Birmingham

• 1. The Second City

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  By 1791, Birmingham was being hailed as "the first manufacturing town in the world". That phrase carried weight in a place that began as a medieval market town in Warwickshire and grew into the second-largest city in Britain. Today around 1.2 million people live within the city proper, and Birmingham is commonly called the second city of the United Kingdom. It sits in the West Midlands, the largest local authority district in England by population.

  What is strange about a city this large is what it lacks. Birmingham has only small rivers running through it, mainly the River Tame and its tributaries the Rea and the Cole. One of the closest main rivers, the Severn, lies about 20 miles to the west. It is the most inland major city in the country. To compensate, the city built canals, the Birmingham Canal Navigations, and has more miles of canal than Venice.

  How did a place with no great river and no coastline become a centre of invention, political revolt, and reinvention. The answer runs through thousands of small workshops, a society loosened from feudal control, and a habit of building over the past. Birmingham's nickname is "Brum", and its people are Brummies, a term that traces back to the city's old name, Brummagem.

• 2. Beorma's People

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  The name Birmingham comes from the Old English Beormingahām, meaning the home or settlement of the Beormingas, a tribe whose name means 'Beorma's people'. Beorma himself may have been the clan's leader at the time of Anglo-Saxon settlement, a shared ancestor, or a mythical figurehead. The Beormingas formed what may have been an early unit of Anglo-Saxon administration.

  Place names ending in -ingahām mark primary settlements from the early phases of Anglo-Saxon colonisation. That ending suggests Birmingham probably existed by the early 7th century at the latest. Surrounding settlements carry telltale endings of their own: -tūn for 'farm', -lēah for 'woodland clearing', -worð for 'enclosure', and -field for 'open ground'. These were secondary settlements created as the population expanded later, sometimes on earlier British sites.

  The Forest of Arden once covered much of the area. Districts such as Moseley, Saltley, Yardley, Stirchley and Hockley all end in "-ley", from the Old English lēah, and they remain densely covered by oak. Long before any of this, Stone Age artefacts point to human activity around 8000 BC, with seasonal settlements and woodland work such as tree felling.

• 3. A Charter At The Castle

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  In 1166, the Lord of the Manor Peter de Bermingham obtained a charter to hold a market at his castle. He followed it by building a planned market town and seigneurial borough on his estate, around the site that became the Bull Ring. This established Birmingham as the primary commercial centre for the Birmingham Plateau, at a time when the regional economy was expanding fast.

  Within a century of the charter, Birmingham had become a prosperous town of merchants and craftsmen. By 1327 it was the third-largest town in Warwickshire, a rank it held for the next 200 years. The Roman legions had once seen this country differently. During the 1st-century conquest of Britain, the forested Birmingham Plateau formed a barrier, so the Romans built the large Metchley Fort at modern-day Edgbaston in AD 48.

  The medieval order did not last. The Guild of the Holy Cross and the lordship of the de Birmingham family collapsed between 1536 and 1547. That left the town with an unusually high degree of social and economic freedom. The agricultural market itself proved durable. The Birmingham Wholesale Markets remain the largest combined wholesale food markets in the country.

• 4. Workshops Of A Thousand Trades

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  By 1538, the manufacture of iron goods was already recognised as important to Birmingham's economy, and it grew rapidly through the century. The town became a hub for iron merchants who arranged finance, supplied raw materials, and marketed the products. By the 1600s its forges and furnaces stretched from South Wales to Cheshire, and its merchants sold finished goods as far as the West Indies.

  Birmingham's industrial rise differed sharply from the textile towns of the North. Instead of a low-paid, unskilled workforce making a single bulk product, Birmingham relied on highly paid, highly skilled workers in small, often self-owned workshops, producing a constantly diversifying range of goods. The inventiveness this produced was exceptional. Between 1760 and 1850, Birmingham residents registered over three times as many patents as those of any other British town or city.

  Money followed the making. Lloyds Bank was founded in the town in 1765, and Ketley's Building Society, the world's first building society, in 1775. By 1800 the West Midlands had more banking offices per head than any other region in Britain, including London. The Gun Quarter shows the older craft roots. The first recorded Birmingham gun maker dates to 1630, and a trade in jewellery was first recorded in the city in 1308.

• 5. The Chain Reaction Of Innovation

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  In 1776, James Watt and Matthew Boulton developed the industrial steam engine. For the first time, manufacturing was freed from the limited power of hand, water and animal. This was arguably the pivotal moment of the entire Industrial Revolution, and a key factor in the worldwide rise in productivity over the following century.

  The 18th century had set the stage through the Midlands Enlightenment. The town became a centre of literary, musical, artistic and theatrical activity, and members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham circulated philosophical and scientific ideas among Europe's intellectual elite. In men like Boulton and James Keir, the leading thinkers and the major manufacturers were often the same people. That overlap made Birmingham a bridge between pure science and practical technology, forming a "chain reaction of innovation".

