Description:Image: An Architectual Drawing of Singer's Hill by Yeovill Thomason.
No visual images exist of the very first Jewish synagogue in eighteenth century Birmingham. We know it was used for worship in 1779 as it gets mentioned in William Hutton's History of Birmingham (1780). This synagogue- perhaps converted from a domestic house- would only have served a small number of Jews; at the time, it has been estimated that from a population of around 70,000 perhaps twenty Jewish families may have existed in the area
Soon, new places of service appeared. Moving from the confines of the 'Froggery', a new synagogue was apparently built in Hurst Street in 1791. However, with the Jewish congregation still growing, another syanagogue (in a building which still stands today) was constructed in nearby Severn Street in 1809. By around the 1850's, the Jewish population in Birmingham has been estimated to have grown to include around 700 people.
Finally, the creation of the magnificent Singers Hill synagogue in 1856 by the architect Yeoville Thomason on Blutcher Street was a impressive testimony to a community which had grown, struggled and integrated itself with the town. The building of Singer's Hill synagogue proved to be much needed. According to Zoë Joseph’s vital text 'Birmingham Jewry 1749-1914', from between 1851 to 1871 the Jewish population had swelled from around 700 to 2360. This was out of the overall town population of 343,787 (Josephs, p13).