James Watt’s garret workshop

History

A room at the top of the stairs

When James Watt moved into Heathfield in 1790 he made sure the new house had a workshop. Up under the roof, on the second floor, was a garret where he could work undisturbed. He used it for nearly thirty years, through his partnership’s most profitable years and his long retirement after 1800.

It was a working room, not a showroom. The Science Museum’s catalogue counts more than 8,400 objects: tools, materials, instruments, models, chemicals and the clutter of a lifetime’s experiments. Its Energy Hall page gives the figure as 8,430. Watt used it until the end. He died at Heathfield on 25 August 1819, aged eighty-three.

A time capsule

After his death the garret was closed up and left as it was. How firmly it stayed shut is not certain. The Science Museum says a few visitors were admitted after 1848; Library of Birmingham captions say it was “not re-opened until 1901”. A photograph of 1901 is described as showing it undisturbed since his death. In 1889 the painter Jonathon Pratt recorded the room; his picture is now in Birmingham Museums’ collection.

For a century the room survived because successive owners left it alone. One of them, the engineer George Tangye, lived at Heathfield for many years and took care of it.

The lorries arrive

In the 1920s Heathfield’s estate was being broken up for housing, and the house itself was doomed. In 1924 the decision was made to save the workshop. That December, H. W. Dickinson, the Science Museum’s curator of mechanical engineering, arrived with lorries. Everything went: not just the contents, but the door, the window, the skylight, the floorboards, the stove and part of the banisters.

The land agent, Edward Collins, wrote descriptions of the items. His lists still underlie the museum’s catalogue today. The workshop entered the national collection as object 1924-792, credited to Major J. M. Gibson-Watt. Three or four years later, in 1927–28, Heathfield Hall was demolished.

Back on show

In March 2011 the Science Museum re-displayed the workshop as the centrepiece of a new permanent gallery, “James Watt and our world”. It is now in the Energy Hall on Level 0, alongside Old Bess, the early engine once used at Soho, and other Watt engines.

Why it matters

Most great inventors leave behind finished machines and patents. Watt left the mess in between: the tools he reached for, the experiments he abandoned, the materials he hoarded. Historians can study how he actually worked, and visitors can see an 18th-century engineer’s workshop in a way almost nowhere else allows.

There is one irony. This is Birmingham’s most complete relic of James Watt, and it is in London. The house it came from is a row of 1930s homes in Handsworth; the lodge on Radnor Road and its blue plaque are all that stand there now. But the workshop’s survival is a small miracle. If the lorries had not come in December 1924, it would have gone the way of the hall.

What happened here?

James Watt worked here in retirement from 1790 until 1819. After his death the room was kept almost untouched for about a century. In December 1924 the Science Museum removed it complete, and since March 2011 it has been displayed as a gallery centrepiece, now in the Energy Hall.

Why it disappeared

Redevelopment

It left Birmingham because Heathfield Hall was being redeveloped. The Science Museum Group says the removal was decided in 1924 while the estate was being broken up, and the hall was demolished in 1927–28.