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 TelegraphFor 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
