Birmingham and Midlands Conurbation
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands county of England. It is the most populous British city outside London, with over 1 million inhabitants, and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the United Kingdom’s second most populous urban area with a population of nearly 3 million. Birmingham’s metropolitan area, which includes surrounding towns to which it is closely tied through commuting, is also the United Kingdom’s second most populous with a population of 3.7m
The city grew from a medium-sized market town throughout the medieval period, to international prominence in the 18th century at the heart of the Midlands Enlightenment and subsequent Industrial Revolution, which saw the town at the forefront of worldwide developments in science, technology and industrial organisation, producing a series of innovations that laid many of the foundations of modern industrial society. By 1791 it was being hailed as “the first manufacturing town in the world”. Birmingham’s distinctive economic profile, with thousands of small workshops practicing a wide variety of specialised and highly-skilled trades, encouraged exceptional levels of creativity and innovation, and provided a diverse and resilient economic base for an industrial prosperity that was to last into the final quarter of the 20th century. Many of these individual workshops still flourish and others have been converted into appealing residential units with good proximity to the city centre. The resulting high level of social mobility from this rapid growth also fostered a culture of broad-based political radicalism that under leaders from Thomas Attwood to Joseph Chamberlain was to give it a political influence unparalleled in Britain outside London, and a pivotal role in the development of British democracy.
Today Birmingham is a major international commercial centre, ranked as a gamma- world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network; and an important transport, retail and conference hub. With a city GDP of $90m its urban economy is the second largest in the UK and the 72nd largest in the world. There has been significant investment in urban regeneration and the city centre now provides a cosmopolitan high quality living environment with access to a very wide range of the very best in retail, entertainment, restaurants and hotels.
Birmingham’s three universities and two university colleges make it the largest centre of higher education in the United Kingdom outside London, and its major cultural institutions, including the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, enjoy international reputations. Other cities and towns making up the conurbation include: Wolverhampton, West Bromwich, Kings Norton, Walsall, Stourbridge and Solihull.
