J. W. Evans – The Story of a Silver Factory

Nick: Welcome to everyone. We've just got within this lunchtime hour to go through this. So, hopefully, I'll finish in time to have some chat and conversation at the end, because it is a project that does stimulate quite a lot of thoughts and discussion. It certainly did for us as a project team going forward, and taking it to its conclusion. Just to introduce myself… So. I'm Nick Hill, National Conservation Projects Manager with Historic England. And actually, I've been with the organization for 31 years. This project was done in 2008 to 2011, before we split from our sister organization, English Heritage. We were at that time all under one camp. I'm a chartered building surveyor, and particularly have been managing our larger in-house projects, some of which I've given technical Tuesday webinars on before. In particular, the current project, which we've just been finishing up and winning awards for, which has been very nice, at Shrewsbury, Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings project, and also Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire, a great country house rescue project. Both of those are recorded webinars if you're interested in those.

But today we're looking at a very different kind of project, the J.W. Evans Silver Factory in Birmingham. There's actually an article which I wrote on this, an excellent article, if I say myself, which is available to download, and I do recommend looking at that if you're interested in some more of the detail about the project, both the historical background and the technical side of it, and how the project was delivered. So, to start at the beginning. The Evans Silver Factory is located in the jewellery quarter in Birmingham. This sits just to the northwest of the city centre, just about a mile or so northwest of the centre. And it's a rather extraordinary section of the urban fabric.

It was recognised from way back as a rather special neighbourhood, particularly given the production of not just jewellery, actually, but silverware is one of its major things as well, and all sorts of metalworking trades crammed into this extraordinary area, which, despite all the changes in recent times, has actually continued to be quite a centre of industry, metalworking trades, really just outside the city centre. It was recognised as a very special place, not just in England, but actually right across Europe. So, it was the focus of a study that English Heritage took forward in 1998 to 2000, and produced this handsome book looking at all of the buildings of the jewelry quarter and the very special nature of it. And it was during that study, actually, that the J.W. Evans Silver Factory was recognised as being really quite a unique survival, a very complete entity that survived right through to the current time. So, I just wanted to check, Matt, can everybody see my mouse alright as I'm circling around things there? Is that working okay?

Matt: No. We can't. So, what you need to do is, just go up to the top right-hand corner of your slides, and there's a little pointing finger icon there. If you click on that, your cursor will appear.

Nick: Pointing finger. Not seeing that.

Matt: Hover at the very top right corner of your slide.

Nick: Oh, I've got it. Yes. I was looking on the screen here. Yeah. Yeah. Is it there now?

Matt: Alas, no. Let's move on.

Nick: Let's move on. Okay. Not to worry. So we're here looking at an aerial view of the jewellery quarter. You get an idea of this dense urban fabric. It's interesting in that the JW Evans factory is on the right there in the center, the sort of black whole slate roofed areas there. A frontage of ordinary domestic houses as they were built here in the 1830s, and then infilled with workshops behind. And you can see this extraordinary dense way that it's built. It's certainly made for some quite complex issues in terms of accessing the building and its repair. Here's a front street view from some years before the project started, actually. Again, to give you an idea of just the sort of ordinary, rather domestic looking street front. These were built as domestic houses in the 1830s. And then these workshops, as you see on the rear view, were added in the 1880s behind.

And then, even this sort of footprint between those filled in with a glazed roof, very typical, really intensive use of these places in the jewelry quarter for industrial purposes. But what's special about the JW Evans Silver Factory and what had been recognised in particular in that English Heritage study of the whole of the jewellery quarter, and it was singled out as being a rather remarkable survival. Inside, the minute you walk in, you're confronted with these extensive areas, a wonderful stamp shop that we're looking at there with thousands and thousands of dyes. And it really is a most remarkable, complete entity. The heart of the ground floor of the building has these drop stamps, as they're called, which are very specialised pieces of kit developed in the late 18th century, still in use in parts of the jewellery quarter, but actually now extremely rare.

And JW Evans has one of the largest, most extensive surviving sets of these drop stamps, which have now been put into working order. And drop stamps were a particular technology. What you see on the right there is one of the typical dies. That's about 150 mil across that. And it's a carved pattern in reverse. And the business here, that Jenkin Evans, who we'll see shortly, started in 1881, was actually particularly focused initially on creating these patterns, an incredible craft skill, carving into steel in reverse these patterns. That's for a small tray with very, very fine detail, all finished to a high polish. If you look closely at that slide, you can see the on the outside rim of the carving, you can see the chisel marks of where it hasn't had to be finished. Gives you an idea of the craftwork involved.

