Birmingham Assay Office - Newhall Street

Opening in 1773 following the Hallmarking Act, the purpose of the Birmingham Assay Office was to validate the quality of the precious metal used and to hallmark the item to attest to this measure having been validated (the hallmark indicating the maker and date of item and the anchor symbol indicating the Birmingham Assay Office).  With a flourishing ‘Jewellery Quarter’ at Hockley, the Assay Office was destined to be an increasingly busy place and, interestingly, its first customer was Matthew Boulton who had tirelessly campaigned for the opening of a local Assay Office due to the restrictive practice of having to send all products to London to be assayed.

In 1877, the Assay Office moved to its current location on the corner of Newhall Street and Charlotte Street – opposite the Elkington’s Silver Electroplating Works that was later to become home to the Birmingham Museum of Science and Industry.

An enduring success story in the history of Birmingham, the Assay Office in Newhall Street is today the largest in the World handling in excess of 12 million precious metal items a year!

Cadbury - Bournville, viewed from the Cross City Line

Amongst the doom and gloom that is usually associated with Birmingham’s ever-shrinking industry it is nice, for once, to report a success story and there are currently none better than that of Cadburys.

Beginning in a small shop in Bull Street in 1824, John Cadbury’s fledgling business began to rapidly expand and by 1847 brother Benjamin had been taken into partnership and larger premises sough in Bridge Street. In 1860 the business was passed to John’s sons, Richard and George, who built the business and sought new premises, settling on a greenfield site near Stirchley in South Birmingham at which they set about building a new factory in 1879.

The combination of a healthy rural environment, the Midland Railway, the Worcester & Birmingham Canal and fresh water coupled with a large undeveloped plot of land, made this the ideal spot for the rapidly expanding business. In addition to the factory, the Cadbury’s were philanthropic Quakers who believed in caring for their workers – although more cynical revisionist histories suggest other reasons for their endeavour – and constructed the 330+ acre village of Bournville around the works with large, good quality housing with gardens, swimming baths, a library and a whole host of other facilities (and educational and health-related schemes), many of which remain today!

The works developed its own internal railway, with locos, that linked with the Midland Railway’s Birmingham West Suburban Line and also crossed the line to reach their Waterside Wharf on the Worcester & Birmingham canal. Prior to the railway connection, horse-drawn carts had to traipse a mile and a half away to Lifford transshipment wharf near Kings Norton to avail the company of the rail network.

Like many of the region’s companies, Cadbury’s has been involved in numerous mergers and acquisitions of other companies. The difference appears to be the business acumen displayed through the majority of business dealings: the absorption of Typhoo, Frys, Schweppes, Trebor-Bassett and many, many more over the years has served to strengthen the company and enable movement into other markets, most of which they have exploited successfully.

At last, a Birmingham success story! They have traded longer than most of the companies in the region and have outlasted many of them – it was ‘alleged’ that a desperate call from Rover’s Personnel Dept several weeks before their ’sudden’ closure asking if they had vacancies for ‘a considerable number’ of electrician apprentices, however, fell on deaf ears!

Alstom (Metropolitan-Cammell Ltd) - Leigh Road, Washwood Heath

Opened under the Midland Railway Carriage and Wagon Company, the works at Washwood Heath operated hand in hand with, and eventually absorbed the work of, Joseph Wright & Sons works at Saltley.

Developing stock for the railways of the Empire and the flourishing rail industry at home, the company enjoyed great susccess and in 1929 was bought by Vickers Ltd and Cammell Laird and Co (shipbuilders) and became Metropolitan-Cammell Ltd. Further success ensued with the giant backing of the two parent companies leading to the landing of successive lucrative contracts and, in 1962, the works absorbing the manufacturing work from the Saltley works which had closed.

However, as with any industrial success story – including making trains for railways in the UK and overseas, including the London Underground, Hong Kong Metro, the Channel Tunnel and locomotives for Malaysia’s Keretapi Tanah Melayu – eventually a period of decline ensued, due in part to cheaper competition from abroad and later the restructuring of British Rail into privatised franchises.

In 1989 the company was sold to GEC Alsthom (who later dropped the ‘h’, becoming Alstom) and in 1998 the Alstom Group emerged as owners.  The now French-owned company initially continued working the plant and landed contracts to build the Pendolino fleet for Virgin Trains – a contract which proved to be the company’s last UK production. A £100m contract was won for London Underground’s Jubilee Line which was swiftly followed by an announcement from Alstom that the contract could be fulfilled more cheaply abroad which was itself followed by the seemingly overnight withdrawal of Alstom from train production across the UK with, of course, the swift asset stripping of machinery from the plant.

