Birmingham is Britain’s second largest city, sitting in the middle of England at the heart of the West Midlands. It has around 1.1 million people, and the wider conurbation nearly three million.
The workshop of the world
Birmingham was the manufacturing centre of the Industrial Revolution, and its character came from the kind of manufacturing it did. Where Manchester had cotton and Sheffield had steel, Birmingham had thousands of small workshops making an enormous variety of things — buttons, guns, jewellery, pen nibs, brass, toys, chocolate.
The city was called “the city of a thousand trades”, and that diversity made it unusually resilient. At one point Birmingham produced most of the world’s pen nibs, and the Jewellery Quarter still contains the largest concentration of jewellery businesses in Europe.
It was also home to the Lunar Society — Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin — who met at full moon so they could see their way home, and who between them did a substantial amount to invent the modern world.
The canals
Birmingham sits on a plateau with no navigable river, so everything had to be dug. The result is around 35 miles of canal within the city, more than Venice, built to shift coal, iron and finished goods.
They were derelict by the 1970s and have since been comprehensively restored. Brindleyplace and Gas Street Basin are now the centre of the city’s bars and restaurants, and narrowboats moor where coal barges once queued.
The rebuilding, twice
Birmingham was heavily bombed in the war and then heavily rebuilt in the 1960s, in a manner that is now almost universally regretted. The city was carved up by an inner ring road — the “concrete collar” — and given a series of brutalist structures including the much-hated Bull Ring shopping centre.
Much of that has since been demolished. The new Bullring, with Future Systems’ extraordinary disc-covered Selfridges building, opened in 2003, and the Library of Birmingham followed in 2013. The city is on its third architectural identity in a century.
The Balti
Birmingham’s genuine culinary invention. The Balti — a curry cooked and served fast in a thin pressed-steel bowl — was developed by Pakistani and Kashmiri restaurateurs in the city in the 1970s, and the Balti Triangle in Sparkbrook and Balsall Heath is its home. It is a British-Asian dish that did not exist anywhere before Birmingham.
The accent
Brummie comes bottom of almost every accent popularity survey ever conducted in Britain, which Brummies find both irritating and funny. The distinctive feature is its falling intonation, where most English accents rise at the end of a phrase.
Note that Brummie and Black Country are not the same. The Black Country — Dudley, Wolverhampton, Walsall, West Bromwich — is next door, has an older and more distinct dialect retaining forms from Middle English, and its residents will correct you firmly if you confuse the two.
What it has produced
Heavy metal, essentially — Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant all came from the city or its edges, and the sound is often traced to the industrial noise the musicians grew up in. Also UB40, Duran Duran, Cadbury at Bournville, and Peaky Blinders, which has done more for the city’s image than any tourism campaign.