Piran was going with some other friends anyway, to tour the Cadbury Factory. So I figured I might as well tag along because who wouldn't want the chance to play Charlie Bucket? And then I figured I should probably go the night before, since getting to the train station from my current mooring is a faff and they were leaving early. And then I thought if I’m going for one night I might as well go for two and actually see some of the town. Plus it was kind of my birthday weekend anyway. Which is how I ended up spending three(ish) days in Birmingham, England’s second city.
Quick Birmingham primer: First, it's pronounced BURR-ming-um. Not, under any circumstances, BURR-ming-HAM. (And while I'm at it please, for the love of God, can someone tell Canadian news readers that it's BUCK-ing-um Palace. Not BUCK-ing-HAM. Maybe I'm just overly sensitive due to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Harry and Meaghan thing but it's just got to stop.) Ok. Birmingham. The second largest city in the UK (population four million-ish in the metro area) is about 100 miles north and a bit west of London and was once the hub of a huge amount of skilled manufacturing, large and small, leading to its nickname: "the city of a thousand trades". Also affectionately called "Brum", the residents are known as Brummies and the Brummie accent is notable and distinctive. Being a former industrial hub, it's also got a lot of canals. If I'd kept going north on the Grand Tour instead of turning towards Oxford I'd have ended up in Birmingham. Brummies like to remind you that their city has more miles of canals than Venice. Oh, and of course there's "Peaky Blinders".
Moving on: the first order of business when I arrived on Friday afternoon was a warming lunch of ramen, because it was chilly and rainy and my next stop was a pre-booked tour of the Birmingham Back to Backs in what is now Chinatown, which promised to be interesting but not centrally heated. Back to Backs are a form of terraced house that were once very common in cities like Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester. As the name implies, Back to Back house were built along a common back wall and - as with other terraced houses - with shared side walls as well. The front was the only wall with windows and doors. With so much shared structure it was a very inexpensive way of building a lot of houses, a necessity for the rapidly expanding factory towns in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Back to Backs were built cheaply, often very substandard construction, and with no inside toilets, water or electricity. With only one open wall for doors and windows ventilation was bad, and they were poorly lit. Sharing outdoor toilets and a communal laundry room among all the residents of the courtyard, disease was also common and residents of Back to Backs were noted to have poorer health than more salubriously accommodated citizens. Nevertheless, the pressing need for housing and the cheapness of the form meant that at one point there were thousands in Birmingham alone and more than half a million people lived in Back to Backs. The Birmingham Back to Backs are the last surviving courtyard of this once ubiquitous form and are now owned by the National Trust and operated as a museum.
Our tour guide was excellent, and the museum is set up really well. Each of the four preserved houses is styled in a different time period, showing the progression of time and relative improvement in living conditions right until the last tenant of the last house left in 2000 (a commercial tailor… but more on him later). It’s particularly poignant because the houses depict the life of real people known to have lived in those very houses.
Number 1 was styled for 1830 and unlike most National Trust properties, in the Back to Backs we were encouraged to touch things, which was really refreshing. Our guide even told us it was fine to sit on the furniture and poke around in drawers and such. There was a decent coal fire burning in the grate on the ground floor, so I positioned myself there while listening. The detail in the rooms is impressive, (reminding me a bit of this place) but we were asked not to take photos of the interiors, so I’m relying here on photos from other people who flouted the rules and then brazenly posted their misdeeds online, supplemented with some nice shots by the National Trust itself.
The houses had just one room on each of three floors with a narrow winding staircase linking them. Those stairs were an elfin safety nightmare and our guide warned us to be careful approximately eleven zillion times. The next level was the main bedroom, with a smaller bed for a child in the same room. On this level, they’d also knocked through to the front unit facing the street, which has been left in the state in which it was found when the National Trust acquired the property in 2000. It’s in a sorry state, with a lot of peeling plaster and layers and layers of paint and wallpaper (the tax was eventually repealed). Interestingly, the other two front-facing halves of the Back to Backs museum have been renovated into holiday homes that can be rented! One is done in Victorian style and one in 1930s style, with appropriate furniture and fittings and with the mod cons like a kitchenette and bathroom tucked away but still functional. Fun, but a bit out of my price range for a quick wekeend getaway.
The upper floor of 1830s house was set up as a bedroom for two boys and also housed the workbench for the father of the house, whose trade was making the cut brass hands for clocks. It was fantastic to be able to paw through the tools on the bench, which was set in the window on the highest floor to make the most of every hour of daylight available.
Moving into the 1870s house, you could see already that the living situation had improved. In 1830 all water had to be carried through the streets by the bucketful from a local standpipe. They had an example of the bucket in 1830-land and even empty it was hefty. Apparently it was common to send children as young as six years old many times a day to haul water. It must have been an exciting moment when around the time of the 1870s house a water pipe was installed in the shared courtyard.
