Birmingham’s historic Jewellery Quarter — long celebrated as the beating heart of British jewellery manufacturing — is facing what business leaders describe as a pivotal moment.
Meeting at Birmingham City University’s School of Jewellery, a panel of manufacturers, educators and entrepreneurs told Birmingham Business editor Henry Carpenter that while pride in the district remains strong, mounting pressures around property, skills and global competition threaten its future.
Alex Wardle of A Wardle & Co summed up the mood bluntly. “I think it’s pretty much fifty-fifty at the minute,” he said. “There are very specific problems now in terms of the trade itself, problems that haven’t really been addressed since the 80s and the 90s.”
Wardle pointed to the long-term impact of marginalised local communities — once a vital source of skilled labour — and warned that housing development is now squeezing out traditional workshops. “The council didn’t protect the buildings or the trade when it had the opportunity many years ago,” he added.
Rachel Morrish of RE Morrish, a second-generation manufacturing jeweller on Vyse Street, revealed that discussions with Birmingham City Council are now under way to secure stronger protections for trade buildings. “We’re now looking at getting building protection in place so that the buildings that are currently workshops and for the jewellery trade are hopefully going to get protected, like Hatton Garden and Savile Row in London,” she said.
The aim is to prevent workshop properties from being converted into apartments, preserving the Quarter’s industrial ecosystem. “If somebody buys a trade-related building, they can’t just turn it into apartments,” Morrish explained. “That would hopefully give us protection that we haven’t had before.”
Collaboration is another emerging priority. Morrish said the newly formed Jewellers of the Jewellery Quarter, working with the National Association of Jewellers, is encouraging businesses to speak with one voice. “We can be quite insular,” she admitted. “As a collective, we can do more and bring more business to us all.”
Despite the challenges, there is deep pride in the district’s unique status. Rebecca Skeels, course director at Birmingham City University’s School of Jewellery — the largest specialist jewellery school in the world — highlighted the Quarter’s rare concentration of expertise. “Every bit of the industry is here,” she said. “Retail, training, manufacturing, insurance companies, the biggest companies and the smallest companies — all in a very small amount of space. The hard thing is getting the awareness out there.”
Global competition remains fierce. Giles Knox, managing director of Firmin and Sons — established in 1655 and the UK’s oldest privately owned manufacturer — warned that the real threat is not neighbouring firms but overseas production. “The competition isn’t the people down the street,” he said. “It’s someone who’s going to take an order and send it all to be manufactured in China or India.”
He stressed the need to protect specialist skills. “If there’s only one person who has a specialist skill and they don’t want to train anyone, you’re going to have a problem. We need those skills to be transferred.”
The future workforce is a critical concern. Skeels reported growing enrolment numbers at the School of Jewellery but noted that craft courses nationally are under pressure. Students are passionate, she said, but manufacturing employers struggle to recruit apprentices. “Young people want to be creative,” Knox observed. “What we want is to make a thousand helmet plates and the thousandth to look like the first.”
Efforts are under way to rebuild apprenticeship pathways, with calls for models that blend college learning and hands-on workshop experience.
For Norma Banton, founder of the Silverfish Jewellery Company and Masterpiece Academy, widening access is essential. Established in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, Masterpiece Academy supports young people from marginalised communities into the trade. “Most of our young people who want jobs have got jobs,” she said. “These are young people who wouldn’t have considered the trade had they not stumbled on us.”
Entrepreneur James Newman argued that structured post-graduation support is equally vital. Recalling council-backed incubation space and early funding that helped him launch his business in the 1990s, he said: “If graduates can get a workshop or space for a very reasonable rent to get them started, perhaps rising incrementally, this area could and should rise again.”
For Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, the message from industry leaders is clear: protect the buildings, transfer the skills, support new talent and tell the world its story — or risk losing one of Britain’s most remarkable manufacturing clusters.
