Silver is too soft to be used on its own for metalworking so it is usually alloyed (combined) with another metal such as copper. Silver objects are stamped with a ‘hall-mark’, which guarantees a standard of purity for the metal. Assay (‘proof’) offices issue the marks. An office was established in London in the medieval period, and by the 18th century AD, several provincial towns had their own assay offices.

Silver was a luxury product affordable only to the wealthy. During the 1760s and 1770s wealthy patrons were having their houses designed and decorated in the neoclassical style made famous by architects like Robert Adam (1728-92) and James Wyatt (1748-1813). The shapes of silverware followed the new fashion, imitating the forms of classical vases and the tripod. The popularity of tea and coffee was reflected in the manufacture of tea-urns and coffee pots.

The entrepreneur Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) was determined to raise the tone of his Birmingham metalwork business. He commissioned Wyatt and other distinguished architects like the Adam brothers and Sir William Chambers to produce designs for silver candlesticks, jugs and snuff-boxes. He also successfully lobbied Parliament to establish assay offices in Birmingham and Sheffield, where flattening mills were used to produce sheets of ‘Old Sheffield Plate’, which replaced the laborious hand-beating of ingots.