42 Vyse Street And 17 And 19 Hylton Street

This is a late 19th-century manufactory, with alterations made in the 20th century. It is constructed of red brick with painted stone dressings, a gable chimney stack, and a slate roof with an asymmetrical pitch, the front slope being deeper than the rear.

The building has a modified U-plan, featuring an angled front range facing Vyse Street and parallel rear ranges along Hylton Street, which enclose a narrow yard.

The Vyse Street elevation has two bays and is two storeys high. The left-hand bay is angled towards the line of Hylton Street. To the right is a pair of doorways set at different levels. A lower door on the right provides access to an angled passage leading to the rear yard. A tall, semi-circular arch-headed doorway with a rubbed brick surround and a semi-circular overlight, approached by a flight of five steps, is on the left. A panelled door occupies the doorway. Above the doorway is a window opening with a 20th-century frame and a rubbed brick flat head. The bay to the left has a tall ground floor window opening with a deep lintel, interrupted by a shallow bracketed hood. Above, there is a two-over-two pane sash window within the opening, matching that to the right.

The Hylton Street elevation is three-storeys high and has a wide gable incorporating shallow second-floor sash windows. The rear wall has multi-pane workshop windows. A single-storey, three-bay monopitch range extends along the Hylton Street frontage. A two-bay monopitch return range to the north-east side of the frontage range continues as a lower, three-storey workshop range with shallow arched heads to multi-pane windows. A boundary wall and a vehicle entry to the yard remain along the street frontage.

The building forms a group with Nos. 2 and 44 Vyse Street, and Nos. 84 and 84 Vyse Street.

No. 42 Vyse Street is part of a street frontage largely composed of manufactories, typically small-scale and with domestic detailing, reflecting an earlier 19th-century pattern of converting and extending houses to create workspaces and offices. These buildings were consciously designed and planned as purpose-built industrial units. Together with the parallel range of buildings along the south-east side of Hylton Street, they form a block of back-to-back manufactories, with workshop ranges behind the front buildings. The plot shapes in this area were fully utilized, resulting in the densest survival of this type of development in the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter, a district recognized for its international manufacturing significance.