About
Newman Brothers made coffin furniture — the handles, breastplates, nameplates and crucifixes fitted to coffins, and the shrouds laid inside them — in a purpose-built factory in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter from 1894 until 1998. The company began in 1882 as brass founders and moved into the funerary trade, where the combination of Birmingham's metal-working skills and a Victorian appetite for elaborate mourning made it a highly profitable specialism. At its height the firm exported worldwide and supplied fittings used at some of the most prominent funerals of the twentieth century, including those of Joseph Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.
When the works finally closed, the last owner, Joyce Green, was determined that the building and its contents should not simply be cleared, and after a long campaign and a fifteen-year restoration led by the Birmingham Conservation Trust it opened to the public in 2014. What survives is the point of the place: not a display about a factory but the factory itself, with the stamp room where presses cut and shaped metal fittings, the shroud room where women sewed and finished burial garments, the warehouse with its stock still on the shelves, the 1960s offices, the courtyard and the cart entrance onto Fleet Street. The machinery, the paperwork, the tea mugs and the working conditions are all in place.
Interpretation is built around the people who worked there, drawn from oral histories with former employees, and guides tell the story through their accounts rather than through a company narrative. The subject is handled directly and without either sentimentality or ghoulishness, which is harder than it sounds in a museum about the trade in death, and visitors consistently find it more affecting and less morbid than they expected.
The restored building, designed in 1892 by the architect Roger Harley, is itself a good example of the small, dense Jewellery Quarter works that gave the district its character, and part of it is now let as workspace.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Take the guided tour rather than self-guided entry if you can — the presses are demonstrated on tours, and watching a fitting being stamped is the thing people remember.
- Book ahead: walk-ins are welcome but online booking closes at 09:00 on the day and the small rooms limit numbers.
- Wednesday is a pre-booked tour day rather than a general opening day; general admission runs Thursday to Sunday from 10:45.
- Last entry is 15:00, and the operator does not publish an exact closing time, so aim to arrive by early afternoon at the latest.
- Self-guided entry is only available Friday to Sunday between 12:00 and 15:00 — check which option applies to the day you are coming.
- The building has original stairs and narrow doorways; anyone unable to manage stairs should ring in advance to discuss what can be seen.
- Come by tram to St Paul's rather than driving — there is no visitor parking and the stop is four minutes away.
- Combine it with the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter and the Pen Museum for a day on Birmingham's small metal trades.
Highlights
The Stamp Room
The stamp room holds the presses on which sheet metal was cut and struck into coffin handles, breastplates and ornaments, and they are still worked during guided tours, so visitors see and hear a fitting being made rather than looking at a static machine. The noise, the physical effort and the speed at which a skilled operator worked all come across in a way no display case conveys, and the room retains its dies, tooling and the accumulated marks of a century of production.
It is the single most memorable part of a tour.
The Shroud Room
Upstairs, the shroud room is where women cut, sewed and finished the burial garments the firm sold alongside its metal fittings, working at long benches with sewing machines, patterns and stock still in place. It is the part of the works where the trade's division of labour is most visible: metalworking below, largely male, and textile finishing above, almost entirely female.
The oral histories that inform the interpretation are strongest here, and the room does more than any other to make the factory a place about people rather than about processes.
Preserved As It Was Left
The essential fact about the Coffin Works is that it is not a reconstruction. When production stopped in 1998 the building was left substantially as it stood, and the restoration retained the machinery, stock, order books, correspondence, fittings and the ordinary residue of working life rather than clearing it to create gallery space.
Shelves still carry unsold product; desks still carry the paperwork.
Complete survivals of small urban factories are extremely rare, because the sites are usually worth more cleared, and that rarity is what gives this one its national significance.
Joyce Green's Determination
The works survived because its last owner, Joyce Green, refused to let the building be stripped and sold on ordinary commercial terms and insisted that it and its contents should be preserved. What followed was a long campaign, the involvement of the Birmingham Conservation Trust, and a restoration lasting some fifteen years and costing around three and a half million pounds before the museum opened in 2014.
The story is told within the museum, and it is a useful corrective to the assumption that heritage of this kind survives by luck rather than by somebody deciding it should.
Collections
The Coffin Works preserves the complete premises and contents of Newman Brothers, coffin-furniture manufacturers in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter from 1894 to 1998, in a factory built in 1892 to the design of Roger Harley. Retained in situ are the stamp room with its working presses, dies and tooling; the shroud room where burial garments were cut and sewn; the warehouse with unsold stock still on the shelves; the company offices in their 1960s condition; and the courtyard and cart entrance.
Order books, catalogues, correspondence and the ordinary residue of working life survive alongside the machinery.
Interpretation is built on oral histories with former employees, and covers the economics of the Victorian and Edwardian funeral trade, the graded product range that mapped onto social class, and the firm's supply of fittings used at prominent twentieth-century funerals including those of Joseph Chamberlain and Winston Churchill.
The Stamp Room
Working presses, dies and tooling used to cut and strike coffin handles, breastplates and ornaments, demonstrated on guided tours.
The Shroud Room
The first-floor workroom where women cut, sewed and finished burial garments, with benches, machines and stock in place.
Warehouse and Offices
Unsold stock on the shelves, order books and catalogues, and the company offices preserved in their 1960s condition.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.