Being a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution would have SUCKED!!!

Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham  [Thursday]

Today I visited the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham. It's all fancy, expensive metal & gem jewelry, so I didn't buy anything (that's more Christel's scene) or even visit any shops; I visited the area because of the museum! The guided tour was awesome!: the museum is in the front rooms of an old jewelry company, and the tour goes through the back factory areas which are *exactly* as they were left in 1981 when company paid off the workers and shut the doors. But it's pretty trippy to see, because since the owners and employees were super old-school and set in their ways, they hadn't done much to adapt with changing manufacturing or business technologies, so the workshop looks like something from the early 20th century, and the office (which I don't have pictures of) looks as if nothing had been changed since the 1940s.

I wish this was a better photo, but you can still kind of see the workshop exhaust fan's corroded blades from sulfuric acid fumes (part of the metal working process).