Category Archives: Birmingham

Victorian Birmingham

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Victorian Birmingham

In my previous post I described how Birmingham’s canals became a lifeline for the city of a thousand trades, but by 1840 the canal boom was virtually over, and we can blame the likes of James Watt and William Murdoch for that. If you read my post about the Lunaticks and Golden Boys you will already be able to guess why: These men may have been pioneers in the use of steam power, but they also paved the way for others to take their inventions to a whole new level.

Richard Trevithick was one of the first to prove that steam engines could be adapted to haul heavy goods when he ran a steam locomotive with 10 tons of iron and 70 men between Merthyr Tydfil and Abercynon in 1804, but that was just the beginning.

Apart from a greater capacity to transport goods around, railways were also quicker and more reliable than canal barges, and if that wasn’t enough, on 27th September 1825, George Stephenson introduced steam transport to the general public by using his Locomotion No 1 to carry 450 people between Stockton and Darlington in the North-East of England.

Following the success of the Stockton to Darlington railway, Stephenson was then appointed to design and build a line between Liverpool and Manchester which would enable Lancashire’s cotton mills to be connected to the Port of Liverpool, but despite celebrating the world’s first inter-city railway line when it opened on 15th September 1830, the journey on the day wasn’t quite incident-free.

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Birmingham’s Canals

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Birmingham's Canals

Following on from my previous posts about Birmingham’s involvement in the Industrial Revolution, its location in the centre of England had its advantages and disadvantages. Being close to the Black Country’s coal and iron reserves was one of the main reasons why metalworking happened here in the first place, but transporting these raw materials to the foundries and workshops, and then delivering the finished goods to consumers, was hampered by the terrible road conditions which were little more than muddy tracks. The answer was to build canals and transport everything by barge.

Canals weren’t a new phenomenon of course. They had been in existence since ancient times, often for irrigation purposes, but also to connect major river courses. In Britain, the first canal was built by the Romans to connect Lincoln with the River Trent to facilitate access to York, but the 11-mile long Fossdyke was constructed over flat and marshy land, and quite different from the landscape which engineers were faced with during the Industrial Revolution.

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Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter

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Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter

If you’ve been following my previous posts about how Birmingham became the Workshop of the World, you’ll know how the absence of restrictive guilds, the knowledge of enlightened nonconformists, and the demand for skilled labour in the small metal trades were all contributory factors in Birmingham’s population increase which soared from around 5,000 in 1700 to over 23,000 by 1731. To meet this extra demand, the Colmore family, one of Birmingham’s wealthiest, obtained a private act of parliament which allowed them to sell off part of their Newhall Estate as separate plots of land, and this area of Hockley is essentially the Jewellery Quarter today.

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Birmingham’s Lunaticks and the Golden Boys

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Birmingham's Lunaticks and the Golden Boys

In my previous post we saw how Birmingham gradually evolved from a small Anglo-Saxon hamlet into a prosperous 18th century market town, but life in rural England was about to see a rapid change.

Up until the 18th century, England’s shires had steadily got on with everyday life by growing crops or perhaps keeping a few sheep to spin their fleeces into wool. Agriculture and cottage industries were the main source of income for most people outside of major urban areas, but it wouldn’t be long before Birmingham and the surrounding area would also become a major urban area – all thanks to its impact on the Industrial Revolution.

To explain why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain I would need to write a book, and to explain why the Midlands was at the forefront of this revolution, I would need to write another one, but I’m going to attempt to cover both in just a few paragraphs by introducing you to Birmingham’s Lunaticks and Golden Boys.

To put things into perspective, it’s generally agreed that the Industrial Revolution began around 1760 and actually came in two phases: The first, which focused on textiles, steam power and iron, lasted until around 1840, and the second, with advancements in steel making, electric power and chemicals, lasted roughly between 1870 and 1914.

It didn’t just happen overnight obviously, but was a result of a gradual change in the way people started to think about the world around them. The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries saw established religious thinking challenged by people such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, to name but a few, but the thirst for knowledge wasn’t just confined to astronomers.

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Birmingham Before the Industrial Revolution

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Birmingham Before the Industrial Revolution

Watching a short video the other day that was offering advice on what to see and do in Birmingham, there were just two comments in response: One said “Leave” and the other said “Drive straight past”. Such is the reputation of Britain’s second largest city, but the question has to be asked, are those comments fair?

To be honest, criticism aimed at this once major hub of the Industrial Revolution is difficult to argue with at times, but it doesn’t tell the whole story, and in a series of posts about how Birmingham evolved from a small Anglo-Saxon hamlet to a city of 1.2 million people, I want to show you that there’s more to Brum than industrial waste sites, concrete flyovers and Balti restaurants – and believe me when I say you might even be pleasantly surprised.

For those of you who don’t know it, Birmingham is the most inland major city in England and lies at the heart of the once industrial West Midlands. For somewhere that played such an important role in England’s Industrial Revolution, it may seem surprising that it doesn’t have a major river running through it, but that was compensated for by a network of canals that became the centre of the English canal system.

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