Those dyes are placed in the base of the drop stamp, and then a big heavy hammerhead comes down and presses out the parts to make pieces of silverware. Inside the factory, as I say, it's just an extraordinary place crammed with all of the working tools. Since it was set up in 1881, the Evans family seem to have been one of those people who never threw anything away, really. And it just accumulated over the years. The parts, as you can see here, for all sorts of manner of making of silverware. Pieces were stamped out and then made up by silversmiths, joined together to make up the different parts. And they made a huge variety of items: candlesticks, you can see jugs, sauce boats, all sorts of trays, and everything you can imagine, really, for the tableware, the sort of silverware, to be honest, that had its heyday in the early part of the 20th century, maybe through the 50s, 60s or so, but then has become less and less popular.

And we have also, amongst all that, the surviving showroom. This is from when it was still there in the next door property. It was then dismantled, but all of the silverware was also retained. And these marvellous handcrafted pieces you can see, they're one of my favourite ones, that sort of barley sugar twist candlestick. Remarkable things. And the whole showroom full of about 500 pieces of that stuff. To just touch then briefly on the history of the building, it was built as houses in the 1830s originally, but became the focus of the J.W. Evans business from 1881. This is Jenkin Evans and his family, this splendid chap seated with a hat in his hand on the left there and his wife, and then his three children, including Harold and Austin, his two sons who took over the business. And then on the right, we have Tony Evans, who's the grandson of Jenkin, who took over the business in the 1950s.

So, he started working at the business in the 1950s and remained the owner right through to the time when Historic England, English Heritage as we were then, took over the property in 2008. So, remarkable continuity of the single family ownership, and as I said, the whole building inside containing really all of that history. One of the things that survives particularly well are these photographs from... We have the original negatives of these photographs. One of Jenkin's sons, Austin, was a very keen photographer. So, we have a whole collection of these. And these are not just of- There's quite a lot of the family and their pursuits and so on. But actually, rather uniquely, there are some really fine shots, as you see here, of the workforce as well.

This is all of the men in the heart of the building in one of the drop stamp shops. And you can see also young boys, there was a whole series of apprentices and so on here. And rather wonderfully, there was then a division of the sexes. This is the fly press shop on the first floor. And as you can see, in the traditional way in the jewellery quarter, this was staffed by ladies, who I'm afraid at that time had to have a man in charge of all of the machinery and so on. But the ladies were really a force to be reckoned with. As you can see, they're very much in charge of their own domain on the first floor. This is the fly presses, which were sort of for the lighter machinery where all the cutting out and more delicate pattern work was applied. And being such a complete entity, we have not only this whole set of glass plate negatives, but actually we also have the original camera, the Evans family camera that this was taken- all of these photographs were taken with.

And alongside that, also with the property, since its foundation in 1881 by Jenkin, a whole set of archives, paper archives, going back through that whole period of the family business, right through to 2008, when Tony was in charge. Ledger books, copies of invoices, copies of letters that Jenkin was writing to apprentices, cross when they didn't turn up for work, writing to their parents and telling them that they wouldn't be employed any longer if they didn't show up, and so forth. A remarkable, complete insight into the whole working industry of the time. So, that's a very brief introduction to the interiors and what went on there in the production of this silverware, and especially early on, dye sinking, Jenkins's special craft. Just to talk about the initiation of the project, through the...

From sort of the 1980s or so on, the Evans business was somewhat in decline. The market for silverware was fading. The buildings were getting into increasingly poor condition. So, when it was picked up by English Heritage in 1998, it was recognised as hugely important, was listed at Grade II* and it was on our radar very much as something that really needed to be saved. There were a number of efforts when it became clear that Tony Evans was looking to retire. His sons were not willing to take on the business. They'd been involved with it, but they recognised that really there was no great future for it as a silverware manufactory anymore, so they were looking to dispose of it.

And we realised looking at it, that while the buildings themselves would be listed, the great risk was really to the huge collection of contents inside which were not listed where they could be picked up and carried off out. And in fact, you know, as had happened to many places in the jewellery quarter, though not as quite as important as J.W. Evans, just simply cleared out and dumped into skips or scrap. And the whole of that history could have been lost really overnight. So, eventually, after various attempts by other organisations and support from English Heritage, looking at options, appraisals and so on, we decided that the only way forward to save the place was actually, very uniquely, and this only happens very infrequently, English Heritage started to step in and to purchase the building and its contents complete.

