The clean lines and well-ordered cabinets of the modern museum may have their place, focusing one’s undistracted attention entirely on the exhibits at hand. But to really engage with the sweaty grime, throbbing noise and energetic industry of the factory floor nothing quite beats being, well, on a factory floor. At the Birmingham Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, the old Smith & Pepper jewellery manufacturing firm’s workshop has been preserved much as it might have been had tools been downed mere minutes ago. Grubby aprons hang from hooks, mugs sit on dusty desks, equipment lines the walls in well-ordered readiness.
The factory was already something of a working museum when it closed in the 1980s, the technological developments of the 20th century having seemingly passed it by. The visit begins in the room where the manager met clients and, depending on the size of order being placed, to where he’d summon the secretary with one knock on the door for plain digestives, two for cream cakes. No biscuits today, so we head into the old-school office where a vintage punch calculator takes up a square foot of desk, rope pulleys open doors downstairs and faded box-binders line the shelves. This room was closed up, we recall, in the decade which saw the proliferation of the home computer, the era of the Space Shuttle – or, at the very least, the electronic calculator. We then move below to the factory floor, where we’re given a demonstration of how a jeweller would work at his bench, tools in hand and blow-pipe in mouth. Jewellers became masters of circular breathing, and apparently you could always identify one by his missing teeth on which ever side he held the pipe, year after year.
It’s a wonderfully evocative industrial time-capsule, no more so than when the machinery is turned on and the belt drives are whirring, the massive weights of the punch presses are flying, and the blow torches are roaring. For once you can both understand and forgive the health and safety rules which only allow you to visit by guided tour.
Mr Phoebus 