United Kingdom

London’s early gunmakers worked around the Tower, serving its military needs.¹ Before the gunmakers obtained their own company, armourers, cutlers and blacksmiths made firearms, and immigrants from France and the Low Countries worked around the Tower and the Minories.¹ From 1581 the gunmakers petitioned Elizabeth I for recognition, and in 1637 Charles I granted their charter.^{2, 3} The charter reached the Guildhall register in 1656, and by 1663 gunmaking apprentices were bound to the Company.³

Military and civilian customers shaped different districts: the eastern trade served the Board of Ordnance and the East India Company, while the western trade grew around the Royal Court at St James’s Palace.⁴ In Birmingham the trade was established by the end of the seventeenth century and supplied the Ordnance Office in London.⁵ European wars, colonial expansion and the slave trade encouraged its growth.⁵ Farmer and Galton supplied the African Company’s committee and leading slave traders, while the firm’s Quaker connections also supported its North American business.⁶

The Midlands trade drew on the Black Country’s coal and iron ore.⁷ Makers in Aston, Deritend, Smethwick and West Bromwich used water to power boring and grinding machines.⁸ Roads carried heavy loads of coal, iron and lime from Staffordshire, and the Birmingham Canal improved transport when it opened in 1769.⁹ Small masters clustered in Birmingham’s emerging Gun Quarter, working inside houses and building workshops in gardens and courtyards.¹⁰

By the end of 1795 Henry Nock had a steam engine at his Whitechapel manufactory and had made more than 12,000 interchangeable musket locks there.¹¹ Alexander Forsyth patented percussion ignition in 1807, and in 1808 the state began investing in military gunmaking capacity.¹² State demand through the wars that ended in 1815 helped shape the London gun, and the Gunmakers’ Company controlled the trade through proof.⁴ By 1829 two-thirds of Birmingham’s gun trade occupied about twelve streets, and by the middle of the century small purpose-built manufactories had replaced some of the houses.¹⁰

The Crimean War of 1854 led the War Office to set up a factory at Enfield for mass production.¹³ Birmingham gunmakers subscribed to the Birmingham Small Arms factory, which opened in 1861, but the Gun Quarter began losing military work to mass production.¹³ In London, the end of the East India Company and greater machine production at Enfield Lock made civilian sporting arms the Gunmakers’ Company’s principal business.¹⁴ In 1875 Westley Richards employees patented the Anson & Deeley fixed-lock action.¹⁵ John Dickson’s Scottish Round-Action gun followed in 1880, with its locks on the trigger plate.¹⁶

Proof rules changed with sporting guns and ammunition: London introduced rules for choke barrels in 1875, standardised proof bore diameters in 1887 and introduced marks for smokeless nitro powders in 1896.¹⁷ Chamber depth entered the marks in 1925 and proof pressure in 1954.¹⁷ Falling markets, foreign competition and redevelopment shrank Birmingham’s Gun Quarter, and in the 1950s and 1960s much of it was demolished for the Dental Hospital and the Inner Ring Road.¹³ Dickson opened a new workshop and showroom in Dunkeld in 2001 and closed its Edinburgh shop in 2017.¹⁸

In the 2012 Mapping Heritage Craft study, interviewees described the United States as the main market for gunmaking, while repairs served British customers.^{19, 20} The same interviewees described markets for European luxury goods in the Middle East, China and India.¹⁹ In 2021 Westley Richards used computer-controlled manufacture for components and traditional mills for finer work on individual guns.²¹ Holland & Holland makes shotguns and rifles under one roof in its London factory.²² The Gunmakers Trust, established in 2003, supports apprentices, and since 2007 it has paid bursaries monthly across four-year apprenticeships.^{23, 24}