The building behind Matthew Boulton and James Watt on the £50 note is the Soho Manufactory in Birmingham, which no longer exists. In 1756 Edward Ruston leased land on Handsworth Heath and deepened Hockley Brook to drive a water wheel for a rolling mill. Between 1761 and 1764 Boulton and his partner John Fothergill took over the lease to expand his toy business, meaning small metal goods such as buttons, buckles, snuff boxes and watch chains. Boulton tore down the mill and cottage and had the Wyatt family of Lichfield design a monumental factory, completed in 1766, along with his own home, Soho House, on the same grounds.
Inside, Boulton replaced the single craftsman with a line of semi-skilled workers who each stamped, drilled or filed one step, flooding the market with cheap goods while also making japanware, silverware and ormolu for the wealthy. The brook still left the works idle in droughts and freezes until 1782, when Soho became the first site to house a Watt steam engine with the sun and planet gear, which turned a piston’s up and down stroke into continuous rotation. The factory then built the world’s first steam-powered mint, whose steady pressure struck uniform coins that were hard to counterfeit. Production ended in 1848, the buildings were demolished by 1853, and the land became housing for Birmingham’s growing workforce.
- Ruston’s lowering of the brook bed created the head of water that made the site viable.
- The sun and planet gear works like a bicycle pedal, with a planet gear on the engine rod orbiting a sun gear on the drive shaft.
- The Soho minting presses were later used at the first Birmingham Mint.
- Soho Wharf sat at the end of the Soho branch, linked to the Soho Loop of the Birmingham Canal Navigations.
- In 1997 Time Team, series four, episode three, dug up the factory’s foundations from residents’ back gardens.
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