The district now known as of Hockley, the home of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, lies north of the City Centre straddling Icknield Street on its west side and stretching as far as Newtown Row on its eastern side then north as far as Winson Green. It was an area formerly on the edge of Birmingham Heath which is largely made up of glacial drift up to 15 metres in depth overlying sandstone and pebble beds. But the quality of the drift is very variable, with differing mixes of gravel, sand, clay and stones. There would have been some woodland here, but the heath would have been for the most part large areas of barren heathland connecting with Handsworth Heath to the north-west. This was poor agricultural land and considered to be undeveloped ‘waste’ until the bulk of it, some 350 hectares, was enclosed by a parliamentary act in 1798.
The name Hockley is certainly medieval and may derive from Hocca’s leah or more likely Hocca’s lowe given the local topography. Leah means ‘clearing’ and would more normally be associated with eastern districts of Birmingham where the heavy clay soil is given naturally to dense oak forest. Here the underlying geology on the Hockley side of Birmingham is sand and pebbles which is not given to dense tree cover. Hocca’s lowe would mean a ‘hill’ or ‘mound’, which seems to better fit the landscape.
The location of any original settlement of Hockley is unknown, although a moated site was still visible in the 18th century prior to building at Warstone Lane and Vyse Street. This is likely to have been the Augustinian Priory of St Thomas of Canterbury probably established by a member of the de Birmingham family dating from the 13th century. It was recorded c1390 as being near the sandpits at Warstone (from ‘Old English har stan feld, which means ‘boundary stone field’. This is the point where the manors of Aston, Birmingham and Handsworth meet. The Boundary Stone (Hoarstone or War Stone), a glacial erratic, can still be seen on Warstone Lane on the edge of Warstone Cemetery).
In 1560 as monastic estates were made available during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, William Colmore was able to buy the Conyngre, the ‘rabbit warren’ of St Thomas’s Priory which lay on the north side of the town between Sand Pits and Snowhill, Colmore Row and the ‘Priory’ Brook beyond Lionel Street. Rabbits had been introduced from the Mediterranean region in early Norman times and were farmed commercially on a wide scale by the 13th century. Bred for food and for fur they were an expensive luxury. These ancestors of the naturalised British rabbit had to be nurtured carefully in our colder climate. They could be contained by ditches and banks topped with an impenetrable shrub such as gorse. The light sandy soil of the Birmingham ridge was ideal.
The Colmore family had made their fortune in Birmingham dealing in cloth. The family home was a large, probably timber-framed house near the present site of Moor Street Station. In the early years of the 17th century William Colmore’s son, William the Younger built a large Jacobean mansion called New Hall set at the top of this large estate. Newhall Street was originally an avenue lined with elm trees leading to the house which stood just across the current junction with Great Charles Street. It was surrounded by an extensive park. Newhall Hill stands behind it rising up from Summer Row and Sandpits to the ridge on where now stands the Jewellery Quarter and part of Hockley.
Gradually the estate around the hall was encroached on by the expanding and industrialising town. The Wednesbury Turnpike was set up in 1727, created largely as a new through-road from Birmingham via existing village tracks across the Heath to Dudley and Bilston. It left Birmingham from Bull Street and Snow Hill via Constitution Hill, Great Hampton Street and descended Hockley Hill to the crossing of Hockley Brook before ascending Soho Hill to what is now Soho Road/ Holyhead Road. At the bottom of Constitution Hill and at Villa Road were tollgates and keepers’ cottages. Because of legal restrictions on the estate the Colmores, now long gone to Middlesex, were initially unable to sell their land for development but in 1746 Ann Colmore sponsored a private act of Parliament to solve the problem and the land was sold as individual plots. Subsequently development of the Newhall or Colmore estate was rapid, especially nearest the town. Most of Colmore Row was built up within five years, and the rest of the estate appeared during the next 25 years. New Hall itself, after a spell as one of Matthew Boulton’s warehouses, was demolished in 1787. In 1783 William Hutton described Hockley as a built-up area to the northern edge of Birmingham and recorded a number of hamlets beyond it, including a group of fourteen houses at the Sand Pits on the Dudley Road – the site today of Key Hill Cemetery.
The 1798 Act of Parliament that divided the Heath between the local landowners sold the largest portion to Sir Thomas Gooch. The heath was developed very slowly. In 1801 the Turnpike road was improved as part of the London-Holyhead Mail Road. Thomas Telford raised the level of the road across the valley of Hockley Brook where Hockley Flyover now stands and reduced the height and gradient of Soho Hill. The Birmingham Canal attracted a ribbon of industrial development along its banks, and a small number of country mansions were built along the Dudley Road, but extensive housing did not take place until the late 1800s.
In 1799 Richard Ford leased some 15 acres of the Heath land. Ford had made his fortune making thimbles – thimbles were to be found in every house, as they were vital for clothwork. Previously production of metal thimbles (originally brass) in this country had been carried out at the end of the 17th century by a Dutchman John Lofting who had a thimble mill in London producing some two million thimbles annually, cast in moulds. In 1769 Richard Ford had patented a process in Birmingham known as deep-drawing where the thimble is formed from a metal disc being repeatedly forced between dies and then annealed by heat. This needed less skilled labour, was much faster and more precise and used less metal than the Dutch method.
