Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Workers in trades like the needle-trade needed to be adaptable and so did the
community as a whole. 16
Redditch had become a manufacturing town by 1840, dependent
on needles and fishing tackle, but just as the Birmingham metalworkers produced a myriad
of products, the Redditch folk made all manner of different items within the overarching
umbrella of the needle and fishing tackle industry. Some of these specialised products had
not even existed in 1750.
As Redditch urbanised, shops and other suppliers proliferated in the early
nineteenth century stocking tea, sugar and all manner of other items which would have
been largely uncalled for a hundred years earlier. Trade directories show an increasing
number of makers, dealers and service providers. Alcester and to a lesser extent many
villages (particularly the industrial settlements) also showed signs of diversification in the
nineteenth century, offering more services and a wider selection of shop goods on sale.
The situation regarding specialisation or diversification is complex. As certain
communities industrialised, others concentrated more on farming, with a decrease in the
traditional country pursuits of weavers and leatherworkers. In 1840 some trades and
workplaces kept up the diversification which had begun in earlier periods. So the masons
of Bidford still cut the stone at the quarry, shaped it, dressed it, sold it, sculpted it, with
some of them also using it themselves for building work.
In 1840 there were still several
water-mills where needles and corn were made on the same site. As communications
improved, it became increasingly viable to bring in certain products from outside the study
area rather than making them here. The tailor of 1840 was more likely to sell goods made
by others, (probably outside the area), than his counterpart in 1660. Rather than ordering
16 Later in the nineteenth century local workers also adapted their skills to make springs and cycles.
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