History of Birmingham

Alternate meaning: Timeline of Birmingham, Alabama

The history of Birmingham in England spans 1400 years of growth, during which time it has evolved from a small 7th century Anglo Saxon hamlet on the edge of the Forest of Arden at the fringe of early Mercia to become a major city through a combination of immigration, innovation and civic pride that helped to bring about major social and economic reforms and to create the Industrial Revolution, inspiring the growth of similar cities across the world.

The last 200 years have seen Birmingham rise from market town into the fastest-growing city of the 19th century, spurred on by a combination of civic investment, scientific achievement, commercial innovation and by a steady influx of migrant workers into its suburbs. By the 20th century Birmingham had become the metropolitan hub of the United Kingdom's manufacturing and automotive industries, having earned itself a reputation first as a city of canals, then of cars, and most recently as a major European convention and shopping destination.

By the beginning of the 21st century, Birmingham lay at the heart of a major post-industrial metropolis surrounded by significant educational, manufacturing, shopping, sporting and conferencing facilities.

The oldest human artefact found within Birmingham is the Saltley Handaxe: a 500,000-year-old brown quartzite hand axe about 100 millimetres (3.9 in) long, discovered in the gravels of the River Rea at Saltley in 1892. Other parts or Birmingham are quite similar in this way, as people seem to have lived there for millennia . This provided the first evidence of lower paleolithic human habitation of the English Midlands, an area previously thought to have been sterile and uninhabitable before the end of the last glacial period. Similarly aged axes have since also been found in Erdington and Edgbaston, and bioarchaeological evidence from boreholes in Quinton, Nechells and Washwood Heath suggests that the climate and vegetation of Birmingham during this interglacial period were very similar to those of today.

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