Soho Manufactory

History

A mill on a brook

In 1761 Matthew Boulton and his partner John Fothergill leased about thirteen acres “just over the Hockley Brook”, outside Birmingham in the Staffordshire parish of Handsworth. On the land stood a rolling mill and a house. The brook mattered more than anything: running water meant power.

Boulton wanted something no Birmingham maker had tried. Instead of farming out work to dozens of small workshops, he would bring whole processes under one roof. Building began in 1762, and the factory was finished around 1765–66. The Library of Birmingham names the designer as “the local architect William Wyatt”. In June 1788 the estate was valued at £10,185 15s, of which the Manufactory alone was worth £8,519 10s.

The palace of toys

Visitors arriving along the main road saw a long Palladian front, the “Principal Building”, more like a country house than a workshop. That was the point: Soho was meant to impress. Francis Eginton’s 1773 print of the works carried a French title, aimed at buyers abroad.

Behind the front, the work was Birmingham’s “toy” trade on a new scale: buttons, buckles, snuff boxes and small metal goods, along with japanned ware, silver and Sheffield plate, and gilded bronze ornaments called ormolu. The Victoria County History puts the workforce at about 800 to 1,000 people around 1770. The Soho site was not one firm but many: eight separate trading partnerships were recorded there in 1800.

Water, then steam

At first Soho ran on a water wheel fed from a mill pool on the Hockley Brook. In dry summers the pool ran low, and Boulton was already experimenting with a “fire engine” to pump water back above the wheel in 1766.

In 1774 James Watt’s experimental engine, later known as “Old Bess”, arrived from Scotland. Historian George Demidowicz has shown that it was used to pump the mill’s tail-race water back to the head race, a role no surviving document spells out. The next year Parliament extended Watt’s patent and the partnership of Boulton & Watt began. Engines were assembled at Soho until the purpose-built Soho Foundry opened at Smethwick in 1795–96, about 1.8 km to the west. Keep the two apart: the Manufactory made metal goods and was where steam began; the Foundry, later, made complete engines.

A light in the windows

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

In March 1802, during celebrations for the Peace of Amiens, William Murdoch’s gas lights were shown at each end of the Manufactory. The evidence rests mainly on later accounts, and the old Dictionary of National Biography says the gas was used only “to a small extent”. It was a glimpse of the future rather than a blaze.

Fading away

The Manufactory outlived its founders, but not by long. The water wheel was still turning, Demidowicz says, “almost to the end of its life in the 1850s”. The Soho Mint, on the same estate, closed in 1849 and its machinery was auctioned in 1850. The Manufactory closed around the same time and was taken down in stages. Demidowicz says it was “completely demolished by 1863”, and Sue Tungate’s research on the Mint agrees: “Both the Mint and Manufactory were demolished and no trace of either was left by 1863.”

Early in the 20th century much of the site was dug away for sand, and later it was built over with houses. The Manufactory’s own mill pool was filled in, and Soho Pool, the great ornamental pool to the south (also called Hockley Pool), was drained in 1868 and became a railway goods wharf.

Found again

At Easter 1996 Channel 4’s Time Team dug in back gardens off South Road. Under patios and lawns they found three sections of the brick drive-shaft tunnel of the 1824–26 Mint, part of the wall of the coin cutting-out room, and the southern end of the Principal Building’s front wall at cellar level. For the first time the position of the great factory could be fixed on the ground. The episode, “Steam-Powered Mint”, was broadcast in January 1997.

Soho was where Birmingham’s makers learned to work at the scale of the world. The building has gone, but under the gardens of South Road its foundations are still there.

What happened here?

Boulton & Fothergill made buttons, buckles, boxes, japanned ware, silver, plated ware and ormolu here from the 1760s. Watt’s first engine was set to work here in 1774, and Boulton & Watt assembled engines here until the Soho Foundry opened in 1795–96. Murdoch showed gas lights on the building in 1802. The Soho Mint stood nearby on the same estate.

Why it disappeared

Industrial decline · Redevelopment

By the 1840s the Boulton family’s businesses at Soho were winding down. The Soho Mint on the same estate closed in 1849 and its equipment was auctioned on 29 April 1850, and by 1850 Matthew Piers Watt Boulton was letting Soho House. The Manufactory’s water wheel worked until the 1850s; the buildings were then demolished in stages and no trace was left by 1863 (Tungate; Demidowicz). In the early 20th century much of the site was dug for sand, and it was later covered with housing.