Friday 5th April 2019



Happy Birthday to our Eva Grace. 10 years old today. Where does time go. We miss the kids terribly.

We walked a long way today, 8½ miles, about a mile of it because I took a wrong turn coming out of the Bullring.

We went to the Jewellery Quarter to pick up our earrings. The Jewellery Quarter is an interesting place. It covers an area of just over a square kilometre and is Europe’s largest concentration of jewellery businesses. Birmingham produces 40% of all jewellery made in the UK and is home to the world’s largest Assay Office which hallmarks around 12 million items a year. There are security doors on all the shops and you have to buzz to be allowed in. In the shop that made the earrings the lady brought out a shoe-sized box that was full of all different sized rubies. It would be interesting to know just how much all the gold, silver and precious stones in this square kilometre were worth.


                                                         Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter




Three-storey terraced properties that were used as workshops.



The hallmark of the Birmingham Assay Office makes for a fascinating story. Although the city is about as far from the sea as you can get in Britain, the mark is an anchor. Apparently, meetings were held in a pub called the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, London in 1773 prior to the inauguration of Assay Offices in the provincial cities of Birmingham and Sheffield. The choice of symbol for each city was made by tossing a coin which resulted in Birmingham winning the Anchor and Sheffield with the crown.   

We returned to the boat, dropped the dog off and went into the city centre. Busy, busy, busy. Birmingham, Britain’s second biggest city, has a big city shopping centre, all centred on the Bullring, with hordes of people going about their businesses.

Funny to think, when I was a kid and my dad a lorry driver, Birmingham used to mean a night away from home because you could not drive from Birkenhead to Birmingham and back in a day before the M6 was built, and the Bullring was a major traffic intersection.

We had our ears pierced, no tears, milled around and then attempted to return to the boat although I, most unlike me, took us the wrong way and we walked for almost a mile in completely the wrong direction.

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