british isles robert colls
Brum’s the Word Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain
By Richard Vinen (Allen Lane 592pp £25)
It takes about fifty minutes to travel by train from Leicester, where I live, to Bir- mingham. It’s a flat ride and we slide into New Street station having seen nothing but fields and sheds. No big natural features. No stand-out architecture. No monumental structures, unless we are talking Spaghetti Junction, and we aren’t because that’s only monumental from the air. The city has nice bits by the canal and Symphony Hall; it has the National Exhibition Centre and even the new Bull Ring, home of the world’s biggest Primark. But on the face of it, Birmingham is just another conurbation too big to go through and too wide to go around.
together in the Lunar Society (1765–1813), but the world had to wait for the Chamberlains, manufacturers of three quarters of the world’s screws, before it could see what the place really stood for. As mayor of Birmingham between 1873 and 1876, Joseph Chamberlain might as well have asked not what he could do for the city but what the city could do for his reputation, which grew sky high after he took Birmingham’s gas and water facilities into public ownership and embarked on a series of any political party that took them up. In the event, Chamberlain and his supporters moved in a ‘Liberal Unionist’ direction, splitting with Gladstone, and aligning and then merging with the Conservative Party. His eldest son, Austen, with his trademark monocle and orchid buttonhole, followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming MP for East Worcestershire and going on to enjoy high ministerial office. His youngest son, Neville, was elected MP for Birmingham Ladywood and later Edgbaston and served as chancellor under Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald before succeeding Baldwin as prime minister in 1937.
These three Chamberlains were, and are, the subjects of controversy, though Richard Vinen, in this bright, goodnatured and well-written civic history, fails to acknowledge the revisionism that has recovered a good part of Neville’s reputation after decades of him being branded appeaserin-chief – a charge that united his enemies on both sides of the Commons.
At the time of Domesday Book, Birmingham consisted of nine households. By the Tudor period, it had grown off the back of the trade in wool and leather, its wealth shown in the foundation of King Edward VI’s grammar school in 1552. By the time William Hutton wrote its first history in 1781, it had a population of around seventy thousand and had become known for the manufacture of metal items – all of them useful, from belt buckles to saucepans. A canal linking Birmingham to Staffordshire opened in 1772 and helped make coal cheap, and when Matthew Boulton and James Watt’s Soho Foundry put that coal to work, it set Birmingham squarely on the map for steam engines and everything else carboniferous. Birmingham elected its first MP in 1832, became a municipal borough in 1838 and was awarded city status in 1889, by which time it had all the hallmarks of English industrial civilisation, including a town hall in the classical style and a lot of smoke and graft.
Birmingham had once hosted a distinguished scientific business elite, who came
Tomorrow’s world: new tower blocks in Nechell, Birmingham, 1963
of town centre improvements. Taking his seat in the Commons as Liberal MP for Birmingham in 1876, Chamberlain made an extraordinary impact on both the right and left sides of British politics. The opening pageant of this year’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham made no reference to him, but his 1885 ‘unauthorised programme’ challenged the fundamental principles of the Liberal Party and there can be no doubt that his campaigns for municipal services, workers’ rights, tariffs on trade, imperial preference, regional devolution and rural revitalisation would have benefited the working class had they been successful and transformed the fortunes
Birmingham profited from two world wars, an early entry into motor vehicle production and the interwar expansion of its population, which hit a million in 1931, making it Britain’s ‘second city’. Mass immigration began with the arrival of the Irish in the 1940s and gathered pace with the coming of people from India, Pakistan, Africa and the Caribbean in the 1960s. More recently, Birmingham has attracted incomers from eastern Europe and the Middle East. They come to better themselves, as immigrants always do. Vinen doesn’t duck the difficulties posed by mass migration and multiculturalism, but he is also alert to the upsides. He brilliantly notes how Peaky Blinders, the television series set in postFirst World War Birmingham and centred on an Irish-dominated gang, exoticises industrial labour for contemporary viewers.
After the Second World War, Birmingham’s car industry boomed. With unemployment at 0.5 per cent in 1955, this was the age of the affluent worker. By 1973 this ‘motor city’ found itself ringed by three hundred tower blocks and a tangle of
Literary Review | september 2022 12
