businesses and its "genius loci," continues to flourish alongside new homes, shops, and other amenities (p. vii).
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This book does with Birmingham's Jewelry Quarter what a score of other books could do for the trade-specific quarters of cities in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Oddly, the garment industry has received the lion's share of such treatments. The jewelry-making districts of Waterbury, Connecticut; Providence, Rhode Island; New York, New York; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, merit such an integration of building photography with internal process. What of Antwerp's diamond quarter, Dieppe's old ivory-carving streets, Hyderabad's thriving and long-lived pearl district, and the tortoise shell comb-making lanes of Leominster, Massachusetts?
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One regret is the book's lack of historical photography. Five modest images capture workshops during the quarter's prime. Hundreds of others show the neighborhoods as they exist today, befitting an architectural survey. Some further comparative visual studies would have added to the meaning of the machinery rooms and mute terracotta detailing that are seen today.
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Rare among glamour books of this pedigree, this volume has an unabashed illustrated discussion of urban sewerage facilities, worker privies, and sanitation. Varied examples of "sanitary" iron castings from the celebrated Glasgow foundry, MacFarlane's, stand today in toilet blocks (water closets) out back of the old jewelry manufactories, together with evidence of other amenities of a bygone age: horse stables, tea rooms for the workers, cycle sheds, and assay houses.
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| Among all the building photos, street maps, line art, and text, the reader might be left to wonder, what of the jewelry itself, conspicuous by its absence from this book? It is the quarter itself that is the necklace, polished with age, deeply faceted, missing a few jewels of buildings here and there, but largely intact and still producing the line of product that made it famous. Today the area serves as the largest manufacturer of gold jewelry in the United Kingdom. |
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