St Paul's Square

St Paul's is a Church of England church in the Georgian St Paul's Square in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, England.

The Birmingham Assay Office, one of the four assay offices in the United Kingdom, is located in the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham. The development of a silver industry in 18th century Birmingham was hampered by the legal requirement that items of solid silver be assayed, and the nearest Assay Offices were in Chester and London. Matthew Boulton and Birmingham's other great industrialists joined forces with silversmiths of Sheffield to petition Parliament for the establishment of Assay Offices in their respective cities. In spite of determined opposition by London silversmiths, an Act of Parliament was passed in March 1773, just one month after the original petition was presented to Parliament, to allow Birmingham and Sheffield the right to assay silver. The Birmingham Assay Office opened on 31 August 1773 and initially operated from three rooms in the King's Head Inn on New Street employing only four staff and was only operating on a Tuesday. The first customer on that day was Matthew Boulton.The assay office is managed by a board of 36 "Guardians of the Standard of Wrought Plate in Birmingham", between six and nine of whom must be connected with the trade. The hallmark of the Birmingham Assay Office is the Anchor, and that of the Sheffield Assay Office was the Crown. A story about the origins of this hallmark goes that meetings prior to the inauguration of both Birmingham and Sheffield Assay Offices in 1773 were held at a public house called the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand, London. It is said that the choice of symbol was made on the toss of a coin which resulted in Birmingham adopting the Anchor and Sheffield the Crown (which was changed in 1977 to the White Rose of York).Services provided by the office include nickel testing, metal analysis, plating thickness determination, bullion certification, consultancy and gem certification. Platinum was brought within the Hallmarking Act 1973.

The Elkington Silver Electroplating Works was a building on Newhall Street in Birmingham, England. It later housed the Birmingham science museum Museum of Science and Industry until the creation of Thinktank. Standing opposite the Birmingham Assay Office, the original 19th century silver electroplating factory of George Elkington, built in 1838, once occupied a much longer, grandiose building on Newhall Street which was largely demolished in the mid-1960s. The works had many workshops and warehouses along and over the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal and the now filled-in Whitmore's Arm (or Miss Colmore's Arm) canal, which ran through the site. In the early 1850s there was a steam-powered electric generator with 64 permanent magnets arranged in a circle and a rotating wrought iron armature. The electroplating process involved solutions of cyanide of silver and potassium cyanide. The building carries two blue plaques on its wall, one to George Elkington, and another to his employee Alexander Parkes who is credited with inventing the first plastic.

The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists or RBSA is an art society, based in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, England, where it owns and operates an art gallery, the RBSA Gallery, on Brook Street, just off St Paul's Square. It is both a registered charity, and a registered company (no. 122616).

The Queen's Arms (sometimes styled "The Queens Arms") is a Grade II listed public house in Birmingham, England, built c. 1870. It is noted for the tiled art nouveau signage on its exterior, which was remodelled in 1901 to the designs of the architect, Joseph D. Ward for its then owners, Mitchells & Butlers.The red brick building sits on the corner of Charlotte Street and Newhall Street, on the edge of the city's Jewellery Quarter. It was given Grade II listed status in April 2004.Scenes for the BBC serial television drama Line of Duty were filmed in the pub.

Lasan (Hindi: लसन, romanized: lasan, lit. 'garlic') is an Indian restaurant located in St Paul's Square, Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, England, and was co-founded by Aktar Islam and Jabbar Khan in 2002. In 2009, it became the first Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom to be selected as the "Best Local Restaurant" by Gordon Ramsay on Channel 4's The F Word.

The BT Tower, formerly known as the Post Office Tower and the GPO Tower, is a landmark and telecommunications tower in Birmingham, England. It is the tallest structure in the city. Its post office code was YBMR.

St Paul's tram stop is a tram stop serving nearby St Paul's Square, Birmingham, England. It was opened on 31 May 1999 on West Midlands Metro Line 1. The stop is a short distance west of Birmingham Snow Hill station, which is visible from the stop. Pedestrian access is via Constitution Hill. The stop sits in the shadow of Livery Street, which, at this point, is on a blue-brick lined embankment, preventing direct access to the square. Livery Street then crosses the tram and railway lines, at a very acute angle, at the Wolverhampton end of the stop. The Birmingham to Worcester railway line runs alongside, but the stop is served only by trams, as there are no railway platforms.

Newhall Street is a street located in Birmingham, England. Newhall Street stretches from Colmore Row in the city centre by St Phillip's Cathedral in a north-westerly direction towards the Jewellery Quarter. Originally the road was the driveway to New Hall occupied by the Colmore family. New Hall was demolished in 1787 after being vacated by the Colmores and used as a warehouse by Matthew Boulton. Newhall Street was so named in 1766, after opening as a public street in 1746 called Newport Street and then New Hall Walk. The streets on the estate were named after the children of the family. A number of telephone exchanges have existed on the street: the 1896 Bell Edison Telephone building, Telephone House (still an exchange), the Cold War Anchor Exchange underneath it, and Brindley House (now renovated into an apartment block).

St. Paul's Gallery is a commercial art gallery, the largest in the United Kingdom outside London. It is in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, England. The gallery deals in two main fields: original album art the world's largest collection of signed album cover fine art, including signed cover images from The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Queen and fine art (where its holdings include works from Picasso and Dalí to Henry Moore Bridget Riley). St Paul's Gallery also hosts a programme of visiting exhibitions. It was conceived by Symon Bland and opened in February 2003 in former industrial premises near St Paul's Square.

Anchor Exchange was an underground, hardened telephone exchange built in Birmingham, England. Construction commenced in 1953 under the guise of building an underground railway. It opened in September 1957 at a cost of £4 million. It was located nominally on Newhall Street. However its network of tunnels extended from at least the Jewellery Quarter to Southside.It originally formed one of a network of 18 zone switching centres within the UK telephone system that provided trunk switching facilities within its own charge group and to group switching centres (GSC) within an area broadly comprising the West Midlands and central Wales. The exchange formed part of the trunk mechanisation plan commenced in 1939 to permit operators from originating GSCs to dial through to a distant UK subscriber without requiring further operator intervention. Later, it was additionally used to switch subscriber dialled trunk calls after its introduction at Bristol in 1958. It was subsequently augmented and superseded by a transit switching centre (TSC) equipped with a crossbar switching system (TXK4) which formed part of the transit network. It parented two of the first three GSCs at Worcester and Wolverhampton to go live when the transit network was inaugurated in 1971 which eventually provided universal UK automatic subscriber dialling and was completed in 1979.The Anchor telephone exchange tunnels are still used to house communication cables. They have been updated with firebreak compartments and hazardous asbestos has been removed. They are continually pumped out because of the city's rising water table.The exchange took its name from the hallmark of Birmingham Assay Office, which depicts an anchor.

Kerrang! Radio is a specialist digital rock music radio station owned and operated by Bauer and forms part of the Kiss Network. As of June 2023, the station has a weekly audience of 364,000 listeners according to RAJAR.