And in fact, one of the great things was that this was all done with the great goodwill of Tony Evans, the owner, and we actually agreed for him to be completely, fully involved with the project, and one of our principal advisors and informants on all of the great intricacies and complexities of the building and the processes that happened there, and the history of it. So, that was the start up of the project. I took over as project manager, and it became ours in March 2008, and we then had to take forward the project and decide how we were going to manage to save this, and take it forward into a sound future. As with many such buildings, when one takes them on initially, there is a need for immediate action. And here we have the usual position. The buildings had been declining greatly over the recent years, had a lot of leaks.

So, one of the first operations was to organise the bucket emptying quota for all of the buckets that were catching the rainwater. We did a first round of holding repairs on the roof to try and patch up the leaks. As you can see here, one of the worst areas was the roof lights, which were leaking quite badly. And we put temporary covers over all of those and did our best to stop the rain getting in. And then, other things to take forward, of course, in terms of getting a project underway, including contamination issues. Here we had the normal issues of asbestos, particularly areas of asbestos roof and so on, asbestos in the interiors, but also some of the industrial process contaminants here. The dipping bucket to do with that copper sulfate and sulfuric acid and so on, which needed to be dealt with alongside a lot of mysterious bottles parked away in many remote corners, which we need to assess.

So, we took forward the initial stages of the project. One of the first things was, from the project management point of view, to procure the design team. We appointed, after the whole procurement process, Rodney Melville and partners. Steven Oliver of that was the lead architect, with them as our key lead consultants and architects. I think Steven Oliver is actually on the call today, which is rather wonderful. And quantity surveyors were [...], and the structural engineers, SFK, and the MNE was done by LAM Associates. So, we had to assemble that whole team, put together a measured survey. This is one of the fruits of that. You can see there the sort of elevation of the building. A really good measured survey, of course, gives you a good, sound basis for everything that follows in terms of control of the project and control of the high quality repairs that were going to be needed.

But alongside those more normal things, we were also keen to make sure that we had a very good understanding of the building. So there was a whole program of historic building recording and analysis, documentary study that we commissioned to be taken forward. And this on the left, you can see, is a plan of the buildings showing the phasing of the different parts of it. In simple terms, you can see in red there the terraced house frontages with the bay windows onto the front. Somebody was asking about the bay windows. They were, in fact, added. We have a photograph of the bay windows of the frontage of the house as it was built in the 1830s. the bay windows only arrived in the late 19th century. But the houses, they had room in the front, room in the back, staircase in the middle, and then the yards filled in with workshop through the course of the late 19th century, and increasingly those areas glazed and covered over.

So, we built up a good understanding of our historic building, which was vital in terms of deciding how to go forward. One of the unique things I've touched on a little bit about the jewellery quarter generally is that many of the buildings, as with this one, started life as being domestic premises and then were converted to industrial use. And this being J.W. Evans, a lot of that domestic stuff from the earlier 19th century still remains. So, there's a wonderful staircase there from that period. And amazingly, among all the racks of dyes, there are thousands and thousands of these dyes that they fitted, shells all around the place to store all the patterns of the models that they needed for the silverware, you can see the kitchen range that was used by the Evans family before Jenkin moved out in the early 20th century, out into the suburbs as the business improved. But the range stayed behind.

So, that led us to be able to develop a really good understanding of the building. And we were able to produce a plan showing the sort of key areas of significance and rating the significance of the various parts of the building. This was a sort of foundation block of the project, really. The most important areas being right here, the key workshops and the key other parts of the domestic house, but other areas where there have been some changes, contents had already been removed. Some of the outer areas that you see in green there have actually always been sublet and not used by the Evans business. So, we were able to come up with a really comprehensive understanding, and decide just quite the levels of importance and significance, in our historic terms, of those different parts of the building, which then was going to lead us straight through into thinking about the different uses and the different approaches that would be available to us.

We spent some time and really made it quite a cross-English Heritage/Historic England thing. We had a large seminar with a whole group of people coming together. Because it was by no means straightforward to think about how one was going to save the JW Evans entity. So, there was quite a bit while we were taking forward all that procurement, understanding the building measured survey and so on and so forth, quite a lot of thinking time on our side about how we were going to tackle this extraordinary challenge. Just to touch on other industrial buildings and appropriate uses for those... Sorry, I think I've missed a slide there. Yes, that's right. Industrial buildings, of course, and their reuse, is always a challenge in many ways. Very rarely is it possible to continue the same use when a building has been used in industrial terms for some time, and then it has a challenging future to it.