By the close of 2004, the last Pendolino had rolled off the production line and, despite admirable attempts by the trade union Amicus, along with the workers, to pressurise Alstom to reconsider, the works closed after 158 years of production with the loss of 1900 jobs.

Birmingham Battery & Metal Co - Selly Oak

The Birmingham Battery & Metal Co opened a new rolling mill in Selly Oak in 1871 to equip them for their new venture into rolling and tube production. Incidentally, to dispel a popularly held local misconception, the company did not make ‘batteries’: ‘battery’ was a term for hammering, or battering, ingots of metal into various shapes for the production of various products – pans and kettles, for example.

The Selly Oak site rapidly grew and added a copper refinery, tube mill, rolling mill and canal wharf on the Dudley Canal (now drained and filled) at its junction with the Worcester & Birmingham Canal. The firm enjoyed a boom period supplying railways with stay rods for boilers, amongst other products, and expanding to the point where a coal-fired gas production plant was built to power the machinery and its own power station!

However, as did many of the heavy industries, the company fell into difficulty during the 1980s and closed down leaving a large site prime for redevelopment but heavily contaminated. In its heyday the site was considerable but proposals for residential development were rebuffed due to the land contamination and instead, part of the site was turned into Battery Park – a retail development – and a large Sainsbury’s store.

Futher development of the area is underway with the future of the remaining factory structure looking seriously grim if the following consultation document is anything to go by:

It would appear that what is now proposed is a renavigating of the Dudley Canal – which had been drained and filled, remnants of which can be clearly seen on Harborne Lane – and the construction of a 54-acre retail and residential site and a new, bigger Sainsburys on the site of the remaining Company building.

I have to say I think the remaining Company office building is fantastic and defintiely aesthetically pleasing in a rather gothic manner and I, for one, will be sorry to see it go if it does get swept away:  the road building and bypass scheme – although well-advanced – has not brought about the demise of the building on Bristol Road as yet but I feel it’s more a matter of ‘when’ than an ‘if’.

HP Sauce factory, Aston

Another example of a British institution being sold to a company from abroad and later to be closed is the stalwart of the British breakfast table, HP Sauce of Aston.

The recipe for HP brown sauce was bought from its creator, Nottingham grocer Frederick Gibson Garton, by Edward Samson Moore, owner of the Midland Vinegar Company in 1903. The plant originally brewed its own vinegar for production of the sauce and when the A38 Aston Expressway bisected the site, a pipe was mounted over the Expressway to pump vinegar from one side of the works (The Top Yard – which has long-since closed) to the other!

Danone bought HP Foods for £199 million from industrial conglomerate Hanson in 1988 but, for various reasons connected with other areas of the Danone empire, announced in March 2005 that it was seeking a buyer. In stepped Heinz with a £470 succesful bid who then announced, a year later, their plan to shift production to Elste in the Netherlands! For once, a flourishing business with annual after-tax profits of around £31 million faced closure with the loss of around 120 of its existing workforce (which had already been gradually eroded over the previous few years).

Sadly, the production shifted from the site with closure coming in March 2007, closely followed by complete demolition of the factory itself:  yet another industrial staple of Birmingham – and landmark, particularly the tower as seen in the photograph above – gone from the City for good.

Mitchell's and Butler's Cape Hill Brewery

Opening in 1881, Henry Mitchell took over his father’s pub, the Crown Inn in Smethwick, and, as did a large number of landlords during the period, set about constructing a small brewery adjoining the premises. In 1877, Mitchell began constructing the Cape Hill brewery which was completed in 1879 and became a joint venture with prominent local brewer William Butler in 1898 with a merging of their respective companies to form Mitchel’s and Butler’s.

The brewery went from strength to strength acquiring a large number of pubs, hotels and other breweries. Merging with Bass in 1961, the company had operated around 4,000 pubs and with its merger with Charrington United in 1969, inherited a further 5,000. The brewery enjoyed its own internal railway, linked to the long-gone Harborne Railway (read more on the brewery’s railway on the sister site Rail Around Birmingham HERE), had extensive stabling for its horse-drawn delivery duties, a thriving social club, cricket and bowling teams and had entertained such showbiz luminaries as Laurel & Hardy over the years!

