Birmingham

Assembled from 20 blocks · 1 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. The counter-example that keeps the story honest. Birmingham industrialised as thoroughly as Manchester and looked nothing like it: not one dominant fibre but hundreds of metal trades — buttons, buckles, guns, jewellery, toys, brass, coinage — carried on in small workshops by masters and journeymen rather than in mills by hands. Its typical unit of production had a handful of workers, its skills took years to learn, and its labour force therefore kept a bargaining position that Lancashire's did not. It also had no medieval corporation and no guild restrictions, which is usually offered as part of the explanation for its openness to newcomers, including the religious dissenters who supplied much of its capital and most of the Lunar Society. Boulton's Soho Manufactory sat on its edge, and Watt's engines were built there. Two industrial revolutions therefore ran side by side about ninety miles apart, one concentrating labour and deskilling it, the other dispersing labour and keeping it skilled.
3. Knowledge
4. Manchester
5. Birmingham
6. Connections
7. Boulton and Watt
8. Manchester
9. Boulton and Watt form their partnership
10. The Bridgewater Canal
11. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
12. The steam engine
13. Nineteenth-century British urbanisation
14. Birmingham
15. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
16. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
17. Chadwick reports on the sanitary condition of the labouring population
18. The census records an urban majority
19. Evidence
20. Supports urban and municipal population growth and the conventional dating of the urban majority to the 1851 count. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted. No population figure is quoted anywhere in this pack, because township, borough and conurbation boundaries differ and the distinction cannot be made responsibly without the returns.