“I’ve been told previously by people that the best thing about Birmingham was leaving it,” says jewellery designer Laura Vann, who grew up in the English West Midlands city. So new global recognition of its jewellery skill is “sweet vindication” that helps her “reframe the narrative” about Birmingham.
Last month, the World Crafts Council (WCC), a Unesco-affiliated organisation, named Birmingham as a World Craft City for jewellery and allied trades. Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter is a historic manufacturing hub that in its heyday, around 1913, employed more than 70,000 people. In 2022, it was estimated it housed more than 600 businesses, employing more than 4,100 people in jewellery and related industries, according to a Birmingham City University (BCU) report. Between them, these businesses generated £767mn in annual revenue.
Yet Vann says people “very high up in the jewellery industry” with whom she has spoken do not realise Birmingham’s significance in the trade: it is responsible for an estimated 40 per cent of jewellery made in the UK.
Now, the Jewellery Quarter Development Trust (JQDT), a community interest company that commissioned the BCU research, is using the World Craft City status to try and attract investment for a new UK jewellery festival that could help raise awareness.
Alex Nicholson-Evans, Birmingham’s first city curator, says the month-long Birmingham Jewellery Biennial will feature an exhibition of work by “world-renowned jewellers” alongside jewellers selected via a UK-wide open call.
“The programme that we’re going to devise around that will touch all aspects of what makes the Jewellery Quarter, and indeed Birmingham, special,” she says. This will include pop-up exhibitions, talks, walking and museum tours, workshops, a trade conference and social events. Nicholson-Evans would “be disappointed” if the spring/summer event, financed by public funding and corporate sponsorship, did not come to fruition within the next two years.
Birmingham is the eighth location in Europe to receive World Craft City status since the initiative’s launch in 2014. Matthew Bott, chair of the JQDT, which led the application with BCU, hopes an “immediate benefit” will be “higher footfall, more inquiries to businesses [and] more sales ultimately”, with the biennial helping to keep that uptick going in the longer term.
“[The status] is almost like a PDO [protected designation of origin] for Parmesan cheese or champagne,” he says. “It’s got that kudos where anyone in the trade will be able to use the World Craft City logo . . . to say, ‘We are based in Birmingham’.”
He says the JQDT is in discussions with the Birmingham Assay Office about creating a special mark that could be applied, alongside compulsory hallmarks, to pieces made within the Jewellery Quarter, and another mark that could be applied this year to commemorate the World Craft City announcement.
Rebecca Skeels, course director for the BA in jewellery and objects at BCU’s School of Jewellery, believes the designation will open up access to new funding streams and opportunities for collaborations with other World Craft City locations, which include Stoke-on-Trent and Farnham in England.
The school, which hosted four WCC judges as part of their visit to Birmingham in April, is updating course pages to include the new designation. Skeels hopes the status encourages more applications from international students.
“I run one of the courses that has quite a high international cohort and having that diversity is really valuable,” she says. “It helps us understand how they might sell in other countries, how they might make things, how they manufacture things, and those students become their own network for the future.”
Jewellery designer Fei Liu was the school’s first full-time Chinese student and graduated in 2001. He now runs his eponymous brand from the Jewellery Quarter and sells much of his work at auction. He says the area is a wonderful hub for education and training but, as a manufacturing centre, is not associated with innovative design and is not going to draw people looking to buy “a fantastic luxury piece of jewellery”. “It’s too industrial,” he says. “It doesn’t give the right presentation of luxury.”
Bott agrees there is work to be done on the consumer side. “The challenge is that the Jewellery Quarter was always a wholesale and manufacturing place, and so it’s birth into a ‘retail destination’ came in the ’70s and ’80s, as they needed to diversify,” he says. “But as a retail experience, it’s still got a lot of potential. So with having World Craft City status it helps build the impetus for doing something about that, and the biennial will help.”
Bott says the festival will include open studios, but he acknowledges there is a need for more gallery space for designer-makers to make the “amazing” pieces produced more visible.
For the past three years, Vann has been looking to move her eponymous brand from Sutton Coldfield, a town around 11km north-east of central Birmingham, to the “thriving” Jewellery Quarter, where she manufactures her fine and bespoke pieces. However, due to competition from residential property investors, she is yet to find premises and fears the World Craft City status could make her search even harder.
Vann will promote the designation in marketing materials. She hopes her brand’s Birmingham heritage “now gets looked at in a whole new light” and helps it attract more stockists internationally. “I’ve been banging this drum [for Birmingham] and hopefully now the drum is going to be heard,” she says.
