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Birmingham is a much-maligned city. It is busy, sprawling and never beautiful, but it is vibrant with excellent museums and art galleries and is within easy reach of lovely countryside. Visit the Botanical Gardens, the Victorian streets of the jewelry quarter, or the Museum of Science and Industry with its excellent transport and aircraft sections, housed in an old factory. In this museum you can see the oldest functioning steam engine in the world, manufactured in 1779 by Boulton and Watt. In addition to a collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery shows an exhibition of handicrafts throughout the centuries. Birmingham has been the center of the jewelry industry for 200 years, but its rapid industrial growth began with the advent of the railway. Not surprisingly there is a Railway Museum near the city, at Tyseley on the A41. Canals also played their part in the city's growth, and it can be fun to take a "Brummage Boat" through the old network of waterways and out into tranquil countryside.
Culturally, Birmingham has also seen significant growth in recent years. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has become one of the world's leading ensembles since young conductor Simon Rattle - now a "Sir" - took it over in 1980. Birmingham is also home to the Royal Ballet, which moved from London as part of the ongoing effort to break that city's cultural monopoly in England.
Destinations in Birmingham
Coventry
Cadbury World at Bournville is an exhibition about chocolate - from a taste of the original unsugared drink at the court of Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, to a 1930s sweet shop and a demonstration of putting the yolk into a creme egg.
The Upper Severn Valley
Other places within reach of Birmingham include Aston Hall, a splendid Jacobean house with a grand balustraded staircase and a very long Long Gallery. Dudley has a zoo in the grounds of its ruined castle (14th-16th centuries), and the 26-acre (10 ha) Black Country Museum with a chainmaker's house and an underground coal-mining display. On the canal nearby, visitors can have a go at "legging" a coal barge in the traditional way through the Dudley tunnel.
Heading southwest will bring you to Kidderminster, known for its carpets.
A little outside the town to the south on the A448 is Harvington Hall (16th-18th centuries). This moated manor house is positively riddled with secret passages and priestholes. Hounded Catholics could even lift up the stair treads and disappear inside.
From Kidderminster, the Severn Valley Railway runs frequent steam trains to Bewdley and along the beautiful river valley to Bridgnorth, a picturesque market town. Nearby is the Midland Motor Museum, full of sleek shiny racing cars.
If you leave Kidderminster on the A456 west and turn off onto the A4117, you'll pass through Shropshire. First comes Ludlow with its well-cared-for half-timbered buildings, among them the Feathers Hotel of 1603. Overlooking the Welsh marches and the Teme and Corve rivers, the impressive ruined castle in summer often provides a magical setting for Shakespeare performances. The castle was the last Shropshire fortress to surrender to the Parliamentarians in the Civil War.
The A48 leads to Shrewsbury. Possibly the best-preserved Tudor town in England, it is perched on a rocky hill in a loop of the river Severn. At the center of the town is the Square with the Old Market Hall (around 1596) and a statue of Lord Clive of India.
Abbeys, museums, stately homes and castles abound in the vicinity, and the avid historian or garden-lover might do well to spend a few days here. For example, an elegant, classical 18th-century house is set in beautiful Attingham Park, while at Hawkstone Park the landscape has been carved out into dramatic cliffs, stone steps, precipitous paths, tunnels, and grottoes. Haughmond Abbey, founded in 1135, has walls hewn directly from the living rock of the hillside; and there are magnificent landscaped gardens at Hodnet Hall.
The remains of a 2nd-century Roman city, with baths and forum colonnades, can be explored at Viriconium, near Wroxeter; while medieval Much Wenlock, southeast of Shrewsbury, has Norman, half-timbered and Georgian buildings in immaculate condition. Geologists will appreciate a drive along the B4371 on the 400-million-year-old fossilized coral reef of Wenlock Edge.
Cradle of the Industrial Revolution
An absolute must is the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, actually a complex of several extremely interesting industrial museums. It was in Ironbridge that Abraham Darby first smelted iron using coke in 1709, a technical breakthrough which led to the Industrial Revolution.
Ironbridge thereupon developed into the center of the cast-iron industry; here, for instance, were manufactured the ceremonial gates for Prince Albert's Crystal Palace. The secluded valley is now a vast living museum where you can watch molten iron being poured into Victorian molds, see the decorative Iron Bridge, the world's first cast-iron bridge (1778), or tour the Coalport porcelain works and see a unique collection of tiles at the Jackford Tile Museum. An appropriate conclusion to the visit is a meal in a Victorian gaslit pub.
From Telford, take the M54 east. Near exit 3 is Boscobel House, where Charles II hid when Cromwell's troops came searching for him. He also sought refuge in nearby 12th-century White Ladies Priory and in a priesthole at Moseley Old Hall (south of exit 2).
The history of military aviation is presented through the veteran aircraft at the Royal Air Force's Aerospace Museum in Cosford, a northern suburb of Birmingham. Or detour to Bickenhill to visit the National Motorcycle Museum.
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