It's usually because that industry has come to an end. The perfect example, of course, is Middleport Pottery, where amazingly this pottery- I was involved with this project alongside others some years ago, and this had a major injection with the Heritage Lottery Fund money and so on to take it towards a new future. But actually a large part of this building is still actually in use by Birley Pottery, alongside other uses, which on quite a large site have had to be found. But that, in terms of finding, establishing an ongoing use for an industrial building is perhaps the perfect solution, but very rarely available to us. At the other end of the scale is something like our great Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings project, which I've been leading the construction works on. We just completed this over the last ten years, delivering that.

This had had 2 different industrial uses, first as a flax mill and then as a maltings. That use had finished, and then a been laying empty for many, many years, seeking a new use. And that is what we've now put it to. So it's now open to the public on the ground floor, a café and exhibition, and 4 floors above of commercial offices for rent, a very extensive building that really needed to find a new use, a third age, as we say, a flaxmill, a maltings, and now a mixed-use building, which has actually just won awards in the Architects Journal Awards, retrofit awards, just this last week, which is very nice for us. But coming back to Evans, Evans was clearly a very, very different entity. So, now I want to just consider the conservation philosophy for this particular building. It was a very unique project.

It's not something that most people are going to ever have the chance to work on. And this was a one-off for my career, certainly. But it raises a lot of really fundamental issues and discussion points about what we are doing when we come to conserve a building, and why we're doing it. How to repair something like JW Evans, which as you saw, the whole of the exterior envelope in a very poor state, without destroying what we'd come to save. And what sort of use was it going to be? We decided fairly quickly that it was going to have to be preserved as a museum, essentially, because otherwise you would really, by reworking it, destroy it completely if you were to take it over and fit it out as offices. There are some outer parts of that which that could be appropriate for, but the core of it and the whole part of that that we defined as the highest significance, the red areas, really needed to find a very special solution.

So, as we went through this, looking at how we were to tackle this extraordinary thing, we got to grips more and more with what became a very radical "conserve as found" approach. Now, "conserve as found", this is a phrase that you may well be familiar with, that's used quite regularly in the conservation world. This probably is the most radical "conserve as found" project at scale that you would have come across, really. It's certainly something that when we searched around, you don't really see anything like this anymore. Nothing. Nothing like this has been done quite in the UK before. Other projects have done similar kind of things, but took an essentially different approach. So that, for example, at [...] in Derbyshire, the National Trust took 14 neglected country houses, and that's displayed very much as it was, as taken over.

Similarly, English Heritage did the same at Brodsworth Hall in South Yorkshire. It was taken over quite some years ago and carefully conserved, and presented very much as it was at its point of decline, really. And similarly also, actually in the jewellery quarter itself, as a museum of the jewellery quarter, a very fine museum, the other end of the jewellery quarter from us at J. Evans, where it had taken over some jewellery and silversmithing workshops and had been through a complete conservation process. But in each of these cases and many more like it, although they're presented as if with all the contents reassembled, what's actually happened is that they've been through a comprehensive process of complete cataloguing of all of the interior items, the removal of those, careful conservation of the whole of the interior, and then, conserving all of the individual objects and then rearranging them back in the same place again.

We realised that if you started to do that, as you can see here at J.W. Evans, you would really destroy what you came to save. And the question became, "How do you preserve what was the essential quality of Evans, which is this extraordinary atmosphere?" And we came round to the view eventually that, "How do you preserve an atmosphere?" Well, the answer is obvious, in that you have to leave it alone. So, the starting point for us really was that everything stays exactly the same, where it was exactly on the 1st of April 2008, when we took it on. Each individual object we were going to leave in place as it was, untouched, including the sort of dust layer, the original dust layer, often containing sort of metal filings, and part of the story as well. Runs counter to the training and instincts of collections and museum curators, this does. The decay, the dirt, corrosion and not even full cataloging.

So, it's quite a radical step to try to do it. But this is what we felt we needed to do in order to save the essential side of it. We also recognised that we wanted to conserve Evans in its utilitarian, rather ramshackle character, not to tidy it up or to remove accretions or blemishes. This was- we've been focusing here on the workshop parts, but we applied this philosophy also right through to Tony Evans's office, with its rather outdated fax machine and things like that. That's now part of the museum display, and Tony Evans's coffee cups and calendar and so on as well. The question we like to ask ourselves was always not about "Is it attractive?" But rather, "Will it last?" And if it will last without any intervention. And that's what we were going to want to do. So, that was the core of the project and this "conserve as found" approach was formulated. And this is what we committed ourselves to doing.