  The roster of breakthroughs is long. In 1709 the Birmingham-trained Abraham Darby I moved to Coalbrookdale and built the first blast furnace to smelt iron ore with coke. In 1732 Lewis Paul and John Wyatt invented roller spinning, and in 1741 they opened the world's first cotton mill in Birmingham's Upper Priory. John Roebuck invented the lead chamber process for sulphuric acid in 1746, and Keir developed bulk alkali manufacture in 1780. In 1765 Boulton opened the Soho Manufactory, the largest manufacturing unit in Europe, which came to symbolise the factory system.

• 6. Shaking The Fabric Of Privilege

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  Lord Durham, who drafted the Reform Act 1832, wrote that "the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution". Thomas Attwood and the Birmingham Political Union had brought Britain to the brink of civil war during the Days of May before the act passed. The union's meetings on Newhall Hill in 1831 and 1832 were the largest political assemblies Britain had ever seen.

  Birmingham's reputation for having "shaken the fabric of privilege to its base" carried forward. John Bright made the city the platform for his successful campaign for the Reform Act 1867, which extended voting rights to the urban working class. The roots of this radicalism reached back to the English Civil War, when the strongly Parliamentarian town was attacked by Royalist forces in the Battle of Birmingham in 1643. It had become a centre of Puritanism in the 1630s and a haven for Nonconformists from the 1660s.

  Formal civic government arrived later. The charter of incorporation, dated the 31st of October 1838, was read in the town hall on the 5th of November, with the first council elections on the 26th of December. William Scholefield became the first mayor. Queen Victoria granted Birmingham city status in 1889. Among its best-known political figures are Joseph Chamberlain, mayor and later an MP, and his son Neville Chamberlain, Lord Mayor of Birmingham and later British Prime Minister.

• 7. Blitz And Rebuilding

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  From the summer of 1940 to the spring of 1943, the German Luftwaffe bombed Birmingham heavily in what became known as the Birmingham Blitz. Yet the city was also the scene of two scientific discoveries critical to the war's outcome. Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls described how a practical nuclear weapon could be built in the Frisch-Peierls memorandum of 1940, the same year John Randall and Harry Boot invented the cavity magnetron, the key component of radar and later of microwave ovens. The Tizard Mission carried details of these to the United States in September 1940, in a single black box an official American historian later called "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores".

  Much of what the bombs spared, planners removed. Sir Herbert Manzoni, City Engineer and Surveyor from 1935 until 1963, believed conservation of old buildings was sentimental and that the city had none of worth. New Street station and the old Central Library were lost, often replaced by brutalist architecture, and communities were relocated to tower block estates like Castle Vale. The city's population peaked in 1951 at 1,113,000 residents.

  Then prosperity faltered. Birmingham was Britain's most prosperous provincial city as late as the 1970s, with household incomes exceeding even London and the South East. As central government sought to disperse industry and population, the city grew dependent on the motor industry, and the recession of the early 1980s saw its economy collapse into unprecedented unemployment and inner-city unrest. A deeper wound came in 1974, when bomb attacks on two central pubs killed 21 people and injured 182, thought to have been carried out by the Provisional IRA. Six men, the Birmingham Six, were convicted and sentenced to life, then acquitted after 16 years by the Court of Appeal in one of the worst miscarriages of justice in recent UK history.

• 8. Reinvention And Reckoning

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  Since the turn of the 21st century, the Bullring Shopping Centre was redeveloped and the new Library of Birmingham, the largest public library in Europe, was built. Old industrial areas such as Brindleyplace, The Mailbox and the International Convention Centre were regenerated, and the city successfully hosted the 2022 Commonwealth Games. The economy is now dominated by the service sector, which accounted for 88% of employment in 2012, and the city's five universities make it the largest centre of higher education in the country outside London.

  The culture that grew alongside the workshops reaches far beyond the city. Birmingham was a centre for early heavy metal, home to Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and half of Led Zeppelin. It was the birthplace of modern bhangra in the 1960s, and by the 1980s the global centre of bhangra culture. The Balti, a type of curry, was invented in the city, and food brands including Typhoo tea, Bird's Custard, Cadbury's chocolate and HP Sauce all originated here. J. R. R. Tolkien was brought up in the Kings Heath area and called himself a 'Birmingham man'.

  The city's reinvention sits beside hard numbers. Economic inequality in Birmingham is greater than in any other major English city, exceeded only by Glasgow in the UK, and in the wards of Aston and Washwood Heath unemployment has run higher than 30%. On the 5th of September 2023, the city council issued a Section 114 notice, effectively declaring it bankrupt after an equal pay lawsuit. Contributing factors include a £1.1 billion sum paid out since 2010 for equal pay claims and an ongoing bill of £760 million, rising by £14 million a month. The trade that built the city still endures. In June 2025, Birmingham was declared a World Craft City by the World Crafts Council, because of its continuing jewellery trade.