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Glassmaking was introduced to Smethwick by Thomas Shutt, who started making crown window-glass on a site alongside the Birmingham Canal in 1814. When he died in 1822, his company was sold to Robert Lucas Chance, the business later changing its name from the British Crown Glass Co. to Chance Brothers. Employing French and Belgian workers, Chance began making sheet glass in 1832, the first company in England to do so. The firm supplied the glass used by Joseph Paxton for the Great Conservatory at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, in 1841; for London’s Crystal Palace, in 1851; and for the rebuilt Houses of Parliament in Westminster, in 1852.
By that date, Chances was the largest crown and sheet glassworks in the world, and over the next ten years the company developed as a maker of lighthouse lenses, eventually becoming pre-eminent globally in the design, manufacture, supply, and erection of lighthouses. The company’s military products, including gun-site lenses, periscopes, and binoculars, played an important role in both World Wars.
Taken over by Pilkington in 1955, the company continued to make rolled-plate glass, as well as cathode ray tubes for TV and radar, fluorescent lighting tubes, microscope glass and slides, protective glass for welders, and decorative tableware until it closed in 1981.
Today there are eight listed buildings on the site, which has also been designated a scheduled monument because of the survival below ground of furnace remains and the associated tunnels and flues. Together with documentary sources located in the company’s archive, these remains illustrate the history of the UK glass industry from the early 19th century until modern times.
The buildings have been empty and unused for 43 years; as a result, they feature on the Historic England Heritage at Risk Register, as well as appearing on the Victorian Society’s Top Ten Endangered Buildings list for 2024. There is hope, however: the Chance Heritage Trust has secured capacity building grants of £250,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and of £165,000 from Historic England. Supported until now entirely by volunteers, the Trust now employs a director and support team; together they aim to transform one of the UK’s most globally significant industrial heritage sites into an urban village, with 150 new homes, a cultural space, and a heritage centre.
Further information: https://chanceht.org
Text: Christopher Catling / Images: Chance Heritage Trust
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