The Ruskin Mill Land Trust has renovated the ground floor of New Standard Works to create a training café and bakery that provides valuable work experience and training opportunities to students at Ruskin Mill Trust’s Argent College.
Funded by the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership, the Hive Café & Bakery offers delicious meals, coffee, cakes and bread to the growing residential and business community within the Jewellery Quarter.
The café and bakery is designed to reflect not only the contemporary life in the Quarter, but also honours its history, with quotations, images, peep shows and a mini museum of Birmingham; the first stage of the heritage displays funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The team are enormously grateful to everyone who has supported this phase of their transformation: Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership, Garfield Weston Foundation, Heritage Lottery Fund, Albert Hunt Trust, The 29th May 1961 Charity Sterling Charity, Edward Cadbury Charitable Trust, Charlotte Heber-Percy Charitable Trust.
Argent College is the fifth college opened by the trust and joins sister sites Glasshouse College in Stourbridge and three others in Sheffield, Pembrokeshire and Gloucestershire. It is an education and community centre where 16 to 25 year olds with special educational needs, principally Asperger’s syndrome, can learn a trade while developing personal and social skills.