A thousand trades

By the nineteenth century Birmingham had earned its nickname: the city of a thousand trades. Unlike the great single-industry towns of the north, Birmingham's genius was variety — small workshops and family firms making pens, buttons, buckles, guns, toys, jewellery, and brassware in their thousands. At its height the city's pen trade alone supplied most of the world's steel writing pens, meaning much of the modern world's correspondence began its life in a Birmingham workshop.

This was a city of makers, and the workshop bench shaped its character. Skilled artisans worked alongside their families in the Jewellery Quarter and Gun Quarter; children learned trades at their parents' elbows; and the line between master and worker was thinner here than almost anywhere in industrial Britain. Out of these crowded streets grew the traditions of mutual aid, friendly societies, and trade unionism that would define working-class Birmingham for a century.

It was also a city of reformers. Joseph Chamberlain's 'municipal gospel' of the 1870s gave Birmingham clean water, gas, parks, and libraries, and made it a model civic city admired around the world. George Cadbury moved his chocolate works out to Bournville in 1879 and built a village for his workers around it. The idea that a city belongs to its people — the idea at the heart of this project — was forged here.