Coffin Works & Christmas Markets

After spending the past few days exploring Birmingham, we have found all kinds of weird and wonderful things to do. 

The Coffin Works is an industrial revolution factory still filled with all the stock and machinery that was left when the business ended last century. Supplying the funeral trade, they didn’t make coffins, but rather the metal handles and ornaments that the Victorians loved, since a funeral was like a wedding or baptism in that it was a big event and it was important to impress other people.

The Coffin Works also manufactured shrouds, as well as the fancy linings for the coffins. The women who worked on the sewing machines were also paid piece work rates, so again, speed was vital. Attention to detail was also important, because it was the custom to have the coffin at home for a few days for people to pay their last respects to the recently departed, and so this was an important advertising opportunity for the Coffin Works.

Above are some of the shroud designs you could choose from.  The top one is for a man, with pin tucks and a bow tie. Obviously the more detailed the shroud, the more expensive.  

The actual metalwork factory was a dangerous place to work, the machinery was heavy and the pace was fast because people were only paid for what they produced. One slip and you could lose a hand, and there was absolutely no OH&S, you just had to be careful. It was a fascinating tour.

Birmingham in those days was a working man’s town and the National Trust, apart from all the fancy aristocratic properties we’ve seen elsewhere, owns the last existing back-to-backs, which are working men’s cottages dating from the 1840’s. People live in the back to backs until the 1970's. Here we are standing outside two adjoining cottages.  You can see how narrow they are.

They are literally built back to back, around a courtyard. Each cottage backs onto another cottage, with an adjoining cottage either side. The cottages behind open onto the street rather than the courtyard, but still share the courtyard, toilets,  water tap and laundry.

So you have one outside wall with a small window downstairs, which is the kitchen/dining/living room, a very steep staircase up to another room or two for bedrooms which doubled as workrooms for craftsmen such as watchmakers or glass eye manufacturers if they worked from home, with a worktable beneath the one small upstairs window. Once a week or so you would bring the tin bathtub inside in front of the kitchen fireplace and the whole family would share the bathwater.

Each cottage housed a family, kids top to tail sharing beds, and sometimes a sheet dividing the room so that a second bed could be let to boarders for some extra income. It would have been a hard life. No internal water supply, no bathroom, and only shared dunnies and a washhouse with copper and hand mangle that you got to use on your turn, once every eleven days because there were eleven cottages housing about 70 people all up, sharing the small courtyard. How things have changed.

Back to the present, we loved discovering that the Christmas markets have started, with a theme of traditional Frankfurt-style German Christmas market. There is such a festive atmosphere, with the all lights, food and drink stalls, and enormous Christmas tree. It's also gotten very cold, today's top temperature is forecast to be 3 degrees. We're still waiting to see if we get some snow.