The canal creates a manufacturing town
Smethwick was within Harborne parish. The canal opened in 1769, attracting foundries, rolling mills and glassworks. Crowded terraces followed the factories. Proper sewage and drainage works began only in the 1880s: industrial growth and healthy housing did not advance together. [5]
Making complete steam engines
Soho Foundry was constructed around 1795–97 as an integrated engineering works. Furnaces and casting were combined with a steam-powered boring mill, engineering shops, stores, offices and workers' housing. Instead of treating the foundry as a single celebrated building, this arrangement shows the coordination of materials, machining and labour required to produce an engine. Foundry and engineering work continued on the site into the mid-twentieth century. [3]
The three famous Soho sites were geographically distinct. The Manufactory and Mint stood in Handsworth, now Birmingham; the Foundry stood in Smethwick. Historic England's research places the latter's establishment with the second generation of Boulton and Watt, especially James Watt junior. The prospect of competing engine makers and the loss of cylinder supplies helped make integrated manufacture urgent. [4]
Glass, casting and changing livelihoods
Smethwick's skills extended beyond engine manufacture. The Chance family acquired their Spon Lane glassworks in 1822 and supplied glazing for the Crystal Palace in 1851. When stained-glass production ceased in 1867, artists including Thomas Camm established independent businesses in the town. Industrial change could disperse skills as well as concentrate them inside a large works. [5]
A crossing over a new route
Thomas Telford's Galton Bridge, built in 1829, carried Roebuck Lane over the New Main Line canal cutting. Its single iron arch spans about 46 metres. The high roadway allowed people to cross a landscape substantially excavated for transport. Later conversion to pedestrian use gave this piece of canal engineering a different place in everyday movement. [2]
Housing and racial exclusion
In the 1960s, new residents from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent arrived as industrial employment was beginning to contract. Smethwick's housing became the focus of a struggle over who could belong. Connecting Histories records attempts by local Conservatives to use council property purchases in Marshall Street to prevent Black and Asian people buying homes there, and the opposition that these plans provoked. [5] [6] [7]
This local conflict acquired an international witness in Malcolm X. His visit to Marshall Street expressed solidarity with people resisting racial discrimination in housing. The Connecting Histories exhibition places the episode within a struggle involving local residents and organisations, rather than presenting the visitor as the sole agent of change. [6]
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