The decision passed by a single vote. In 1976 Dudley Council was arguing about what to do with an awkward Regency house in Kingswinford that had served, in unhappy succession, as a wartime property developer's mansion, a Mothercraft hostel and an Old People's Home with 44 stairs and no lift. Someone proposed using it for the borough's Brierley Hill and Stourbridge glass collections. The towns objected; the collections were theirs, they argued, and ought to stay where they had been made. The council voted anyway, by the narrowest possible margin, and four years later Princess Michael of Kent cut the ribbon on Broadfield House Glass Museum. For 35 years the building held some of the finest English glass ever blown.
Broadfield began life in the mid- or late-18th century as a modest two-storey farmhouse facing Barnett Lane. The threshing barn beside it, later the museum's Hot Glass Studio, was put up at the same time. Two hundred years ago this was open country, not the Black Country suburb it became. In the early 1800s an owner with serious money bolted a three-storey Regency block onto the back, complete with sash windows and a portico, and rotated the whole house so the new addition became the formal entrance. The original farmhouse, now relegated to the back, must have felt the comedown. It is the sort of architectural composite the Midlands does well: a building that pretends to be one thing while quietly remembering an older one.
The Stourbridge area has been making glass since around 1612, when refugee French glassmakers from Lorraine arrived. By the 19th century the cone-shaped glass kilns near Kingswinford and Brierley Hill were producing some of the most virtuoso cut, coloured and cameo glass in Europe, and names like Stuart Crystal, Webb, and Stevens & Williams were exported worldwide. The Broadfield collection drew on that whole history, with cameo work, friggers (whimsical pieces made by glassblowers in their own time), 18th-century drinking glasses, contemporary studio pieces, and the entire reference library of Robert Charleston, who had been head of glass and ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Nine galleries, paintings of glassworks, the tools of the trade, and the ephemera that gives any industry its texture: invoices, pattern books, photographs of named men with leather aprons.
The old threshing barn became the museum's beating heart. The Hot Glass Studio, sponsored by Dudley's Hulbert Group, was made available to graduate glassmakers and to established artists who needed time at the gather and the bench. A visitor on a busy day could watch a piece taken from the furnace at around 1,150 degrees Celsius, the orange-blooded gather rolled on the marver, blown, shaped with wet wooden tools, and finally annealed slowly in the lehr. This was an old trade kept alive in a small West Midlands town because someone, somewhere, had decided that knowing how to make a wineglass mattered. The studio outlasted the museum's main displays.
Broadfield House closed on 30 September 2015 after 35 years. Dudley Council's budgets were under sustained pressure, and the building itself, with all those Mothercraft-era partitions and care-home modifications, was never an ideal setting for a heritage collection. The compromise was to centralise the collection where it had been made in the first place. After a long campaign, the Stourbridge Glass Museum opened on 9 April 2022 inside the restored White House Cone, the last surviving glass cone in the Stourbridge area. The new museum is more than a relocation: it is the Stourbridge Glass Quarter, a working complex of museum, hot studio, and shops gathered around the cone where glass has been made since the 18th century. The reference library and archive remain with Dudley's museum service. Broadfield House itself, a Grade II listed building, has moved on to a new chapter.
Located at 52.49 N, 2.17 W in Kingswinford, on the western edge of the Black Country. At 2,500 to 3,000 feet, the Stourbridge glass quarter and the dense urban grain of Brierley Hill spread south-east, with the Clent Hills rising green to the south. Nearest airports: Birmingham (EGBB) about 14 nm east, Wolverhampton Halfpenny Green (EGBO) about 5 nm west.