A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'A spirited attempt at
uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham has managed for so long to
stand at the centre of Britain's history without anyone noticing
... This absorbing book shows us how we did it' Observer 'Vinen has
written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of
Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it' Daily
Telegraph For over a century, Birmingham has been the second
largest town in England, and central to modern history. In his
richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a
small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the
twentieth century: a place of mass production, full employment and
prosperity that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic
halt in the 1980s. For most of that time, Birmingham has also been
a magnet for migration, drawing in people from Wales, Ireland,
India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Indeed, much of British history
- the passage of the first reform bill, the rise and fall of the
Chamberlain dynasty, racial tension - can be explained, in large
measure, with reference to Birmingham. Vinen roots his sweeping
story in the experience of individuals. This is a book about
figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran
Duran. It is also about those that everyone ought to have heard of
- such as Dick Etheridge, the all-powerful Communist convenor at
the Longbridge factory, or Stan Crooke, one of the remarkable West
Indians interviewed for the 1960s documentary The Colony. It
captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from
the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories in the 1930s to
the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's
nightclub in the 1980s - were caught up in the convulsions of
social change. Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history
does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain
does not make sense without it. 'There is unlikely to be a fuller
or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's' Jonathan
Coe, Financial Times
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