Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham (must see)

The Smith and Pepper jewelry factory was a family-run business specializing in gold. When the owners retired in 1981, they simply locked the doors and left. Everything, including tools, teacups, coats and jars of jam and marmite were left on the benches.

The museum opened in 1992. It is the factory itself as it was left eleven years earlier. It is a "time capsule" of the old workshop, and the 200 years of the Birmingham Jewelry Quarter. The Museum is the starting point of a walking tour of the quarter.

There is guided tour that takes visitors around the Smith and Pepper workshop. The 12 seater workbench where some of the skilled craftsmen worked. The names of three of them were Joseph Gee, John Web, and Brian Ravenhill. They were the "mounters." They would build up the "mount" or body of the jewelry using hand-crafting techniques.

There were also Big Eide, Little Eide and Anna Foster worked the polishing lathes while Marjorie and Valery stamped out the gold medallions and broaches on the hand presses.