The 1870s family - the Oldfields - had ten children, so one bedroom included a double bed in which four kids slept, topping and tailing (two at the head end and two at the foot end). Also crammed into the same small room was another narrow bed, curtained off with a single suspended bedsheet. This was let out to two strangers - possibly of mixed gender and not known to each other - who’d have to share the bed for sixpence a week, not including meals. It’s also worth noting that each bedroom I saw had a fireplace, but it was unlikely to have been used much. Coal was expensive, so fires were kept lit in the ground floor sitting room, but the other rooms were rarely heated. (A bit like living on a boat...)
Like the watchmaker from 1830, Mr. Oldfield also practised his trade from home, and the ground floor of the 1870s house included the worktable where he made glass eyes for taxidermy and for people who were victims of all-too-frequent industrial accidents. His tools included a tiny gas torch that was used to heat sections of thin glass rod in many different colours, which he’d mix carefully to match a customer’s eye colour exactly.
Moving into the 1930s things improved significantly. The 1930s house had running water in the scullery and an electric light in the ceiling. The most interesting part of 1930 was in an upper floor bedroom where one of the beds was covered in a collection of seemingly random objects that we were encouraged to play with. Evidently the National Trust is oversupplied with odds and sods that people donate so they lay some as a way of getting use from things. Many of the items were hard to identify, but I was quite taken with a handheld device that resembled an oversized cigarette case, but had a handle that dragged a centre section back and forth on a rack and pinion system while flipping it over at each end. It turned out to be a device for stropping razor blades that would go into safety razors. A highly satisfying little mechanical gizmo.
The last building we visited was also the last to be occupied. It ended its working life not as a family home but as a tailor’s shop run by Mr. George Saunders. He ran his business in that location from 1974 to 2000, when he retired and donated the contents of the shop to the National Trust, who’ve preserved it as he left it. This was the only area of the Back to Backs Museum where we were forbidden to touch anything.
George’s story is remarkable. A Caribbean immigrant who arrived in the UK from St. Kitts in 1958 he experienced such prejudice as a black person in the tailoring trade that he had to take work in a biscuit factory for years while saving up money to set up his own shop. He bought four Back to Backs and ended up knocking through the upper floors to create a work room big enough for a 25’ long cutting table, utterly ignoring the total lack of structure that resulted from removing the interior walls. Luckily, everything stayed standing throughout his 25 years of trading, though the National Trust were quick to swoop in with acro-props and engineers when they took over the property.
George Saunders Bespoke Tailoring was a respected fixture in Birmingham and though it was a small shop, George had some important and longstanding contracts, including making riding breeches for the Royal Guard and supplying uniforms for schools in Libya. No wonder he needed the extra space. And I’ve mentioned that the stairs in the Back to Backs were exceedingly steep, so you can probably infer that there wasn’t much headroom in those stairwells either. This makes it all the more remarkable that George Saunders managed to occupied the space for 25 years, considering he was 6’ 8” tall. Apparently he suffered from frequent bumps on the noggin. After his retirement George remained a friend to the Back to Backs, though one hopes the frequency of concussions was greatly reduced.
The last stop on the tour was back in the central courtyard to visit the shared facilities.
We finished up outside in the courtyard close to two hours after starting and I was very happy to spend a few minutes warming up in the neighbouring sweet shop where I stocked up on rum balls for the trek to my AirBnb. Once ensconced there I quickly cozied up under a blanket with a cup of tea. There was still a lot more on the agenda in Birmingham, but that's another blog. So stay tuned for lots and lots of chocolate, another dip into Birmingham's industrial past, and naan bread big enough to shelter under.
Quick Birmingham primer: First, it's pronounced BURR-ming-um. Not, under any circumstances, BURR-ming-HAM. (And while I'm at it please, for the love of God, can someone tell Canadian news readers that it's BUCK-ing-um Palace. Not BUCK-ing-HAM. Maybe I'm just overly sensitive due to the wall-to-wall coverage of the Harry and Meaghan thing but it's just got to stop.) Ok. Birmingham. The second largest city in the UK (population four million-ish in the metro area) is about 100 miles north and a bit west of London and was once the hub of a huge amount of skilled manufacturing, large and small, leading to its nickname: "the city of a thousand trades". Also affectionately called "Brum", the residents are known as Brummies and the Brummie accent is notable and distinctive. Being a former industrial hub, it's also got a lot of canals. If I'd kept going north on the Grand Tour instead of turning towards Oxford I'd have ended up in Birmingham. Brummies like to remind you that their city has more miles of canals than Venice. Oh, and of course there's "Peaky Blinders".
Moving on: the first order of business when I arrived on Friday afternoon was a warming lunch of ramen, because it was chilly and rainy and my next stop was a pre-booked tour of the Birmingham Back to Backs in what is now Chinatown, which promised to be interesting but not centrally heated. Back to Backs are a form of terraced house that were once very common in cities like Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester. As the name implies, Back to Back house were built along a common back wall and - as with other terraced houses - with shared side walls as well. The front was the only wall with windows and doors. With so much shared structure it was a very inexpensive way of building a lot of houses, a necessity for the rapidly expanding factory towns in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Back to Backs were built cheaply, often very substandard construction, and with no inside toilets, water or electricity. With only one open wall for doors and windows ventilation was bad, and they were poorly lit. Sharing outdoor toilets and a communal laundry room among all the residents of the courtyard, disease was also common and residents of Back to Backs were noted to have poorer health than more salubriously accommodated citizens. Nevertheless, the pressing need for housing and the cheapness of the form meant that at one point there were thousands in Birmingham alone and more than half a million people lived in Back to Backs. The Birmingham Back to Backs are the last surviving courtyard of this once ubiquitous form and are now owned by the National Trust and operated as a museum.