I want to talk now first about the external repairs, which were a more standard and straightforward kind of thing in many ways. For the exterior, we recognised that we were going to have to do a comprehensive repair, complete refurbishment. We weren't looking to retain decay and deterioration to the exterior. We needed to give the interior, which was what mattered here, a very long life in terms of how we treated the exterior. So this is the scaffold going up. We tackled the project in two phases. First, dealing with the external envelope, to protect and keep the weather out, and then moving on to the more complex work of the interior. So, the main problem, to be honest, with the work on the exterior, was the access. You saw from those earlier aerial photographs, that it's completely hemmed in on all sides. So, getting the scaffolding in over this, arranging temporary protection to the roofs as work was done, was particularly difficult and awkward.

But we managed with good contractors and our architects to devise ways of taking that forward. We skipped one there. Yes. So, of course, we were looking to do a normal minimum intervention approach where it was appropriate, as in the timber work, piecing it into one of the glazed areas here and so on, trying to retain as much of the older timber work as possible, scarfing and splicing in new timber. But the roof coverings we needed to replace comprehensively here, glazed pate and glazed roofs. Mainly the Welsh slate roofs with new Welsh slates throughout to give this a long life. One of the things that we also did here was, we actually scaled up the size of all the gutters and down pipes, because we recognised there was an ongoing maintenance problem. We weren't particularly aware at that point.

People have become very aware of this nowadays with climate change and are looking to potentially scale up rainwater goods to deal with the increasing high level of stormwater flows. But this was more to do with maintenance, and particularly a problem that Birmingham has with nesting seagulls on roofs, and debris and blockage that you get as a result of that. One interesting item, just to pick up on the external envelope was some items that came up. Most of the roofs are obviously a roll of slate of older type paint and glazing, where we were able to match like for like in terms of new materials, but you also had some later parts. This yard that we're looking at on the right, the small yard, was actually only covered in roofed in in the 1980s or so. And here we had glass fibre and actually asbestos cement roof, which we decided, no, we weren't going to replace that with a sort of more traditional looking paint and glazing or anything like that.

We would keep, well, keep or replace with like-for-like fibre cement or asbestos cement on that roof as part of the historic character, as part of that retaining the sort of ramshackle and utilitarian character of JW Evans, and not sort of trying to tidy it up and make it look better. And this is very much part of its workaday character. And so, that's the exterior of the building before and after. There was obviously quite a lot of brickwork repairs, window repairs pointing and so on, but relatively normal, straightforward stuff apart from difficulties with the access side of things. And so, that's the exterior. And on the front, as you can see, we had really completely redecorated, and sound, good for, I hope, quite a number of years.

So, we then moved on with phase 2, onto the interior, and we had this strong contrast as we defined between the red areas, where everything as far as possible was to stay absolutely untouched in its original position, something we couldn't do entirely, absolutely in every location and everywhere, but that was the core approach that we defined, amber areas where we were sort of still thinking about which way to go, and green areas, where we decided that we could take forward a much more straightforward approach, make alterations, fit in visitor facilities and so on, and adapt as necessary, because the significance of those areas had already been compromised. One of the key approaches that we had with the interior then was to introduce these crash decks, as we called, scaffold platforms, put in beneath the roof.

And this was one of the more extreme cases where we lost the whole of the ceiling. It was in poor condition before, and with the slate roofing needing to come off and go back directly on the other side of the rafters. This couldn't be saved, this area of ceiling, so, that had to come down entirely, and meant that there was a huge amount, obviously, of mess, which was largely contained by this crash deck. And we put these through one of the areas I should mention really, also at this point, one of the key things that we decided was absolutely essential and turned out to be absolutely a massive advantage to the way of taking this forward, was to appoint a dedicated conservator, English Heritage staff member Beth Stanley, who came on board and was on site throughout the course of the project, able, for example, to supervise the scaffold workers who were bringing in this scaffolding. Scaffolding people, not being known as the most diligent and careful of people, perhaps in the construction industry, needed close control in order to not disturb anything.

