Birmingham Jewellery Quarter
Britain's jewellery workshop — Europe's largest jewellery-trade cluster, maker of ~40% of UK jewellery, and home of the world's largest assay office and its Anchor hallmark
Making & hallmarking
If Hatton Garden is where Britain buys jewellery, the Jewellery Quarter is where Britain makes it. This dense grid of Georgian and Victorian workshops north-west of Birmingham city centre is Europe's largest concentration of businesses in the jewellery trade, and still produces around 40% of all the jewellery made in the UK.
It grew out of industrial Birmingham. The Colmore family released the land in the mid-1700s; the metal trades gradually filled the new Georgian streets, and in 1773 Matthew Boulton and fellow industrialists won an Act of Parliament establishing the Birmingham Assay Office — so local silver no longer had to travel to Chester or London to be hallmarked. (A coin toss with Sheffield is said to have given Birmingham its Anchor mark.) The Quarter became an innovation centre too: electroplating was commercialised here in the mid-19th century, and at its peak the trades employed some 70,000 people.
Today more than 700 jewellers and independent businesses work here — bench makers, casters, setters, designer-makers, and the suppliers who serve them — alongside the Assay Office, still the world's largest by volume, hallmarking around 12 million items a year under the Anchor. In 2025 the Quarter was named a World Craft City.
What makes it singular is that it survived intact. English Heritage calls it a combination of jewellery and metalworking structures "which does not seem to exist anywhere else in the world" — a working district you can still read like an open-air museum.
On the map
- Birmingham Assay Office (the Anchor)
- Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Vyse Street
- St Paul's Square
- The Chamberlain Clock
- The Pen Museum & The Coffin Works
In the district
Traveller notes
The Quarter is one of the few jewellery districts you can read like an open-air museum — its workshops and factory buildings survive largely intact, and the heart of it is walkable in an afternoon.
- Museum of the Jewellery Quarter on Vyse Street — the Smith & Pepper workshop, left exactly as it was when it closed in 1981.
- St Paul's Square — the Grade I-listed Georgian church where Matthew Boulton and James Watt worshipped.
- The Chamberlain Clock at the Vyse Street / Frederick Street crossroads — the Quarter's landmark.
- The Pen Museum and The Coffin Works — proof the Quarter made far more than jewellery.