• England Guide

  • Introduction to England
  • Weather
  • Things not to miss
  • Getting around
  • Entry requirements
  • Money
  • Public holidays

• Explore England

  • Kent and Sussex
  • Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire
  • Oxfordshire, the Chilterns and the Cotswolds
  • Bristol, Bath and Somerset
  • Devon and Cornwall
  • East Anglia
  • The West Midlands and the Peak District
  • The East Midlands
  • The Northwest
  • Cumbria and the Lakes
  • Yorkshire
  • The Northeast

• Cities

  • Bath
    
  • Birmingham
    
  • Bradford
    
  • Brighton
    
  • Bristol
    
  • Cambridge
    
  • Canterbury
    
  • Carlisle
    
  • Chester
    
  • Chichester
    
  • Durham
    
  • Ely
    
  • Exeter
    
  • Hereford
    
  • Lancaster
    
  • Leeds
    
  • Lincoln
    
  • Liverpool
    
  • London
    
  • Manchester
    
  • Newcastle upon Tyne
    
  • Norwich
    
  • Nottingham
    
  • Oxford
    
  • Portsmouth
    
  • Salisbury
    
  • Sheffield
    
  • Wells
    
  • Winchester
    
  • York
    

England Guide

The West Midlands and the Peak District

Birmingham

• Accommodation
• Eating and drinking
• Pubs and bars
• Clubs and live music
• Classical music, theatre and dance

Now the second largest city in Britain, with a thoroughly multiracial population of over one million, BIRMINGHAM has long outgrown the squalor of its boom nineteenth-century years as a "city of 1001 trades". A recent revamp of the city centre has included an extravagant face-lift to the Bull Ring and the opening of any number of chic and trendy bars, clubs, shops and restaurants clustered together in stylish canalside developments around the Gas Street Basin and Brindley Place. The city has also launched a raft of cultural initiatives, enticing a division of the Royal Ballet to take up residence here, and building a fabulous new concert hall for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

It has to be said though that Birmingham lacks unmissable sights. The city's finest museum is the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, with its stunning collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, while the enterprising Ikon Gallery is a great venue for exhibitions of contemporary art. Otherwise there are consumer delights aplenty in the Gas Street Basin development, the prettiest part of the city's serpentine canal system, in canalside Brindley Place, and at The Mailbox, the immaculately rehabilitated former postal sorting office with yet more chic bars and restaurants.

Unlike the more specialist industrial towns that grew up across the north and the Midlands, "Brum" – and its "Brummies" – turned its hand to every kind of manufacturing. It was here too that the pioneers of the Industrial Revolution – James Watt, Matthew Boulton, William Murdock, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) – formed the Lunar Society, an extraordinary melting-pot of scientific and industrial ideas. They conceived the world's first purpose-built factory, invented gas lighting and pioneered both the distillation of oxygen and the mass production of the steam engine. Thus, a modest Midlands market town mushroomed into the nation's economic dynamo with the population to match: in 1841 there were 180,000 inhabitants, three times that number just fifty years later.