And to be quite clear that no, when we said we were leaving everything in place, we were leaving everything in place, and that was how it was to be treated. So that's the crash deck, one of the key methods. Another key method was where we have particular parts of machinery that were sensitive. We were obviously providing localized wrapping to those covers, dust covers, and so forth. A huge amount of this was also done besides the crash deck for the primary care above. One of the nice things to note which Beth immediately said, "Right, this is how we're going to do it," was where you're constructing a whole sort of box around works, and then works are going on for 6 months or so with all the contractors all around it. It's very useful to build in a little vision window so that you can just keep an eye on what's going on in there, and that it's not actually deteriorating, or some leak or mess has got in there.

That was a useful thing, for Beth to be able to keep an eye on how things were progressing. One of the other major challenges throughout the building was then how to deal with the internal surfaces, the walls and the ceilings in particular, which had deteriorated massively, as you see here, were flaking, and so on and so forth. And we wanted to preserve those. We didn't want to intervene. We certainly didn't want to redecorate in any of the red areas unless we really had to. But that deteriorated look was very much part of it, but we clearly needed to control that level of deterioration. So we had to work quite hard on this aspect because on the one hand, you know, normally you would go in and just sort of repair, consolidate, redecorate, or on the other hand, you're looking at conservator level techniques of dealing with wall painting type finishes, and the pounds per square metre sort of mount up massively.

So, we developed a number of trials and took this forward with Alex Carrington, a wonderful conservator who I've worked with on a number of projects over the years. Very pragmatic approach she was able to develop looking at consolidating, pasting back, peeling paper, as you can see, dealing with flaking surfaces, some of it just having to brush down really and deal with that. But it was very successful in the end. It does mean there's a need for a sort of ongoing maintenance regime, and rather different from where you've redecorated entirely. This chart just shows, I guess this "conserve as found" at its most key illustration of it, really. It's rather nice. So we've got one of the dye racks in one of the back doors behind, which was broken and failed. This plaster and dust falling all over this wonderful set of rusting dyes on the wall. Now, usually you would say, right, well, we're going to have to take all those dyes off, clean it all down, mend that shelf and so on and so forth.

Actually, what we did was we put one- you can see that white dot there, there's a resin fixing been drilled through there into the wall to stabilise that with one fixing. That's a timber pallet that then is going to get flushed down and stained in. Then you can see it if you look for it. But actually, it just means that that one intervention means that that whole area is then conserved as found in its original state. A particularly challenging aspect, of course, was the whole of the MNE side of things. The building had to be completely rewired. Fire safety, security systems, as well as electrics, lighting, and so on. And we also had to do that fire safety compartmentation and so on as well. So, that was quite a challenge for the architects, to come up with sensitive ways of managing that.

And on the MNE side, we managed to get a very wonderful compliant electrical contractor, a very personalized service from this chap, Declan Keane, who had endless patience, threading wires down existing conduits and so on in our most sensitive places, which was very successful, and being able to reuse some of the old switchgear. We had to use new galvanized sockets in certain areas as well. But this was the ultimate, really. So, that is looking then at the before and after now in the fly press shop. This is the one that we saw the ladies in the old photograph, black and white photograph early on in the talk. Here's a shot of it on the left there with the ceiling. This is the ceiling that we had the crash deck area in here. And that ceiling had to be replaced. So there's a new ceiling, which is an unusual intervention. But for the rest of it, all of those artifacts on all the benches, all the piled layers of history, and so on, were really kept intact throughout.

We had to move things around a little bit that were sitting on the floor, obviously for access down the main centre of the room, but other than that, all to the sides and so on, it was retained as it was. That's the upstairs. One of the items that we decided would need a very different approach was the whole of the paper archive. This actually was an extremely important set of archive documents, as I touched on earlier. And actually most of it had been moved around and collected together by Tony Evans already. So, it wasn't really in a sort of historic original setting in that sense. And it certainly wouldn't have done very well if it had just been left in its damp and dusty condition. So, we had a full program of archival work on this with our conservators. And also, this is one where our Historic England inspector Nick Molyneaux, who was heavily involved with the project throughout.

Sadly, Nick passed away earlier this year. Great loss to us all. But he was heavily involved with this project, and particularly on the historical and archival side. He put in a great deal of work to that, cataloguing and organizing that. So, we have a whole sort of archive still now of our documents on the site. Another part of it was the silverware. We had the original whole contents, 500 pieces from the showroom, which had already been- had to be sold off. It had been in the next door property already sold off. So, Tony Evans had the silverware in store. So, we were able, in one of our green areas, to identify an area where we could put a new showroom on the first floor as they tended to be often in the jewellery quarter, because these were not showrooms for the general public. The jewellery quarter is very much of a trade-only sort of industry really, and they were selling on to wholesalers, Garrard and so on, the great people who are the middle men who made all the money, and these were the suppliers to it.

