A street with depth behind it
Bromsgrove received weekly market rights in 1200. Its long main street and narrow plots preserve elements of the medieval town, overlooked by St John’s church on higher ground. The rear courts and passages matter as much as the street frontage: workshops developed behind houses and shops. [2]
Cloth manufacture was established by 1533, drawing on mills supplied by streams from the Lickey Hills. Linen and cloth remained important into the eighteenth century, alongside nailmaking from the seventeenth. Nails later became predominant, with button making another significant trade. Bromsgrove’s economy changed through overlapping manufactures rather than one industry simply replacing another. [2]
Nails made at home
Nailmaking was a household industry as well as an industrial business. The Heritage Lottery Fund’s account of a surviving Lickey End cottage describes a brick home with an attached single-storey workshop, and work involving men, women and children. Its small scale challenges any assumption that industrial labour happened only in large factories. [3]
In 2012 the fund supported Avoncroft Museum’s project to dismantle and rebuild that cottage. Records placed it in the same family from 1871 until 2008. Preserving the building offered a way to examine the relationship between cramped domestic accommodation and poorly rewarded work, rather than displaying tools without the household around them. [3]
Worcestershire Archaeology’s town-centre survey records the decline of hand nailmaking from the mid-nineteenth century as cheaper machine-made products competed with it. Other trades, including cloth, buttons, glass and brass founding, used purpose-built premises away from the main street. The town contained several different settings for manufacture. [4]
The railway and the hillside
The railway reached Bromsgrove in 1840, but its station stood about a mile from the town. New Road was built in 1865 to replace the steep, narrow Old Station Road. The railway changed the town’s pattern of movement and helped encourage expansion eastwards, rather than merely adding a stop beside the old market. [4]
North of the station, the Lickey Incline climbed towards the Midlands plateau. Opened in 1840, its roughly two-mile ascent required specialised banking engines to assist trains. This was a continuing operational task: locomotive crews and railway workshops had to manage the gradient long after the construction engineers had finished. [5]
Art becomes another trade
Walter Gilbert became headmaster of Bromsgrove School of Art in 1898, the year the Bromsgrove Guild of Applied Art was formed. Worcestershire Archives describes his aim as a commercial enterprise offering skilled craftspeople well-paid employment. Metal casting, woodwork, stained glass and embroidery belonged to the same ambitious project. [6]
Architectural metalwork became a speciality, with the Buckingham Palace gates commissioned in 1905. Museum records from Ironbridge also show that the Guild’s operations involved workshops elsewhere, coordinated from the main metalworks in Station Street, Bromsgrove. Its reputation was international, but its organisation had a specific local base. [6] [7]
Buildings with more than one life
At the Strand, 2 Stourbridge Road began as Cock Hall, a gentleman’s house built in 1701. It became the town’s first workhouse in 1723 and later a tannery. This succession of uses gives a single surviving building connections with private comfort, institutional poverty and manufacture. [2]
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