“Why does Birmingham exist?” asks historian Richard Vinen of Britain’s perennially overlooked second city. It’s not near a significant river or estuary. It doesn’t sit on a hill, atop bountiful natural resources. Not only is Birmingham 105 miles from the nearest beach, but, writes Vinen, it is also “one of the least walkable cities in Britain”. Its districts are segregated by class, race and income as much as by its notorious road system.
But it is in the middle. From the 18th century onwards, people were drawn to Birmingham by its centripetal position, as a site where useful things were made, traded and dispatched around the globe. Birmingham wasn’t just an engine of modern Britain: it built the very engines that helped make Britain rich. People kept coming to Birmingham for work even as work disappeared: from full employment in the mid-20th century it now has some of the highest unemployment in the country. It’s a city founded on work that lost most of its jobs.