Ford had concerns about the behaviour of his workers who, when laid off through lack of work drank away their money in the alehouse to the detriment of their families. He saved some 15 shillings a week for a considerable time and when trade was slack he used it to pay his workers to collect slag by horse and cart from Aston Furnaces to build him a house not far from Hockley Brook and Hockley Pool (now off Whitmore Street). It may be that the use of this strange material gave him the idea to have the house built in a Gothic ruined style. With no justification he called the building “Hockley Abbey” and had the date 1473 made in pebbles on the front. Ford had ivy trained over the house to give the impression of age. The house and land were rented by Hubert Gallon in 1816 at a cost of £100 a year. By 1830 industrialist and politician George Frederick Muntz was living there. At that time Muntz had a metal factory near St Paul’s Square in Birmingham.
The emergence of the Jewellery Quarter was the indirect result of the sale and subsequent development of the Colmore estate on the north-western edge of the town. When in 1746 Ann Colmore had the restrictions lifted on development of the estate, over the next 50 years the present grid pattern of streets between Colmore Row and St Paul’s Square was put in place. However 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 of large and small buildings cheek-by jowl, large houses for the wealthy next to smaller 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 with the intention of expanding prosperous middle class housing 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. What spoiled Charles Colmore’s plans was the development of the canal system and the industry it attracted.
The Birmingham Canal to Wednesbury opened in 1769 was linked in 1789 to the Birmingham & Fazeley Canal and separated the new development from the town. These canals were commercial highways and attracted industrial and warehouse building in any 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 the part of Hockley nearest the City and lying between Icknield Street and Great Hampton Street/ Constitution Hill began to emerge as the Jewellery Quarter. St Paul’s is now known for its proximity to the Jewellery Quarter as ‘The Jewellers’ Church’. The Jewellery Quarter now has the greatest concentration of wholesale and retail jewellery manufacturers in Europe. Over a third of all British jewellery is still made today within one mile of Birmingham City Centre.
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 go to live elsewhere.
The Jewellery Trade
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 Newhall St 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.
The earliest reference to jewellery manufacture in Birmingham was 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 (made more specifically in the Gun Quarter). And in addition to working in steel, brass, and copper, silver and gold were increasingly used. The move towards small quality items was driven by the promise of higher profits. By 1780 a local directory listed 26 jewellers spread across the town, which at that time covered the area that has become the City Centre.
The Jewellery Quarter’s output quickly surpassed that of the jewellery trade in nearby Derby and the products manufactured in the Quarter also improved in quality. The Edinburgh jewellery trade also declined and by the end of the 19th century, the middle classes in London and across the Empire depended on supplies from Birmingham. Most jewellers still worked in small workshops that would employ between five and fifty people and nine out of ten Master Jewellers had worked their way up from the workshops.
By the mid-1800s the jewellery trade was considered the most lucrative in the city with jewellers being some of the best paid workers in the city. There were also more people employed in the trade than any other in the city. Boys were given apprenticeships at the age of 14 and earned four shillings on average. This would increase annually until they were 21 where would work from 8am till 7pm. Apprentices generally did not require any qualifications but style became a study within the industry and one jeweller’s firm required all apprentices to attend the Birmingham School of Art. Whole families generally were not employed in the trade and most earned additional income by producing leather or paper boxes which were used extensively by jewellers in which to place and protect finished articles.
By 1861, 7,500 were employed in the jewellery trade and by 1880, there were nearly 700 workshops listed in a local directory. The trade benefited greatly from the declining price of raw gold from the 1880s onwards and from the development and refinement of new processes such as electroplating invented by George Elkington at his works in Newhall St. where also the first man-made plastic, Parkesine, was patented by Alexander Parkes in 1856.
In 1883, while less than half of all silver jewellery made in Birmingham was of high enough standard to pass through the Birmingham Assay Office, but in the same year over 30 tons of silver jewellery and 3 tons of gold items were received bringing the total number of articles made in Birmingham sent in for assaying that year to over 2.6 million.
In 1885, Thomas Harman and Walter Showell wrote their Showell’s Dictionary of Birmingham noting that the trade was experiencing a downturn in business and that thousands of workers were surviving on part-time hours with many finding themselves unemployed. This depression was felt nationwide and lasted throughout the 1880s. Many manufacturers went out of business during that period and showed to manufacturers after a long period of growth and prosperity that the trade was susceptible to economic problems.
