Soho Foundry

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Soho Foundry, built on the edge of the Birmingham Canal in 1795, was doing something that the rest of the industrial world would not catch up to for a hundred years. When economists finally sat down to compare it to the celebrated management systems of Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of them concluded that neither man had devised anything that could not already be found at Soho before 1805. That is a striking claim. Ford and Taylor are synonymous with modern manufacturing. The factory that beat them both to it stands in Smethwick, West Midlands, and today makes weighing machines. How did a steam engine works founded by Matthew Boulton and James Watt become one of the most consequential experiments in industrial organisation ever attempted? And what happened to it across the centuries that followed?

• 2. A Factory Unlike Any Other

  ›

  From the moment the foundry opened in 1796, the year after the land was purchased, it operated on principles that would have seemed foreign to most factory owners of the era. Products were built from standardised, interchangeable parts. That single decision rippled through every aspect of operations: it reduced the need to supervise workers moment by moment, simplified the tracking of stock, and made it far easier to repair a customer's faulty engine after the sale.

  Production was broken into small, repeatable tasks that allowed workers to specialise to an extraordinary degree. A document from 1801 records one such arrangement plainly: a team of four named workers was "to be constantly employed in fitting nozzles". The workshops themselves were arranged in physical sequence along the flow of production, so that materials moved forward through the site with minimal backtracking or wasted time.

  The accounting methods were equally advanced. Three main departments handled different stages of the work: the Foundry Department cast iron parts, the Smithy Department produced wrought iron parts, and the Fitting Department machined and assembled them. Each ran as its own separate profit centre, a structure more familiar to modern corporate accounting than to eighteenth-century industry.

  Personnel management received the same thoughtful attention. The foundry established executive development programmes, sickness benefit schemes, and welfare programmes at a time when such provisions were virtually unknown in manufacturing.

• 3. Watt, Boulton, and Their Heirs

  ›

  Matthew Boulton and James Watt created the foundry together, and their sons Matthew Robinson Boulton and James Watt Jr. were part of the founding arrangement from the start. By 1840, following the deaths of the founding generation, James Watt Jr. held ownership of the works alone.

  Watt Jr. died in 1848. His departure marked the end of the family era. A man named H. W. Blake took his place, and with that transition came a new name: the works became James Watt and Co., leaving the Soho name behind in the company's title for the first time.

  The foundry's output in these middle decades was considerable. In 1857 it built the screw engines for the SS Great Eastern, the famous steamship. Three years later, in 1860, a new mint began operating within the foundry walls, following the closure of the earlier Manufactory in April 1850 by Matthew Piers Watt Boulton, grandson of the original Matthew. Then in 1861, tests for the London Pneumatic Despatch Company were conducted on site, pointing toward the foundry's continued role as a place where new engineering ideas were put to practical trial.

• 4. New Owners and a Famous Passenger

  ›

  W and T Avery Ltd. acquired the foundry as a going concern in 1895, bringing it under the ownership of one of Britain's major weighing machine manufacturers. The Avery name would prove durable: the site today remains the home of Avery Weigh-Tronix and Avery Berkel.

  In 1912 the foundry's manager, William Edward Hipkins, died in the sinking of the Titanic. He was travelling as a first-class passenger and was 55 years old. His body was never recovered. The Avery and Pooley Foundries were amalgamated in 1931, a corporate union commemorated by the ornate cast-iron gates that still stand at the site.

• 5. What the Site Holds Today

  ›

  The building itself is a Grade II* listed structure, and the gates and adjacent canal bridge carry a separate Grade II listing. The gates in question have their own layered history. Cast by Henry Pooley and Son around 1840, they were originally made for the Sailors' Home in Liverpool. A plaque on them records that the Avery and Pooley Foundries merged in 1931. The gates are decorated with a Liver bird above ropework draped with cloth, flanked by nautical symbols: oars, flags, bugles, ships' wheels, and intersecting dolphins.

  For years a campaign ran to return the gates to their original home city. Sandwell Council approved the application in March 2011. After restoration, the gates were taken back to Liverpool on the 8th of August 2011. They were re-erected under the name "The Sailors Home Gateway" in the pedestrian section of Paradise Street in Liverpool One, close to the original site of the Sailors' Home.

  The site also includes William Murdoch's cottage and overlooks Black Patch Park. A small museum once operated there by appointment, but it has since closed. The oldest working steam engine built at the foundry is the Smethwick Engine, constructed to recover water used in the nearby canal locks at Smethwick Summit. It now sits in Thinktank, the Birmingham Science Museum.