Birmingham

Turning a corner, 1

This is one of my favourite buildings that I saw on a stroll around Birmingham’s jewellery quarter a while back. It’s not a factory or anything to do with the jewellery business, however: it was built as a pub at the end of the 1860s, that decade when Victorian architecture became more jazzy, colourful and free than most of what went before. The style of Gothic is described by the Pevsner City Guide to Birmingham as ‘very Ruskinian’. In other words there are lots of pointed arches in rows, built in a polychrome mix of red, white and grey (aka ‘blue’) bricks; there are natty details like the small oriel window at the corner and the octagonal turret just visible in my photograph; and there are twin openings divided by slender shafts with carved capitals. All of these details were in the architectural air at this time thanks to the writings of John Ruskin, whose accounts of Venetian Gothic (in books such as The Stones of Venice, which came out in the early 1850s) were increasingly influential.

So far, so good. Whether Ruskin would have approved of this building is another matter. He seems to have had a downer on the kind of dissipation sometimes associated with pubs and taverns, and on genre artists, such as Jan Steen, who painted tavern scenes. But many of us will take a different view. Why should a pub not have a stunning facade, designed with flair, built with care, and enhancing the streetscape? If places of worship or education can have glorious polychrome brick frontages, why not places of hospitality too? I thoroughly approve, and I approve too of the fact that the building has been restored to make the most of its glorious exterior.

Another thing I admire about this building is the swagger with which it occupies a corner plot that is challenging architecturally. Corner plots are good for business, because a site on a junction allows the building to be seen and approached from several different directions. But a tapering cake-slice of a plot like this one is not always easy when it comes to designing the building – how does the structure ‘turn the corner’ visually, and what do you do with the tiny sliver that faces directly on to the junction? Placing the entrance there can be a good solution. Giving the entrance a bit of emphasis by adding the oriel window above (with its cusp-headed opening to make it extra ornate, a pattern echoed in the window on the upper floor) is highly effective visually. Here’s to Victorian brickwork, ingenuity, and that quality of vigour and distinctiveness they called ‘go’!

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, 2

In contrast to my previous post, here is another rather different industrial building from Birmingham. It dates from 1913, just like the almost functionalist structure about which I posted a couple of days ago, and part of it also has pale walls. However, here the resemblance ends, because the entrance facade of this part of Manton’s, silversmiths and cut-glass manufacturers (the works later made everything from powder compacts to bells for cats’ collars), is highly decorative, with a distinctly Art Nouveau flavour. The building, which was known at different times as the Union Works and the Gwenda Works, was designed by William Doubleday, who was based in Birmingham and he must have been encouraged to do a job that was elegantly decorative.

Art Nouveau is a style associated with rich decoration – highly curvaceous forms (in everything from drapery to typography), and the use of imagery from plants, flowers, and trees. The style generally eschews the historical revivalism evident in much 19th-century architecture – hence the ‘Nouveau’. Here we see a band of foliate carving, together with two roundels also adorned with foliage, and very curvy numerals in the dates set two-thirds of the way up. The other lettering is more sober, but elegant and legible. All this is done in faience, a form of glazed ceramic that was popular for a wide range of commercial buildings, from factories to shops, prized for its decorative qualities as well as for the fact that its smooth surface means that dirt stands less chance of sticking to it, and what does stick is generally removed by the rain. This whole entrance building is covered in faience and very effective it is too. The plainer part of the works, to the left, is of red brick, but the windows are surrounded with faience, to give some unity to the design.

This pleasant building is in an unregarded bend in the road in Legge Lane, in the heart of what’s now known as the Jewellery Quarter. Its stylishness was no doubt a good advertisement for the company that was based here, as well as a generous helping of visual delight in what is now a quiet corner.

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.