A city tested
The Blitz strikes hard — Birmingham is among Britain's most heavily bombed cities, its factories turned to the war effort, from Spitfires at Castle Bromwich to munitions across the city. Whole streets are lost. Out of the rubble comes an urgent question: who will help rebuild?
Wartime · 1942
Birmingham at war · Imperial War Museums collection
When war came in 1939, Birmingham's thousand trades turned as one to the fight. The Castle Bromwich Aeroplane Factory became the largest Spitfire plant in Britain, its assembly lines staffed heavily by women; Longbridge built aircraft and military vehicles; BSA made rifles and motorcycles; and countless small workshops across the city turned out components, munitions, and equipment. If Birmingham made it, the war effort needed it.
Factory floor
Birmingham's workforce — the city's hands at work · IWM
The city paid a heavy price. Because of its industrial importance, Birmingham became one of the most heavily bombed cities in Britain — raid after raid through 1940 and 1941 destroyed factories, churches, and whole streets of back-to-back houses, killing more than two thousand people. The Market Hall in the Bull Ring burned; the BSA works at Small Heath was hit with terrible loss of life. Wartime censorship meant the outside world heard little of it; Brummies simply carried on.
Victory in 1945 revealed a wounded city: houses lost, factories damaged, and a workforce depleted. Britain needed labour to rebuild — for the factories, the buses, the hospitals of the new welfare state — and it would soon look to the Commonwealth to find it. The next chapter of Birmingham's story was about to begin, carried in suitcases across the sea.