28-29, TENBY STREET

28-29 Tenby Street is a former manufactory and brass works built between 1865 and 1870 for John Clover, a lockfounder. At the time of inspection in August 2000, the building was empty and had been damaged by fire. It features red brick construction with stone dressings and decorative tilework, topped by a slated roof with a central chimney stack.

The building has an L-shaped plan, with a street-facing entrance range and a storeyed workshop range attached at the rear, enclosing a rectangular courtyard. It stands three storeys tall and has four bays. The right side has a moulded semi-circular arch-headed doorway, surrounded by panelled pilasters with Doric capitals, leading to a six-panel door beneath an unglazed semi-circular overlight. To the left, there is a triple window, with each light featuring a moulded semi-circular head and an advanced keyblock. Further left is a later 20th-century double doorway. Above the ground floor, there is a decorative tile band and a moulded stone string course below the cills of the first-floor windows, which are arranged in a pattern of one single and two sets of two-light windows, all with semi-circular heads similar to those on the ground floor.

Between some of the windows at ground and first-floor levels are slender engaged shafts with foliated capitals. The top of the building features an arcade of attic lights, with alternate openings being blind and linked by moulded heads. The eaves are decorated with dogtooth and modillion detailing. The rear workshop range, now without a roof, is three storeys high and has multi-pane cast iron frames. This building forms a group with Nos. 30-31 Tenby Street and is noted for its distinctive domestic-scale architectural detailing, contributing to an extensive street frontage of industrial buildings in a manufacturing district of Birmingham, which is now recognized as having international significance.