please empty your brain below
Great report. I knew you would get a few posts out of your trip to Birmingham.

Andrew | 22.03.15 - 7:56 a.m. | #

I love Brum. I lived there for the whole 1990s and still return whenever I can but I never knew about the back-to-backs. Will look them up on my next visit. Thanks DG. :-)

THC | 22.03.15 - 8:13 a.m. | #

There is also an old style sweet shop as part of the back to backs.

nick | 22.03.15 - 8:22 a.m. | #

A couple of great music venues around the old custard factory. If they were in London the national press would be banging on about them.

JS | 22.03.15 - 1:10 p.m. | #

DG you are so good at informing us about places we would probably want to visit but have never heard of. Keep up the good work. Tourist Boards should employ you to write about their attractions.

Anthony Finerty | Homepage | 22.03.15 - 2:00 p.m. | #

I'm from Brum, so I'm entitled to be rude about the place, but I think the Jewellery Quarter is fantastic.

I'm not sure what it says about Brummies that the Jewellery Quarter isn't very well known outside the city, despite it being one of the most interesting townscapes in the region. Perhaps this is due to Brummie modesty, but I suspect it is more down to the choking philistinism of the midlands.

The "Urban Repairs Club" write-up of their impressions of the Quarter is rather good

https://urbanrepairs.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/expedition-report-no-4-birmingham-cbd-westside-and-jewellery-quarter/

| 22.03.15 - 2:23 p.m. | #

Also in the Jewellery Quarter (just!), you've got The Coffin Works on Fleet Street, formerly the Newman Brothers Factory, which closed in 1999.

Admission's a fiver (£4 for concessions, £3 for children) and they're open from 12:00 - 17:00 (last entry 16:30) Tuesday to Thursday and on Sunday; and from 10:00 to 17:00 Friday and Saturday. Guided tours, lasting about 1 hour, start on the hour between 12:00 and 15:00.

In terms of content, it's not vastly different to the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, as much the same processes were involved, though it's obviously got a more funerial bent!

Barry S | 22.03.15 - 7:07 p.m. | #

This is getting a bit spooky as we were in Birmingham earlier in the week and visited the same sites!

"It says a lot that the National Trust's only Birmingham property is a courtyard of old back-to-back houses".
This is attributable to the City Engineer, Herbert Manzoni, who, quoting Wikipedia, "encouraged zoning of areas and redevelopment. He did not believe in the preservation of old buildings and saw their retention for sentimental purposes rather than valuable purposes. This was shown in his work which resulted in the loss of many old buildings and historic areas of the city. His attitudes became the orthodoxy and directly or indirectly led to the demolition of a number of much loved landmarks, such as the old Birmingham Central Library and the original Bull Ring market hall."

RogerB | 22.03.15 - 8:26 p.m. | #

Apropos of nothing: I went to Highbury last night to see the comedian Rob Newman. I just Googled the name of the pub to check if it was the Hen & Chicken or Hen & Chicken*s* and one of the first results that came up was "Hen & Chickens Jewellery Quarter."
Directly or otherwise, it seems certain paths seem somehow bound to intersect with somewhere that you've travelled!

RogerW | 22.03.15 - 9:15 p.m. | #

For some years the Custard Factory played gracious hosts to Young Rewired State (www.yrs.io). This is an organisation which gets young computer coders out of their bedrooms and working together to make apps and the like from open source data. The youngsters involved (aged about 10 -18) spend a week in August putting their coding skills to use in a local centre (for example in our neck of the woods Queen Mary's College) and then descend from every corner of the country to present their finished product in a competition environment. The first year our eldest went we collected him from the Custard Factory where we found him completely zonked out from all night coding and replete with pizza and curry. It's a brilliant organisation but has now outgrown the custard factory and so this year is meeting at Aston University.

Joan | 23.03.15 - 8:11 a.m. | #

I visited the Birmingham back-to-backs yesterday and the tour is still exactly as you described eight years ago, word for word (including older people becoming nostalgic, but without the eclipse).

kewman | 03.03.23 - 12:13 a.m. | #











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