When our Fellow Neil Cossons was Chairman of English Heritage he advocated a policy of preserving ‘living heritage’, and the efforts of English Heritage to keep Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter from damaging development was one example of the policy in action. Now English Heritage has reinforced its commitment to the Jewellery Quarter by acquiring J W Evans' silverware factory, established in 1880 and exceptional in that nothing much has ever been thrown away in the subsequent 128 years.
English Heritage has stepped in to preserve the factory and its contents as a last resort, after no other buyer could be found to keep the collection intact. Tony Evans (aged 69), grandson of the founder Jenkin Evans, will stay on for five years as an adviser while a way is found of repairing the warren of rooms and workshops in the knocked-through houses that form the factory (some with Georgian cupboards, fireplaces and a kitchen range) and compile an inventory of the contents, which include all the patterns and dies used to create products that were often sold wholesale and that now turn up at antiques fairs stamped with the prestigious names of Mappin and Webb or Garrards.
Our Fellow Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, said: ‘There is no other complete example of a Victorian factory, with all its contents and all its records, not just in Birmingham but anywhere in Britain’.