Newhall Hill is now recalled only as a street name but in the early 19th century it was the site of extensive sandpits. Their extent can still be seen as a great gouge in the hillside in Key Hill Cemetery. The quarries here yielded both sand and sandstone – used from medieval times for building work – but it also proved to be good for making casting moulds in iron foundries and from the 18th century sand and stone from here was used in the construction of the local canals. To the foot of the quarry was dug Caroline Colmore’s Canal (Miss Colmore’s Canal) now known as the Whitmore Arm – around 1810 alongside which also stood William Whitmore’s iron foundry. This Arm left the Birmingham & Fazeley canal at Newhall Street, halfway up the Farmer’s Bridge flight, and it was from here that many tonnes of sand and presumably Whitmore’s cast-iron fittings were transported. Whitmore is also remembered for his role in building the Stratford Canal and for designing a boat-lift for the Somerset Coal Canal.
Newhall Hill is today most famous as the site of very large public meetings in the early 1820s called by the Birmingham Political Union and Thomas Attwood. He campaigned for parliament to pass The Great Reform Bill which would draw more people into the democratic process (Votes for men, years before there were votes for Women). The current system of parliamentary democracy was rooted in a semi-feudal society, set in a time when the majority of people lived in the countryside and few people were literate.
By the 1800s literacy had spread considerably and almost half the population lived in towns and cities where there was no parliamentary representation. The political unions demanded (mainly male) household suffrage and secret ballots, salaries for MPs, the abolition of the property qualification for MPs and triennial elections. The most famous meeting was that of 7th May 1832 which was allegedly attended by over 200,000 people, all to hear Thomas Atwood of Halesowen.
In 1834 most of Hockley was still a rural area on the western fringe of Birmingham, urban only as far west as Summer Hill Road and as far north as Warstone Lane.
By 1825 the Birmingham and Staffordshire Gas Light Company was established and they lit Great Hampton Street in 1836. In 1832, the company started offering piped gas and, by 1840, all jewellers had a supply of gas to their blowpipes. In 1846, Vyse Street was constructed by Richard Howard-Vyse and Hylton Street was then cut to the north. Branston, Spencer and Hockley Street were all extended from the Inge estate to Vyse Street and Pitsford Street on the Vyse estate. This layout was intended to produce as many building plots as possible.
In 1835, Key Hill Cemetery (“the Jeweller’s Cemetery”) was opened in the old sand quarry although sand continued to be removed as it was in such high demand and was of high quality. The cemetery contains the graves of so many prominent members of Birmingham society in the late 19th century who wanted a non-religious burial plot, to the extent that in 1915 E. H. Manning felt able to dub it “the Westminster Abbey of the Midlands”.
But from the middle of the 1800s the cheap, unattractive and extensive land of the Heath proved a boon to the Birmingham Borough authorities when public institutions were needed for the expanding population of the town. The Borough Gaol opened in 1849, All Saints Hospital the following year and the new Birmingham Workhouse opened in 1852. Various isolation hospitals were opened nearby for serious diseases between 1874 and the end of the century, and in 1889 the Dudley Road Infirmary was built. By 1850 it had been built up from the town centre as far as Hockley Brook, which was the boundary with Aston. By 1881 the Aston side of the brook was also completely urban with Hockley itself completely built up with working-class housing and industry and encircled by similar urban districts.
In 1854 the Birmingham, Wolverhampton & Dudley Railway line became the Great Western’s line from Birmingham Snow Hill to Wolverhampton Low Level Station. Opposite Hockley Station was Hockley Goods Station. This ran the length of Pitsford Street and had a branch line to the rail-canal interchange at Hockley Port on the Birmingham Canal Navigations between Brookfield Road and Lodge Road. On 20 May 1872 the first horse-tram line in the Midlands was opened by Birmingham & District Tramways. The line ran from the Birmingham boundary at Hockley Brook (Hockley Flyover) along the Soho Road/ Holyhead Road through Handsworth to West Bromwich. Twelve crimson and cream open-topped double-decked horse-drawn cars ran on single-track lines. In 1888 the route was converted to an underground cable traction system because of the steep climb up Hockley Hill; the depot was at Whitmore Street, off Hockley Hill. By 1906 all Birmingham lines were electrified with overhead cables.
Queen Victoria’s extended period of mourning after the death of Prince Albert in 1861 had caused the Jewellery trade to be in a distressed state for 25 years. The fashion to wear black with no adornments lasted until Princess Alexandra was persuaded to start wearing fashion clothes again in the late 1880s, a trend that was boosted by Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1887. The Pen trade had proved the saviour for Hockley over this period and the back-to-backs around Camden St, Tenby St and Carver St that were built 1820-1860 brought many low-paid workers that would provide the workforce for the Jewellery trade once it started to rise again. Between 1886 and 1914 employment in the Jewellery trade doubled to 30,000, over 6000 of whom were women. The period also brought a transformation from the individual, specialised workshops requiring close collaboration, to larger privately owned workshops and factories.
More importantly perhaps 200 of the businesses agreed to form an umbrella organisation – the Birmingham Jewellers and Silversmiths Association – who recognised the need for education. The Jeweller’s Technical School opened in 1890 open to men and women alike, and it had such huge approval and support from Joseph Chamberlain that in 1903 they erected the Chamberlain Clock at the entrance to the Quarter.
But Came They All to Birmingham 