So, the showroom here was trade only and was on the first floor. You would be invited in to come and see the items. So we did a whole set of new showcases with atmospheric control to the interiors of those cases to make sure that the silverware was as preserved as it could be. And that's Beth Stanley and Alex Carrington doing some of the final set up of some of the pieces to go through that. And this is just to make the point about the guided tours. We were able in some of the green areas to set up here with a visitor entry point, assembly point for guided tours. We decided that having small parties of guided tours was the only way to show this to the public rather than the free flow system, because of the density and vulnerability of all of the items in the rooms. This is Tony Evans himself and during one of the many guided tours that we did through the course of the project and afterwards.

It's open to the public with English Heritage and I do encourage you to go on their website and book at all. It's a wonderful experience, quite extraordinary. I can describe it, and you can see with all of these photographs that we have a wonderful, photogenic place. Our Historic England photographs really did- our photography team really did us proud on all of the images. But there's nothing like visiting it in the authentic reality of the thing, to see it for real. One of the final items we decided to do was actually, we realised that having studied the whole place in great detail, we had all the artifacts, we had all the sort of physical work, we had the silverware, we had the machinery. What we recognised was about to be lost really from the jewellery quarter is some of the craft skills which went into this extraordinary detail and extraordinarily complex process. So, we decided to actually to make use of our restored machinery.

We decided in a few parts where we could do that. And we decided to follow the making of a typical piece of candlestick right through all of the steps from start to finish, and we made a very detailed documentary film of this. This is Barry Abbot, the drop stamper who worked at Evans for several decades of his life. He is probably retired now, I imagine. When he made this, he was still in business as a drop stamp, one of the last of his trade in the jewellery quarter. So, he came back in and we made this film, taking it through all the processes. The network across the jewellery quarter still, this is a silversmith who assembled parts made in the Evans factory. He's actually just 50 yards up the road from the Evans factory. And so, the video of this is actually available. I really do recommend watching it. There's a short version without sound and there's a longer version with sound, and those are both available on that link.

Our wonderful filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, we have Jonathan Lee who put that together for us. And really to put on record a really quite detailed account of just all of the different craft skills that go into the making of that piece. So, I think that's the last slide there, just to finish on that note of this extraordinary atmosphere. That's one of the after slides there of the main stamp shops, with its battered old fluorescent light fittings, new tubes within it. But other than that... We had a final.. Sort of interesting sessions at the end where, despite all of the protection, of course, there had been an amount of fine dust that settled throughout the building. So, Beth Stanley and Alex Carrington, our conservator, had to go through things and, with some humour, it has to be said, distinguish between the historic dust which had been there before and often contained things like metal filings and some of the various base metals and so on that are a key part of the works, and the non-historic dust, the builder's dust, and to remove the non-historic dust and leave the historic dust behind as the sort of finishing touch really. So, there it is. I think that's the end of the talk. And we could then move on to looking at some of the chat.

Matt: Nick, what an amazing story and a fantastic presentation. Personally, I can't think of another example of a historic environment such as this that's actually been preserved and conserved in that way. Absolutely. Amazing. Nick, if you'd like to turn your webcam on, let's have a look at some of these questions. We've got a few here. Please, to our attendees. If you have a question you'd like to ask Nick, please feel free to populate that Q&A window in the centre of your screen. I can see a few questions.

Nick: I'll go through those as they come up then. Yeah. So, yes, there was a comment about the 1830s front houses and the bay windows. I covered that earlier on because I saw that had come up. And yeah, those bay windows are a later ion, strangely. The contamination... How is it possible... Unknown contamination of the dust as found dealt with. Yes, well part of the earlier investigation was really looking quite carefully at the sources of contamination. And we did constant tests on that. We had more difficult areas of contamination to do with asbestos in particular. Those areas had to be dealt with by asbestos contractors under close supervision. But most of that was actually asbestos that was still intact. So, not really spreading dust. And the dust involved as we found in the investigations that we did, the dust that we were finding generally across the factory didn't- it wasn't going to have contaminants, generally.

