Qualla: Broadfield House Glass Museum

Broadfield House Glass Museum: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 House Glass Museum: From Farmhouse to Regency Pile

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 i...

Broadfield House Glass Museum: Stourbridge Glass and the Cone Country

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Europ...

Broadfield House Glass Museum: The Hot Studio

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 take...

Broadfield House Glass Museum: The Move to Stourbridge

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 compromis...