The Back to Backs Museum, exterior. The narrow arched opening on the right is the entrance to the central courtyard. And the corner is now a traditional Sweet Shop!
We assembled in the courtyard where you can see the other end of the arched access corridor on the left. The tour began in the house whose address was styled as “1 back of 50 Inge Street”, meaning that anyone who knew your address knew you lived in a Back to Back.
The 1830s ground floor sitting dining room, including stencilled wall pattern in lieu of wallpaper. Apparently wallpaper was heavily taxed at the time and dodging the tax could result in the death penalty! I’m definitely a bleeding heart liberal, but even so I think we can all agree that execution for interior design is a bit harsh. And if you really must, then surely there are greater crimes than wallpaper? Like what about wall-to-wall carpet in the bathroom? That surely deserves at least a good flogging.
The upper floor of 1830s house was set up as a bedroom for two boys and also housed the workbench for the father of the house, whose trade was making the cut brass hands for clocks. It was fantastic to be able to paw through the tools on the bench, which was set in the window on the highest floor to make the most of every hour of daylight available.
You can just see a flattish peg jutting out from the concave cutout in the front edge of the work table, which is called a peg bench, and is common in jewellery and watchmaking even today. The wear and tool marks on the peg are unique to each craftsman, but the connection is universal, so a maker could remove his peg from one bench and slot it into another if moving among different workshops. Apparently this is the origin of “square peg in a round hole”! (This photo from the National Trust. Nicely done with the lighting effect here, NT.)
The 1870s family - the Oldfields - had ten children, so one bedroom included a double bed in which four kids slept, topping and tailing (two at the head end and two at the foot end). Also crammed into the same small room was another narrow bed, curtained off with a single suspended bedsheet. This was let out to two strangers - possibly of mixed gender and not known to each other - who’d have to share the bed for sixpence a week, not including meals. It’s also worth noting that each bedroom I saw had a fireplace, but it was unlikely to have been used much. Coal was expensive, so fires were kept lit in the ground floor sitting room, but the other rooms were rarely heated. (A bit like living on a boat...)
Like the watchmaker from 1830, Mr. Oldfield also practised his trade from home, and the ground floor of the 1870s house included the worktable where he made glass eyes for taxidermy and for people who were victims of all-too-frequent industrial accidents. His tools included a tiny gas torch that was used to heat sections of thin glass rod in many different colours, which he’d mix carefully to match a customer’s eye colour exactly.
Mr. Oldfield’s Output (another photo from the National Trust)
The last building we visited was also the last to be occupied. It ended its working life not as a family home but as a tailor’s shop run by Mr. George Saunders. He ran his business in that location from 1974 to 2000, when he retired and donated the contents of the shop to the National Trust, who’ve preserved it as he left it. This was the only area of the Back to Backs Museum where we were forbidden to touch anything.
The preserved work room above George Saunders’ shop.
George Saunders Bespoke Tailoring was a respected fixture in Birmingham and though it was a small shop, George had some important and longstanding contracts, including making riding breeches for the Royal Guard and supplying uniforms for schools in Libya. No wonder he needed the extra space. And I’ve mentioned that the stairs in the Back to Backs were exceedingly steep, so you can probably infer that there wasn’t much headroom in those stairwells either. This makes it all the more remarkable that George Saunders managed to occupied the space for 25 years, considering he was 6’ 8” tall. Apparently he suffered from frequent bumps on the noggin. After his retirement George remained a friend to the Back to Backs, though one hopes the frequency of concussions was greatly reduced.
The last stop on the tour was back in the central courtyard to visit the shared facilities.
The earliest shared toilet was a simple bucket, emptied into a central cesspit in the courtyard that was also used for ash and other waste, called a miskin (a word still used in the local dialect for a dustbin). Later innovations saw a plumbed water closet installed, though it was still outside, shared, and very much unheated. It wasn’t until the 1960s when indoor, private toilets might have been installed in the houses themselves.
Next to the toilets was the wash house where laundry was done. This room was also sometimes called the Brewis (more of that local dialect, it’s a contraction of Brewhouse) where men would brew beer in between wash days. The wash house had a large water vessel suspended above a fire where water could be heated to wash clothes. Anything and everything might be burned in this fire to save on coal, including using dried potato peelings as kindling. And of course the water to fill the copper would have to be hauled by hand so it’s no wonder the hot water was used not just for washing clothes but also for boiling whelks, eggs and potatoes, steaming a pudding, or washing the baby.
Wash days were assigned to each household to prevent conflict. Which is good, because it wouldn’t do to get one of those heavy irons upside the head for jumping the queue.
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