Listed Buildings - The Nailer's Cottage

This photo, taken recently, shows the “Nailer’s Cottage”, which stands on the corner of High Street and Ridgacre Road West. The cottage is presently the only Grade II listed building that remains in Quinton. Parts of the building reputedly date back five hundred years. In the garden, to the rear of the cottage, is a small stone building which contains an old fireplace where the metal was heated and shaped into nails. All the floors upstairs and down are stone, and the oak beams are as they were when the cottage was built. The oak panelling, that lines the hall, was taken from Witley Court in Worcestershire. Witley Court was destroyed by fire before the Second World War. Over the fireplace is a hand-carved mantel with a tapestry insert. In one of the corners is a Flemish stained glass panel, believed to be from the fourteenth century. Downstairs in the far wall are a pair of wrought-iron Gothic windows which were taken from the old Quinton Toll House, prior to its demolition in 1946, reputedly the windows contain the original glass. The kitchen floor is made of red quarry tiles and the building contains many stone Gothic arches. The nailers traded as small cottage industries and the nail-factor, a man by the name of Samuel Dingley, would deliver raw materials, and then collect the finished article, paying out only a few pence to the nailers as recompense for their labours.