One of the fortunate things we had in terms of the JW Evans factory was that they never did one of the most contaminant-producing processes in the jewellery quarter, the electroplating, which involves potassium cyanide and so on. We did find an old barrel at the back of one of the green areas in one of the junked areas which had the words potassium cyanide across it, which sent the alarm bells ringing. We had to have some special disposal technique. But in terms of that permeating through the dust, we didn't really have an issue with that, fortunately. The little barriers on the roof. Yes, those barriers are to stop, in particular sliding snow, where you get that sliding snow and then onto the glass below. So, it's a technique that's used sometimes. "How do you deal with cleaning, distinguishing between historic and modern dust?"

Yes, I think that was really down to the judgment of the conservators in getting the right people on it, really, people had become very familiar with distinguishing that dust. One of the particular characteristics of the historic dust on the work benches especially was that it had little glint of particles of brass, copper, nickel in amongst it, the base metals that were used for much of the silverware before it was plated. So, you got to recognize that. And basically it's just older and grimier, whereas the new dust, particularly from our plasterwork and things like that, paint, is a finer, whiter dust. Yeah. Do we consider some areas leaving exactly as is, cleaning up other areas to show the equipment items as they would have been in their prime? Yes. In a way, we have ended up doing a bit of that with the working area of- we got one set of the stamps, the drop stamps to work again, and we actually used one of the fly presses as well.

So in producing our candlestick, we did actually use some of those, and we decided actually to leave those, very much, you know, basically just as Evans left them, really, which is how they'd been left, you know, before 2008 and how they were left once again in 2011-12 when we were doing it. So, we've done that to an extent. The difference is maybe not all that apparent in that- what had happened evidently through the factory had been that there'd been a gradual abandonment, really, of many areas, and a sort of condensing of the active areas into a few remaining parts. And that remains the case, really. From a building contract, I think we used the intermediate form of building contract with full- with quantities and so on. We like to have quite close control over that, quite a traditional method.

We like to be able to specify fully, have everything fully defined before going out to tender, and before a tender, public procurement process to get contractors on board. The contractors were, for the first phase, Bowman's, and then for the second phase, Linford, both sadly firms that are no longer with us. I haven't mentioned the coffin works. The coffin works are another premises entirely. It's actually where Stephen Oliver, his architectural practice is based there now. But that's a different business, coffins, another specialist factory within the jewellery quarter. Does the museum use... With just very small limited guided tours generate enough income to pay for the upkeep of the building. No, it does not. That was never really going to be a feasible thing. It's one of those things, like with the rest of English Heritage properties open to the public, about 2/3s of them are actually free sites.

They are a liability, a public liability that we've signed up to as being part of England's history, that's the reason that we're there to save. There was a big conservation deficit. it was paid for- the total cost of the project was £2 million. We received a conservation grant from Birmingham City Council of something like 120K, I think. But basically, it was a commitment from English Heritage, Historic England, to save the nation's heritage. Would you consider having regular demonstrations on specific pieces of machinery to retain the skills? That would be a wonderful thing if it could be done. We certainly did that for a short while. I think that's now, with the English Heritage team, we thought it would be nice to be able to do that and to be able maybe have some workshops, skills workshops occasionally, but I'm not sure what they've been able to do on that front.

Was there any thought turning parts of the factory into a resource to keep the trades going? It's interesting, that. Actually it was a key part of the project earlier on. You would have noticed, in the outer parts, number 57, which was never- these 4 properties, the number 57 was never occupied by JW Evans themselves. Originally it was sublet. And we did for quite a while try to get going with a- to have designer maker workshop provision for up-and-coming jewellery quarter workers linking to crafts and skills training and the other initiatives that are happening within the jewellery quarter. We did put some effort into getting that going, but unfortunately that didn't transpire. Getting the ongoing funding... Getting funding for a one-off capital project is one thing. Getting the funding for an ongoing thing that needs funding year by year can often be much more difficult.

How long can the building remain in the state without more intervention conservation action? Yes, I think the exterior obviously is a standard sort of thing with the Welsh slates and so on. The interior, I guess, is what that's directed at, really. And Beth Stanley, our conservator, certainly, I think she's still involved with this. And so, there's a regular ongoing review of it. I think it's turned out to be relatively manageable in terms of its ongoing needs. There will, I'm sure, come a time when particularly some of the internal surfaces need another round of reconsolidation, the peeling paper and so on. But a lot of that deterioration actually had really been caused by water ingress and that kind of neglect. And I think having removed the cause of the problems, many of those areas really had been sort of left as they were for 50 years and can probably be left for another 50 years. And so I think... Have we got to the end of it there, Matt?

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