Birmingham. Solid brass. Made by hand.

Two names. Two centuries. One city.

We take our name from Turner's Brass House, Coleshill Street, 1740 — Birmingham's first brass works — and from R.W. Winfield & Co, Cambridge Street, 1820 — its largest. Our workshop continues a tradition the city began.

1740. Coleshill Street.

Before 1740, Birmingham had no brass. The town's metalworkers worked in iron, in copper, in pewter — and they bought their brass in from Bristol, or from the Cheadle works in Cheshire, at a price.

Then Thomas Turner built a brass house on Coleshill Street, in the centre of Birmingham. Nine furnaces in three buildings, fed by Warwickshire coal. Each pot charged with forty-one pounds of copper and fifty pounds of calamine. Casting twice in every twenty-four hours. From that moment, Birmingham made its own.

Within a generation, the city's brass-founders, polishers, platers and finishers were supplying door furniture, candlesticks, bedsteads and cabinet fittings to every corner of the Empire. The trade Turner started would, by 1914, employ fifty thousand people in the Jewellery Quarter alone.

1820. Cambridge Street.

Eighty years after Turner, Robert Walter Winfield opened a brass foundry on Cambridge Street, half a mile west of Turner's Brass House. The Winfield works grew quickly. By 1860 it employed eight hundred people. Contemporary writers called it the largest hardware factory in Britain, possibly in the world. Its four-acre site had its own canal and a two-hundred-horsepower steam engine.

Winfield patented improvements to brass bedsteads in 1861. The firm exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and its work shipped to every part of the British Empire. The last Winfield family member left the business in the 1890s. The Cambridge Street site has since become the Library of Birmingham.

1890. Kyrle Hall.

Between Turner and Winfield came a third voice — the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, founded in 1890 under the architect Arthur Stansfeld Dixon. Where the founders cast in volume and the Victorian works cast in scale, the Guild cast by hand and to the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement. By Hammer and Hand was their motto. The five-petal Tudor rose was their hallmark, chased into every piece they finished as the maker's mark.

We have recovered that rose, with permission of history, and made it our own. Every Winfield & Turner piece carries it.

Today.

The Turner and Winfield families are gone. The Guild closed in 1910. Their factories and workshops are now offices, libraries, or open air. But the trade those three voices started never left the city. Birmingham still casts brass. There are still hands in the Jewellery Quarter and the Black Country that know how to pour, file, polish, chase and patinate solid brass the way it was done in 1740, in 1820, and in 1890.

Winfield & Turner takes its name in tribute to those families, and to the centuries between them. We do not claim direct descent from any of the three houses. We claim the city, the craft, the rose, and the responsibility to carry the work forward.

Every Winfield & Turner piece is cast in solid brass and finished by hand, at our Birmingham workshop.

"Birmingham's brass articles are to be found in every part of the world."
— W.C. Aitken, Brass and Brass Manufactures, 1866

Solid

Brass, not plated. Brass, not hollow. Every piece is cast solid from a single pour and finished by hand. The weight in your hand is the work.

Slow

Our pieces are made-to-order in small batches at our Birmingham workshop. We hold modest stock of our hero finishes. Lead times for non-stocked finishes are four to six weeks. There is no quicker way to do this well.

Specific

Three collections — Founders, Guild, Forge. Three finishes. A small, considered range, rather than a catalogue. We would rather make a knob that lasts than fifty that do not.

Cast and finished in Birmingham, England. Made in Britain.