09/01/2025
✨ JQ building spotlight ✨
💍 🥇 This month takes us to Warstone Lane and Warstone Parade East. We’re going back to c.1867 to a housing and ‘shopping’ development for John Mantle, chain maker, and manufacturer of bracelets, medals and wedding, gem and signet rings. Mantle was operating from these premises for a substantial period, until at least 1916.
📖 Now for the architectural history!
The works comprised of a three-storey house, with a basement and rounded corner, which fronted onto Warstone Lane, with a L-plan three-storey workshop to the rear (clearly visible in the photos). The yard enclosed by the workshop range was gradually infilled in the 19th and 20th centuries. Probably in the early 20th century, a workshop (one and a half storeys high with tall north-facing windows and large roof lights) was built over the infill buildings in the yard.
In the mid to late 20th century, part of the upper story of the entire building was refurbished as offices. No. 160 retains some distinctive features including the original stair in the house. While the workshop range retains the original workers’ entrance from Warstone Parade East.
The yard which is not visible is an excellent example of a process called ‘shopping’. If this term isn’t familiar to you, that’s because it’s actually a word synonymous with nineteenth-century Birmingham, and the Jewellery Quarter in particular, but more generally associated with manufacturing buildings. The way the Jewellery Quarter developed was a direct response to land shortage, and as the area became more desirable, buildings were literally ‘squeezed’ into tiny plots of land such as gardens and courtyards, places that weren’t necessarily suitable to build on, but provided an ideal opportunity to make money and profit. This is where the term ‘shopping’ originates.
