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There is a plaque in Handsworth that most people drive past without stopping. It marks the house where Matthew Boulton and James Watt conducted experiments that would change the nature of work, transport, and energy for the entire planet. Birmingham has always been better at doing things than talking about them — which is perhaps why it remains persistently underestimated, and persistently extraordinary.
Before there was Silicon Valley, there was Birmingham. In the late eighteenth century, a group of industrialists, scientists, and thinkers met monthly by the light of the full moon — both for the journey home and for the symbolism — at each other's houses in and around the city. The Lunar Society included Watt, Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley (who discovered oxygen), Josiah Wedgwood, and a cast of colleagues who collectively defined the intellectual engine of the Industrial Revolution. These were not remote academics; they were men who built factories, tested ideas on lathes, and changed the world by trying things out. Birmingham was their laboratory.
The city earned its character from that period: practical, inventive, unglamorous in the way that genuine craft rarely needs to be glamorous. By the nineteenth century, it was producing more types of manufactured goods than any city on earth — jewellery, guns, glass, toys, screws, coins, hardware of every description. A thousand trades in a thousand workshops.
If the Lunar Society gave Birmingham its industrial identity, Joseph Chamberlain gave it its civic one. As Mayor from 1873 to 1876, Chamberlain essentially invented modern municipal government. He municipalised the gas and water companies, demolished some of the worst slum housing in Britain, built Corporation Street, and established free libraries and schools on a scale that no British city had attempted. His conviction was simple: a city should use its collective resources to improve the lives of its people. It was a radical idea at the time. It is still a standard that most cities are trying to meet.
Birmingham's cultural institutions deserve more credit than they typically receive. The Birmingham Repertory Theatre — known simply as the REP — is one of the oldest producing theatres in Britain, founded in 1913 by Barry Jackson, who staged world premieres of Shaw and Eliot and helped launch countless careers. Symphony Hall, opened in 1991, is acknowledged as one of the finest concert halls in Europe; the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has been its resident company since, performing at the highest international level. And Brindleyplace, the redeveloped canalside district in the heart of the city, proved in the 1990s that post-industrial regeneration could be genuinely beautiful rather than merely functional.
Cadbury's, too. The company that George Cadbury built at Bournville — including a model village for its workers, with gardens, sports fields, and no pubs — was a genuine act of corporate idealism. The chocolate was very good too.
When Birmingham hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2022, the city put on a remarkable show — opening ceremony included a giant mechanical bull (because of course Birmingham has a bull). More significantly, the Games left behind a transformed Alexander Stadium, a completed Athletes' Village converted to new housing, and a renewed argument that Birmingham had arrived as a genuine global events city. The city was unhurried about making that case; it simply made it.
Birmingham is the youngest major city in Europe by population, with over a third of its residents under 25. Its universities — the University of Birmingham, Aston, Birmingham City — generate significant research output and a large graduate population choosing to stay. Advanced manufacturing, digital creative industries, and life sciences have grown around the old metalworking base, keeping the city's identity as a making place intact even as the economy shifts beneath it.
The Jewellery Quarter still has working goldsmiths. The Bullring still draws the crowds. The canals — more miles of them than Venice — are lined with cafés and apartments where factories once stood. Birmingham keeps finding ways to use what it already has.
That instinct, inherited from the lunar tinkerers and the municipal radicals, is the city's most durable quality. Birmingham rarely announces itself. It simply gets on with it.
Photo by TBD