Excellent news...

Image: the Coffin Works, Jewellery Quarter

Last year, I blogged about the Newman Brothers Coffin Works in Birmingham and the cuts in national public funding which led to regional development agency Advantage West Midlands, which owned the site, to pull out restoring the building as a museum. However, the building has now been purchased by the Birmingham Conservation Trust as a result of a £150,000 grant from Birmingham City Council. For more on this story and the future of the Coffin Works, see here...

Preserving the past...

Preserving the past? A bottle of embalming fluid from the Coffin Works collection. Photograph by Tim Ellis – see more of his work here.

In trawling the interwebs t’other day, I happened to chance upon the sad story of the withdrawl of funding from a proposed project to transform a Victorian coffin works by the name of Newman Brothers in the centre of Birmingham into a delightfully macabre museum. Not only would I have crawled across broken glass on my hands and knees to snaffle a job there, this really would have made a unique and unusual attraction. More importantly however, it leaves the factory building on the EH ‘Heritage at Risk’ register and a curious collection without a home. The entire debacle makes for an interesting read and if you feel as miffed as I do then make your voice heard here…