Qualla: Custard Factory

Custard Factory: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. Alfred Bird invented egg-free custard in 1837 because his wife was allergic to eggs. The recipe used cornflour instead, and Birmingham housewives bought it by the boxful. His son Sir Alfred Frederick Bird took over the company and built, between 1902 and the 1930s, an enormous works in Digbeth that employed a thousand people making yellow powder. The Bird company moved to Banbury in 1964. The factory sat derelict for twenty-eight years. Then a man named Bennie Gray put eight hundred thousand pounds of city grant money into the buildings in 1992 and turned them, with a chaotic kind of patience, into something Birmingham had not previously had: a workspace built for artists, musicians, and the creative trades. There is now a forty-foot Green Man made of vegetation and stone watching over the courtyard.

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Image: Richard Harrison | CC BY-SA 2.0

Custard Factory: From Banbury to Bennie

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Alfred Frederick Bird, who designed the factory, was the son of an inventor who had solved a domestic problem and built a national business on it. The factory architect was a firm called Hamblins. The buildings went up across fifteen acres - sixty thousand square metres - of red ...

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Custard Factory: The Lake in the Loading Bay

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Harrison, CC BY-SA 2.0. The first phase of the project, completed in the mid-1990s, included one of the most theatrical decisions in modern British adaptive reuse. The factory's main loading bay was flooded. Where lorries had once pulled in to be packed with custard powder, there was now a shallow lake,...

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Image: Richard Harrison | CC BY-SA 2.0

Custard Factory: The Green Man Watches

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Tawny Gray, no relation to Bennie or Lucan, built a forty-foot sculpture of the Green Man and installed it overlooking Gibb Street. It is made of vegetation grown into stone, a face composed of climbing plants and lichen and exposed mineral, the kind of work that takes its time. ...

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Custard Factory: Tenants and Trains

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Some of the names that have rented space in the Custard Factory over the years: the Gadget Show. Ocean Colour Scene. ASOS, before it became one of the country's largest online retailers. Codemasters, the video-game publisher. Rare, the games studio. Maverick Television. North One...

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0

Custard Factory: What Custard Built

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0. Phase three has not formally finished. The Custard Factory now plays host to workspaces for some 400 small businesses, almost all of them in tech, digital, or creative fields. The complex also includes bars, restaurants, an arcade, the Mockingbird Cinema, a hair salon, a gallery,...

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Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK | CC BY 2.0