Exhibitions of fabrics are normally what I slip stealthily past in museums, along with the porcelain and the stone axe-heads. I comfort myself with the thought that I can’t be interested in everything, but still feel guilty doing so.

I would not have dreamed, therefore, of popping into the Lost in Lace show at Gas Hall. But, as it happened, I was speaking at a conference in the AV room at the rear of the hall and couldn’t avoid it. It turned out that such narrow-mindedness on my part was entirely misplaced. The exhibition is visually stunning, and one of the most imaginative I have seen in a long time. You could call it dream-like.

I have a terrible habit of plugging shows that have just closed, but for once my timing is OK. There’s another month to take it in.

Historically, the connection between Birmingham and lace is a problematic one. In the 19th century, and even before that, the lace industry was based in the East Midlands, most commonly in Nottinghamshire and (I think) Bedfordshire. Arsenic was made in Birmingham, but not lace.

There is, however, one particular instance of lace-making in the town.

At the end of the 18th century the Birmingham Poor Law guardians set up an Asylum for the Infant Poor on what we would now call New Town Row. This was, in essence, a children’s workhouse, designed to inculcate the offspring of the poor in habits of industry and self-reliance, and prevent them from being (in their turn) the parents of the poor as well.

Two kinds of work dominated the new institution. For the boys the task was pin-heading, a good, easy-to-learn, metalworking skill that would put them on the production line to adult employment.

For the girls it was a mixture of plaiting straw (for bonnets) and lace-making. Not a local trade, as I said, but one with suitably feminine and domestic virtues. Webbing was supplied by a contractor, and the girls were taught to “figure” it. They worked on their lace for up to eight hours a day (and from the age of five or six years). Only in 1831 was the trade abandoned over concerns that it was damaging the girls’ eyesight. And thus Birmingham’s little lace-making venture was put to Bedford, as it were.

* Dr Chris Upton is Senior Lecturer in History at Newman University College in Birmingham