In the heart of Birmingham, at the corner of Bar Street and Wells Street, one can find a slice of late 19th century architectural history - the remnants of the Woodman Pub, adorned in the distinctive "Tudor-Bethan" style. Known for its charm and reminisce of a long history, the Woodman Pub is revered by Kevin Thomas, a guide from Birmingham Walking Tours, for its intriguing past and unique ambiance, and he shared his knowledge of the establishment with us.
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00:00 Okay so I'm on the corner of Bath Street and Wells Street and what you see behind me is the
00:06 Woodman pub. Now Birmingham had a number of Woodman pubs but this one I particularly like
00:13 because it's in the style it's called Tudor Beetham and that's because it's not Tudor
00:18 and it's not Elizabethan but it was built in the late 1800s and it was a local pub in the
00:27 Jewelry Quarter. What I have a photograph of is the owners and they were called the Atkinsons
00:34 standing outside it around about 1800 and I just love this couple because they're really proud
00:40 about having their pub. The interesting thing about this site was that it's thought this was
00:46 where a beer house stood and beer houses were enabled by an act of parliament in the 1700s
00:54 because cheap gin was being imported into Birmingham and Britain on the whole and there
01:00 was an epidemic of alcoholism and there's a famous illustration by the artist Hogarth called Gin
01:07 Street where people were lying in the street drunk fighting neglecting their children so the
01:13 government allowed small houses to start producing small amounts of beer and it's thought this is one
01:22 of those houses were here. One of the things I use to talk about the pubs is a booklet that was
01:28 written in the 1970s by a man called Fred Pearse. He said a monument to years accumulation of all
01:35 manner of kitsch to fill a pub up with. The original idea was perhaps nautical. The main
01:41 public bar with it with its raised lounge area was filled with lifebelts, ships, lamps, models
01:47 and pictures, shells etc but that has since spawned a glass bottle collection, an earthenware jar
01:54 collection, an alligator with a broken tail, a gun or two, toby mugs, little baskets of plastic
02:02 flowers with a plastic budgerigar to match. Not an inch or wall or ceiling in this really very
02:09 small pub is left unadorned. One of the other things that really impresses me about the Woodman
02:16 it stood next door to the Swallow Raincoat Company and the Swallow Raincoat Company was quite a
02:23 prestigious raincoat company. In fact in the 1950s a raincoat there cost £10 and 10 shillings
02:31 and I just love the idea that on a rainy Friday evening after work the workers would pour out
02:38 from the Swallow Raincoat Company and you'd see them standing around the bar area in their probably
02:46 Swallow Raincoat second raincoats. Unfortunately industry moved out of the
02:53 Jewellery Quarter in the 1980s and the pub closed and became an office but it still
02:59 has the memories and people still remember coming here and enjoying the Woodman pub.