Coffin Furniture Works

Coffin Furniture Works, 13-15 Fleet Street, Birmingham

A metal-working factory including warehousing, workshops and office, built in 1892 by Richard Harley of Birmingham for Newman Brothers, coffin furniture manufacturers. The building has undergone 20th-century alterations and additions.

The structure is built of smooth red brick rising from a blue brick plinth, with ashlar sandstone dressings and slated roof coverings. It follows a rectangular courtyard plan, with a frontage range and parallel rear workshop ranges enclosing a long narrow rectangular yard accessed from the frontage range.

The north-west front elevation is an asymmetrical 9-bay frontage of 3 storeys. A wide flat-headed waggon entrance with boarded doors occupies bays 3 and 4 to the left, with an entrance doorway and panelled door at the right-hand end. Six window openings on the ground floor are arranged 2:4 either side of the waggon doors, each with a shallow segmental brick arched head and attenuated keyblock, all below a continuous string course. Continuous cill bands run across all floors. The first floor openings have arched heads, whilst the upper floor has a lintel band at eaves level below a shallow moulded parapet. The first and second floors each contain 9 closely spaced openings separated by narrow brick piers, with multi-paned cast iron frames to most. The left return elevation was formerly concealed by now-demolished works, with truncated workshop hearth stacks rising through the eaves.

The rear courtyard contains a 3-storey shopping (workshop) range along the north-east side extending the full length of the plot. This range has closely-spaced windows with mostly multi-paned cast-iron frames incorporating pivoting panes for ventilation. Continuous blue brick cill bands run throughout, with arched blue brick heads to ground and first floor openings and flat heads to the upper floor at eaves level. The centre of the ground floor contains 3 grouped door openings: the 2 outer ones have plank doors and overlights giving access to ground floor workshops, whilst the central opening leads to a stairway to the first floor shopping. The south-west side features a 20th-century replacement stores and office range built over the basement of the former metal-casting shop. A former engine room survives in semi-basement at the south-east end of the yard.

The frontage range interior features an entrance lobby leading to a stick-baluster stair serving the first and second floors. Access to the attached shopping is provided at upper floor level from the frontage range. The ground and first floors functioned as warehousing, with the office and showroom located at the stair head on the first floor. The upper floor was latterly used as a shroud-making workshop. Original joinery and fittings survive throughout the frontage range, together with a hand-operated hoist serving all floors.

The workshop range to the north-east contains a press shop to the left and a plating shop to the right of the stair access. The press shop displays exposed cross-braced joists and fixed benching below windows supporting hand-operated fly presses. A battery of 4 drop stamps stands against the rear wall, with wall shelving for stamping dies. At the northern end is a larger single stamp, above which line-shafting with pulleys and reducing wheels extends along the shop. The plating shop retains 20th-century vats and electrical equipment for the electroplating process. The upper floor workshops, used for polishing and finishing goods, retain workbenching and evidence of gas fittings for soldering (known as Birmingham side-lights) and floor-level line-shafting. A small brick furnace survives at upper workshop level.

The building represents a near-complete example of a 19th-century Birmingham metal-working factory complex specializing in coffin furniture production, retaining the different constituent parts found in such factories including the characteristic shopping range to the rear courtyard, with much surviving original in-situ machinery for the shaping and finishing of metal wares. Such survivals are now extremely rare in Birmingham, an internationally significant centre for the production of metal goods of this kind.

Nos. 13 and 15 Fleet Street form a group with nos. 9 and 11 Fleet Street.