Birmingham pen trade same time Osmiroid International had a large production plant in the city. Birmingham pen trade The Birmingham pen trade evolved in the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter and its surrounding area in the 19th century; for many years, the city was the centre of the world's pen trade. In Newhall Street, John Mitchell manufactured pens; he pioneered mass production of steel pens (prior to this, the quill pen was the most common form of writing instrument). Mitchells are credited as being the first manufacturers to use machines to cut pen nibs, greatly speeding up the process. John's brother William later set up
Art of Birmingham consensus in the first half of the 20th century came from the Birmingham Surrealists, who emerged as a group from 1935 and whose leading figures included the painters Conroy Maddox, John Melville and Emmy Bridgwater, the art critic Robert Melville and later the artists Desmond Morris and Oscar Mellor. John Melville had been one of the "harbingers of surrealism" in Britain, being identified as a surrealist by 1932, and he and Maddox did much to advance British surrealist practice by introducing the principle of visual distortion. The early years of the group were marked by a conscious rejection not just