Locating Birmingham Button Makers

This map was ‘Printed and Published by Richard Davies, Temple Row, (opposite Dee’s Royal Hotel) and No. 6, Colmore Row, (opposite the Blue Coat School)’. The full title is Davies’s new map of Birmingham, Strangers’ Guide, and Street Directory. The original, held in the Archives and Heritage section of Birmingham Central Library, includes a range of local information – a list of major showrooms and manufactories, hotels and inns and museums, plus travel information – railway stations, coach and omnibus offices and hackney coach fares. The archive record for the map can be found here.

To find a maker’s name, I have to ask you to use the ‘Find’ function (Ctrl F): who knows when I’ll find time to compile a list by makers’ names!

Locations in 1770 come from Samuel Sketchley and Orion Adams’s original directory of that year. This directory was re-published by Richard Bissell Prosser and Samuel Timmins in 1886 as The Streets and Inhabitants of Birmingham in 1770. The street address numbers given in the listing below cannot be relied upon to relate to more recent (let alone current) numbering systems.

If you were to draw a line diagonally across this map from top left (square 1) to bottom right (square 63), all but one of the manufactories named in the 1841 inspections are located to the right of/above that line. The exception is Ingram’s, which is located on the very long Bradford Street (squares 42, 52 and 59).  All of the 1864 manufactories lie in that to the right of/above that top left to bottom right line. With one or two exceptions, I do not have door numbers for these manufactories in either of those years and several of the streets cross two squares (for instance Branston Street, squares 12 and 19). That lack means that the spread of locations could be a little tighter or looser.

For the purpose of locating button makers in Sketchley’s 1770 directory, or manufactories inspected in 1841 and/or 1864 on the Davies map, you need to remember two things. First, the map is not conventionally oriented. The arrow just above the illustration in the bottom left corner points to the north, meaning that the map is skewed to the east by about 50 degrees. Second, the map is divided into 63 squares (nine rows of seven squares) which are numbered from top left to bottom right. Squares 50 and 57 (bottom two rows, left-hand side) are not numbered as they are empty.

Extra information in the columns headed ‘Name’ and ‘Occupation’ comes from Sketchley’s 1770 directory, and the absence of a date in the column headed ‘Proprietor’ indicates that the business was active in 1770. The dates 1841 and 1864 refer to the inspections carried out in those years.

Extra information about street names can be found in ‘Obsolete Street Names’, part of Showell’s Dictionary of Birmingham which was published by Walter Showell & Sons in 1885. Although there are no button (I haven’t checked for buckle) makers in the streets, I have included Buckle Lane and Button Alley out of sheer delight at finding their names in Showell’s list.

Further information about street names can be found on Bill Dargue‘s excellent website: the text, pictures and maps included there are of great interest and help to paint a vivid picture of Birmingham’s past.