Anvic House

Anvic House is a manufactory, originally a pair of houses dating from approximately 1850, which was extended to form smaller manufactories and further altered by 1875. The building is constructed of red brick with painted stone dressings, and has a hipped roof covered in composition slates with tall brick chimneys on each slope of the Vyse Street frontage.

The building occupies a corner site, composed of two original L-shaped ranges with a workshop extension facing Spencer Street. The Vyse Street elevation is three storeys high, with four bays rising from a shallow blue brick plinth. The central bays contain paired semi-circular arch-headed doorways with moulded architraves and panelled doors beneath semi-circular overlights. Flanking these are wide display windows with 20th-century joinery. A third doorway to the left has a rectangular overlight. The first floor has four 2 over 2 pane sash windows with flat rubbed brick arched heads, set on a painted sill band. Above this is a painted storey band, and then four smaller upper floor sashes with eared lintels. The Spencer Street elevation mirrors the first three bays of the Vyse Street front, with blocked window openings to the corner bay and an inserted doorway further along. The remaining two bays have stacked windows, mostly with 2 over 2 pane sashes. To the right is a three-storey workshop range with an altered ground floor, but with workshop windows on the upper floors, featuring grouped multi-pane lights arranged 2:3:2 in shouldered frames separated by colonnettes. The banding and eaves detail of the earlier building is extended into the workshop range.

Nos. 83 and 84 were initially part of a new housing development on the western end of Vyse Street, and were quickly adapted and extended to become small manufactories. By 1862, workshops had been built to the rear of No. 82, and by 1889, the garden of No. 84 was built over with the present workshop range. The manufactory was used for the production of gold chain and jewellery.

This late 19th-century manufactory developed through the adaptation, extension, and combination of two mid-19th century houses, demonstrating the rapid evolution of specialist industrial buildings in Birmingham, a manufacturing quarter now considered to be of international significance.