Qualla: Elkington Silver Electroplating Works

Elkington Silver Electroplating Works: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 25 March 1840, George Elkington and his cousin Henry filed a patent that quietly changed the table settings of the British Empire. They had figured out how to plate one metal with another using an electric current and a bath of cyanide solution. Until then, silverware meant either solid silver, which was expensive, or Sheffield plate, which involved fusing thin silver sheets to a copper base by heating and rolling. Electroplating let you deposit a uniform skin of silver onto anything conductive, in any shape. Within a decade, Elkington's factory on Newhall Street in Birmingham was supplying the world. By the 1850s, dining rooms in Liverpool, Bombay, and Buenos Aires gleamed with silver that had been electrolysed onto base metal in a vat in the West Midlands.

Image: Oosoom at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Elkington Silver Electroplating Works: Cyanide, magnets, and the new industry

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Oosoom at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Elkington works stood opposite the Birmingham Assay Office, the institution that hallmarked precious metal in the Midlands. The original factory was built in 1838 and grew along the banks of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, with workshops bridging the now-filled Whitmore's A...

Image: Original uploader was Oosoom at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Elkington Silver Electroplating Works: The accidental birth of plastic

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0. One of Elkington's employees, a Birmingham metallurgist named Alexander Parkes, started experimenting with cellulose nitrate dissolved in alcohol and camphor. In 1856 he patented a substance he called Parkesine, the first man-made plastic. He exhibited it at the 1862 Internationa...

Image: Spudgun67 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Elkington Silver Electroplating Works: The Museum of Science and Industry

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Elkington works was largely demolished in the mid-1960s, but the part that remained on Newhall Street became Birmingham's Museum of Science and Industry in 1951. For nearly fifty years the building housed the city's collection of working steam engines, locomotives, and machin...

Image: Oosoom at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Elkington Silver Electroplating Works: What stands today

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oosoom at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Birmingham City Council put the site up for redevelopment in 2002. Planning permission was granted in 2006 for a mixed-use development called the Jewellery Box, with 234 apartments rising over the old workshops. Construction started in 2008, and further flats were added over the ...

Image: Oosoom at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0