West Midlands Of England

The West Midlands of England is the land comprising a group of historic counties - Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Herefordshire which stretch to the Welsh border to the west. They border Cheshire and the East Midlands to the north and east and counties which are closer to LondonTown to the south. In the 1970s, they were regrouped to carve out a Metropolitan County called West Midlands, comprising the districts of Coventry, Solihull, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Sandwell and Dudley. The last two of these are made up of small older towns and villages which are known as "The Black Country" because of the colour of the smoke in the nineteenth century, when most of the area contained coal mines and associated industry.

The historic mediaeval city in the area was Coventry, which goes back to Saxon times. Birmingham became significant only in later times, and grew in size greatly in the nineteenth century. It is the largest single municipal unit in the country, as London is subdivided.

Birmingham is on a large flat hill and therefore has no large rivers, although it is near to both the Severn and the Trent. It therefore did not develop greatly until it gained a large network of canals in the eighteenth century, which aided the industrial development. In the nineteenth century, it became a focus of the railway network, with the canals remaining for some heavy goods traffic until the mid twentieth century. The canals have in the late twentieth century formed the basis for extensive urban renewal, with new civic buildings including a conference centre, which was used in recent years for a G8 gathering of world leaders. Bill Clinton was seen drinking beer in a canalside public house. A quite common saying in Birmingham is, Birmingham has more miles of canals than Venice.

I have been living in Birmingham since 1972. When I first moved there it was not an attractive place at all. Now it is beginning to be on the map for conferences, shopping and even tourism, though for that it will never beat Stratford on Avon.

-- JohnFletcher

See also IdentityOfEnglishMidlands

Having been to both places, however, I must point out that the canals of the Black Country Ring do not lend themselves to romance quite as well as the ones in Venice do. Although there is certainly something to be said for cruising along in a barge on a summer's day at a magnificent 4mph. -- EarleMartin

Have you tried the canal tunnel at the Black Country Museum? Seriously, I am sure you are correct. I suspect most of the people who say it have not been to Venice. The canals have, however, been quite transformed. Where there were previously derelict warehouses there are in many cases modern houses. -- JohnFletcher