The Victorian Era

How Did Birmingham Grow in the Victorian Era

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Birmingham grew rapidly during the Victorian period, transforming from a mid-sized market town of about 71,000 inhabitants in 1801 to a major industrial city of about 522,000 inhabitants by 1901. The growth was driven by the extraordinary variety of its skilled trades: the city was renowned for its brass foundries, its gun-making, its jewellery workshops, and its manufacture of buttons, buckles, pins, steel pens, screws, locks, and small hardware of every description. Unlike the textile cities of the north, Birmingham’s economy rested on hundreds of small workshops rather than a few great mills, and this diversity earned it the title of the city of a thousand trades. The wider context is examined in Victorian Cities Beyond London.

The Metal-Working Industries

The metal-working industries were the principal industries of the city. The workshops worked in brass, copper, iron, steel, and the precious metals. Birmingham brass, cast and stamped into fittings, lamps, bedsteads, taps, and machine parts, was exported throughout the world, and the brass trade employed tens of thousands of workers by the late Victorian period. The gun trade, concentrated in the Gun Quarter around Steelhouse Lane, supplied military and sporting markets alike. The Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA), founded in 1861 at the former Government Small Arms Factory at Enfield and reconstituted in Birmingham, became the principal military and sporting gun-maker in the country. The so-called toy trade — the contemporary name for the manufacture of small steel and brass articles such as buckles, buttons, and trinkets — occupied a multitude of skilled hands. Alongside these stood the makers of steel pens, screws, nails, chains, locks, and keys, whose cheap and reliable products carried the name of Birmingham into every corner of the empire.

The pen trade is particularly associated with the city. Joseph Gillott, the founder of the trade, set up his works in Graham Street in 1828 and by 1857 was producing some 250 million steel pen nibs a year. Perry & Co, Hinks, Wells & Co, and C. Brandauer & Co joined him; their products were sold in every country where people wrote with a pen, and the work was done largely by women and children, sometimes at home and sometimes in the great new factories.

The Jewellery and Toy-Making Industries

The jewellery and toy-making industries were the second most important industries of the city. The jewellery trade was concentrated in the Jewellery Quarter of Hockley, which by the late Victorian period had become the principal centre of jewellery manufacture in Britain. Its workshops produced gold and silver wares, costume jewellery, and the mourning jewellery that Victorian custom demanded. The trade was organised in small workshops grouped around Vyse Street, Spencer Street, and Warstone Lane, with the great jewellery and silver-smithing firms of Boulton & Sons (the heirs of Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory) and Elkington & Co, the pioneers of electroplating, among the leaders. The jewellery quarter retains much of its Victorian character to the present.

The New Electrical Engineering

Birmingham became a major centre of the new electrical engineering from the 1880s onwards. Chamberlain and Hookham, founded in 1879, supplied the electricity meters for the new municipal power stations; Ferranti, founded in 1882 in nearby Hollinwood and moved to London, made transformers and large electrical machines; the General Electric Company, founded in 1886 and based at the Witton works from 1889, was the principal supplier of electrical equipment in Britain by the early twentieth century. The new industry was based on the older skilled trades of the metal-workers, and the same labour force that had made pins and pens in the 1840s was making dynamos and meters in the 1890s.

The Civic Birmingham

The wealth of the Victorian city paid for a series of great public buildings. The Council House (Yeoville Thomason, 1879) and the Town Hall (Hansom and Welch, 1834) were the centres of municipal government; the new municipal buildings in Victoria Square (1880s) and the great museum and art gallery of Chamberlain Square (opened 1885, with a 19th-century extension by John Henry Chamberlain) housed the public collections. The University of Birmingham, founded in 1900 from the older Mason University College, was the legacy of the Victorian civic culture. The Bull Ring market, the centre of the old town, was rebuilt in stages through the 1880s and 1890s, and the city centre was refaced in brick and terracotta by the great municipal architects of the period. The wider context is examined in Victorian Architecture and Interior Design.