However, legislation during the 1980s limited the number of pubs breweries could own leading to a mass sell-off of properties and unsuccessful foreign outings and a failed take over of Carlsberg-Tetley spelt a downturn for the company resulting in the selling-off of its brewing arm to Belgium Interbrew Group. The final takeover was by American giants Coors who, within a matter of months from taking over, announced that the brewery would be closing on December 6th 2002. As of my visit in March 2005, the site demolition was well underway and Persimmon Homes had obtained permission from Sandwell Council to build 650 new homes on the site.

Dismantling the overhead conveyor system 05/08/06

One of the more shocking elements of the demise of Longbridge, social and econimic consequences aside, was the changes it bought about to the landscape of the southern tip of Birmingham.  Views that I had known all my life had suddenly, and drastically, changed.  For visitors to the City approaching from the South along the A38, one of the most striking changes was the removal of the overhead conveyor system that had provided a ‘gateway to Birmingham’ from a southern approach for 30 years.

Whilst it can be argued that industrial landscapes are an eyesore etc . . . they are very much, or at least were, integral to the landscape of Birmingham and its surrounding regions so to lose 400 acres of such industrial heritage in one fell swoop has had a considerable impact on the region.

Below are a series of images covering largely the demolition of the West Works and the removal of the overhead conveyor bridge (which was no mean feat) during the period 04/08/06 – 04/11/06:

Austin Rover works Q Gate

One of the giants, if not THE giant, of Birmingham industry was that of Austin Rover (under its many guises). It can virtually be guaranteed that anyone like me, growing up in South Birmingham, knew countless people employed at the sprawling factory and, in many cases, had generations of relatives who had worked there. For this reason alone, the ’sudden’ closure of the works in August 2005 was a rather emotional time and revelations as to the business dealings of the then owners Phoenix, whether accurate or mere conjecture, left a bad taste in the mouth. However, for the purposes of this site it is not possible to provide a full account of the rich history of the company and debate its many ups and downs, so below I will provide a potted history and a brief tour around the remaining buildings, many of which have now been demolished.

In 1905 Herbert Austin bought a derelict printing works at Longbridge (White & Pike Printing) and proceeded to construct what became, at its peak, a car plant employing 22,000 people on a 460 acre site!

In 1914 the company was nationalised and the factory had turned its attention to the war effort and produced over 8,000,000 shells, among other armourments, and had almost trebled in size. The works returned to vehicle production following the war – including the Austin 7 – but soon was swept-up in World War II. Unlike World War I, the second world war introduced aerial warfare and the works duly turned part of its production to supplying the demand for aircraft producing, among others, the Fairey Battle and Stirling bombers at a purpose built site – the Aero – off Cofton Hackett.

During the post-war years, the Austin Motor Company metamorphosed into a myriad of organisations – in 1956 it merged with the Morris Motor Company to become BMC (British Motor Corporation) and in 1968 it became British Leyland and was again nationalised in 1975 under this name. For those who remember, the 1970s were a particularly turbulent time at the works politically and econimically. During the 1980s the Metro was launched and a flagship robotised production plant built. However, the now-named Rover Group, was struggling to keep afloat and government subsidy for ailing public enterprises was not a politically favoured option and the company was sold to British Aerospace in 1988.

In 1994, BMW bought the company – a move which it can be argued largely put the final nail in the Austin coffin – didn’t appear to have much interest in investment, developing new models etc and rather left the company to fall apart, finally being saved from closure by the Phoenix Consortium, a somewhat underfunded management buyout.

Then, as if to mark the 100th anniversary of the factory, amid collapsed Chinese takeover talks and huge pension deficits, the factory closed putting 6000 workers out of a job and untold ancilliary workers and those in the supply industries. To make matters worse, the Chinese Nanjing Automobile (Group) Corporation bought the company following its collapse, asset stripped the works and moved the lot to China. To add further insult to injury, part of the MG brand was touted to the USA who are planning to go into production and, as far as I can tell, market what were our own cars, via the Chinese, back to us!

As for the works itself, it has largely been demolished and replaced by the the usual business park, retail park etc . . . with some small car production returning (up to 600 jobs!) under Nanjing.

Below are a series of images taken shortly after closure of the factory – see also the Austin Rover – Longbridge Demolition post for images of the factory’s eventual demise.