The Birmingham Jewellery Quarter: The Square Mile That Made Britain's Jewellery

One square mile north-west of Birmingham city centre came to make a large share of Britain's jewellery for two fairly unglamorous reasons. Ann Colmore obtained a private Act of Parliament in 1746 that let the family break up and lease an estate they had previously been barred from selling. The streets that filled those plots were taken over by a trade already organised around very small units of production, and jewellery inherited both the buildings and the habit.

The Jewellery Quarter is the district north-west of Birmingham city centre where, since the late eighteenth century, jewellery has been made in hundreds of small independent workshops rather than in a handful of large factories. That structure explains nearly everything else about the place: the long thin buildings, the Assay Office, the anchor punched inside British gold, and the awkward fact that nobody can say with confidence how many businesses sit there today.

How did the Colmore estate turn into a jewellery district?

Plots were let on building leases of 120 years. By about 1800 the grid of streets between Colmore Row and St Paul's Square was in place, and Charles Colmore had given land and a thousand pounds towards St Paul's Church, consecrated in 1779. The houses were built for comfortable people. The comfortable people left.

What replaced them was the toy trade, which in eighteenth-century Birmingham had nothing to do with children. Toys meant buckles, buttons, corkscrews, snuff boxes, watch chains: small goods in steel and brass. Edmund Burke told the Commons in 1777 that he looked upon Birmingham to be the great toyshop of Europe, a line quoted ever since, usually without the qualifier that he meant metal trinkets rather than dolls.

Makers took the garrets and back yards of the new houses first, then built into the plots behind them. Those rear workshop ranges have their own Birmingham word, shopping, and they are why an aerial view of the Quarter resembles nowhere else in England. The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England surveyed them, and the results appeared in 2002, published by English Heritage, as The Birmingham Jewellery Quarter: An Architectural Survey of the Manufactories, by John Cattell, Sheila Ely and Barry Jones.

Read from the pavement the typology is plain: a brick house of three storeys on the street, a yard behind it, and off the yard a workshop range one room deep, windowed along its length because a bench needs steady daylight and little else.

Why is Birmingham's hallmark an anchor?

Because for most of the eighteenth century the town had no assay office, and silverware made there had to travel to London or Chester to be marked. Matthew Boulton of the Soho Manufactory led the campaign to change that. Petitions from Birmingham and Sheffield reached the Commons on 1 and 2 February 1773, the London Goldsmiths' Company fought the bill, the Lords agreed on 28 May 1773, and royal assent followed the same day. Birmingham's office opened on 31 August 1773 in three rooms of the King's Head Inn on New Street.

Then comes the story everybody tells. Much of the lobbying happened at the Crown and Anchor tavern off the Strand, and the two towns are said to have taken one half of the sign each, Birmingham the anchor and Sheffield the crown. Some accounts have them drawing lots, some a coin toss, some a straightforward agreement to use the innkeeper's sign. Treat it as tradition, not record. The Sheffield Assay Office says on its own website that the inn certainly existed but that whether the tale is true is simply not known. Sheffield lost the crown under the Hallmarking Act 1973 and has marked with a rose since the Act came into force on 1 January 1975.

A British hallmark today carries three compulsory marks: the sponsor's mark, showing who submitted the article; the fineness, in parts per thousand; and the assay office town mark. Below certain weights nothing is required at all. Gold under one gram, silver under 7.78 grams, platinum under half a gram and palladium under one gram are exempt, which is why a very light chain may carry no mark. Our own metals sit at 375, 585 and 750 parts per thousand, set out properly in our guide to gold karats, and used across the classics.

How big was the Quarter, and how big is it now?

Two cautions apply to that table. Nineteenth-century employment counts come from trade directories and census categories that were not measuring the same thing decade to decade. And the Quarter's own site gives around 70,000 in its small metalware industries for 1913, against roughly 20,000 in the jewellery trade for 1914; the two are counting different trades under different boundaries, and neither publishes its basis.

Is it true that 40% of British jewellery is made there?

It is said constantly. The claim sits on the Jewellery Quarter's own websites, on Birmingham tourism pages, in the trade press and in the reference works that copy them. What we could not find, as of August 2026, is the survey underneath it. No date, no method, no named publisher. The figure may well be about right, but we cannot show you the working, and as far as we can tell neither can anyone else.

Business counts vary the same way: over 500 on one Jewellery Quarter Business Improvement District page, over 700 on the Quarter's own history page, and more than 800 in the coverage of 3 June 2025, when the World Crafts Council named Birmingham a World Craft City after a bid led by the Jewellery Quarter Development Trust with Birmingham City University.

What is the Chamberlain Clock doing in the middle of the road?

At the junction of Vyse Street, Frederick Street and Warstone Lane stands a cast-iron Edwardian clock tower, put up in 1903 to mark Joseph Chamberlain's tour of South Africa as Colonial Secretary, made between 26 December 1902 and 25 February 1903 after the Second Boer War. His wife, Mary Crowninshield Endicott, unveiled it in January 1904. It was restored in 1989, lifted off its base again on 22 August 2020 by the clockmakers Smith of Derby, and returned to its junction on 20 March 2021.

What is still inside the Smith and Pepper workshop?

Smith and Pepper made jewellery at 78 to 79 Vyse Street from 1899. In 1981 the surviving owners decided to retire and, rather than sell the business on, stopped trading and locked the door. Tools stayed on the benches, overalls on their hooks, dirty teacups where they had been set down. The city council took the building and opened it as the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter in 1992, at 75 to 80 Vyse Street.

Repairs closed it again in 2020. It opened for the Jewellery Quarter Festival on 26 July 2025 and began guided factory tours on 21 August 2025, Thursday to Saturday. The workshop is not a reconstruction, and nothing in it was arranged for visitors. That is what a working bench looked like on an ordinary working afternoon in 1981.

What does Birmingham have in common with Surat?

The same economics at a different scale. Birmingham's trade was never one great factory. It was hundreds of benches on a single grid of streets, each doing one operation and passing the work along: a caster here, a setter two doors down, a polisher round the corner. Surat, where our own bench sits, is built the same way and for the same reason. Specialised hands are quicker than general ones, provided they sit close enough together that a job can move between them on foot.

Those two places have already met, and not altogether happily. In July 2016 the Birmingham Assay Office opened a testing operation in the Mumbai SEEPZ zone. Birmingham silversmiths objected to the anchor being applied outside the city and got up a government e-petition, which fell well short of the threshold for a debate. The British Hallmarking Council decided in March 2018 that hallmarks struck overseas by UK offices should be distinguishable, and since 1 April 2019 the Mumbai mark has been separate: a vertical anchor with a compass, inside a cut-cornered rectangle. London's jewellery district grew a different shape, set out in our piece on Hatton Garden.

What survives in Birmingham is smaller than the legend and more solid than the tourist copy. The conservation area holds over 200 listed buildings, 106 of them protected in one 2004 decision. Plenty of those long thin workshops are flats now. Plenty are still benches, and the Assay Office restarted its date-letter alphabet at A in 2025, so work marked there this year carries a B. We make nothing in Birmingham and have never claimed to. Our own work is done in Surat, in solid 9K to 18K gold, with lab-grown stones and IGI reports rather than an anchor punch, and the rings are here. The Quarter does not need us to sell it.