Birmingham

Turning point, 3

For the third in this sequence of three Birmingham buildings, I return to Hockley Hill to look at a close neighbour of Gem Buildings, posted the other day. This is a retail building, originally the premises of Harry Smith, ironmonger. It survived as an ironmonger’s until relatively recently and the lettering of its signs, including those of the adjoining shop, is still clear. An old-fashioned ironmonger could function in any kind of shop, provided there was plenty of space to house the bewildering variety of stock. This embraced virtually anything made of metal and much that was not. Locks, cutlery, and tools, of course; but also buckets, pots, and pans; stoves and kitchen ranges; knobs for doors and drawers; bell systems for calling one’s servants, or for responding to the ringing command if one was a servant – all of these things were the preserve of the ironmonger and might well have been on sale here in 1913, when this building, like my previous two, was erected.

So if you think this building stark, if you prefer the traditional shop next door with its sash windows and conventional shop window, I sympathise, but pause for thought. Harry Smith might well have wanted to look up to date – or to want to combine the traditional virtues of good service and reliability with the latest in household convenience, c. 1913. What’s more, the plain facade in its heyday would have been, I suspect, little more than a picture frame for the lively composition of goods, from brooms to incinerators, that would have spilled out on to that broad pavement. Personally I still find something to admire in the frame, even now the picture is no more.

Birmingham

Turning point, 1

This is a surprising building for its date, which is 1913: one of the first in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter that’s broadly functionalist – in other words, it combines minimal ornament with features that – in theory – express the function of the structure, which contained large, light workshops on the upper floors and small offices on the ground floor. In addition, the building is designed along the lines then becoming fashionable in some parts of mainland Europe but still very unusual in Britain – box-shape, white walls, concrete beams, metal-framed windows, roof that at least gives the appearance of being flat (there are shallow pitched roofs behind the parapets). The first picture shows the side that faces on to Key Hill. The picture below is the Hockley Hill elevation,. which the owners no doubt regarded as the front – there’s a little bit of ornament here, but it is limited to baroque details at cornice level, where the building’s date is inscribed.

So what was the function of this functionalist building? It was the premises of Ginder and Ginder, diamond cutters and polishers. People in such a decorative trade might have been expected to opt for a more ornamental factory, but for some reason they didn’t. Maybe they wanted to look up to date. Maybe the structure was inexpensive to build. This may well have been a priority, since one of the firm’s selling points was that the cost of diamond-cutting in Birmingham was less than it was in the main European centres of the trade, Antwerp and Amsterdam. Modernity also seems to have been part of their ethos – they tooled up with the latest machinery from the USA when they set up their new factory. A number of Belgian refugees who came to the city during World War I increased their capacity, and there must have been a ready market back then for their stones in the factories of the jewellery quarter. There’s more about the company here. Their building is no longer part of the jewellery trade – at least some of the premises, when I passed a short while ago, was given over to a clothes business. But its architecture, stunning or stark according to your tastes, is a memorial to past glories and, arguably, to a company’s image of itself over a century ago.