Birmingham

My mother is currently in the UK indulging her inner cricket tragic; she was at the Lord's test, and is now attending the Edgbaston test. We arranged our itinerary to be within easy train distance of Birmingham, with the idea of stealing her away from a day of the cricket.



Fortunately, it rained all day, so she didn't actually miss any cricket! And, from what I've heard, it's a good thing for the Aussies that it rained all day....

When we met Mum in the foyer of her hotel, she was surrounded by bananas: the Banana Army, who - upon seeing that little cricket was likely to be had for the day - decided to start in on one-pint-in-each-hand at 11am. Classy.

Aside from talking, and getting rained on, and making snarky comments about the feralness of Birmingham, we actually did manage to see some stuff. First off, the Pen Rooms. Set up in a former pen factory - don't laugh, at one stage three quarters of the world's writing instruments were manufactured in Birmingham, almost entirely by women - it's two rooms stuffed to the gills with writing paraphernalia. Most of it pen nibs of the most amazing variety, including a set with 5 nibs for drawing a musical stave! And they still have some of the machinery used, which I got to have a go at: they're all fly presses, which means that once your piece of metal is in the right spot you give a big weight a mighty heave - and the blank is pressed, or it gets embossed, or the metal gets curved... it was an incredibly labour-intensive process, and the woman in charge of pressing out blanks, for example, was expected to cut 28,000 in one day in order to make a decent living.

From the mundane to the sublime: next we went to the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter. The Jewellery Quarter was a really important area of manufacturing, way back when; these days it's almost exclusively retail, and the jewellery is imported. But the museum is set up in the workshop of Smith and Pepper: a company founded by an uncle/nephew team, continued by three of the nephew's children... who then, in August 1981, walked out and closed the door. Nine years later, the Birmingham Council got around to doing something about it. We went on a tour around the offices and workshops, and they were just fascinating. Again, so labour-intensive; also, OHS was unheard of - fly-wheels and acid fumes and blow-torches...

These two museums meet our criteria for 'free' and 'awesome.'

The rest of the day involved getting rained on, sitting, drinking beer, eating Indian, and then catching the last train back to Oxford (fortunately sans rowdy cricket fans).