England's second city has been a manufacturing powerhouse since Anglo-Saxon times, yet it is not a port and has no local mineral deposits of the kind that powered the Industrial Revolution. For its expansion into a major city, Birmingham relied on the talents and hard work of communities of migrants, first people from neighbouring villages and then in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the other side of the world. The borough rental, or list of tenants, from 1296 is an important document showing that two-thirds of the early workforce came from a ten-mile radius. The 19th century saw economic migration from Scotland and Ireland, and also the arrival of Russian Jews and Romanies escaping persecution. In the 20th century there were new communities of Yemenis, Chinese, Poles, Ukrainians, West Indians of the Windrush generation, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. This comprehensive history, published to mark the 850th anniversary of Henry II's grant of a market charter to the town in 1166, starts with recent developments in the archaeology of the medieval and Tudor periods. The "City of a Thousand Trades", to quote the 18th century politician Edmund Burke, emerged in the centuries after 1700 as it became a centre of industry and commerce. There were no guilds to create a closed shop, and the freedom allowed to Nonconformists in religion resulted in leaders such as John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain, radicals with a strong philanthropic drive. The first navigable canal was opened in 1766, giving the city access to overseas trade. There has been debate about the involvement of slaves in local industry, but their numbers were probably small. A high wage economy and opportunities for women and children attracted people to the town. Metalworking, from guns to jewellery to railway carriages, was a speciality, and the 20th century saw Birmingham's further development as Britain's motor city. 334pp, timeline, population figures, superb colour photos.
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The Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps in Rome may not be a best-kept secret, but they are very Instagram-able and here are celebrated with a rich array of spectacular places in incredible colour photographs. Here are the most fascinating cities and attractions that can't be missed as well as quiet streets, charming cafés and quaint gardens that are hard to find when we travel somewhere new. Covering France, England including the Sherlock Holmes Museum and the Italian Gardens in Kensington, Scotland, Ireland, Berlin, Amsterdam and the tulip flower markets, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and the Mediterranean including Pittaki Street in Athens and the Theatre of Dionysus, mosques and bazaars in Turkey, bridges and castles in Prague, Budapest and Vienna, stretching from exotic Asia in the East to the choppy waves of the Atlantic Ocean in the West, and from the sun-kissed shores of the Med in the South to the frozen wastes of the Arctic in the North, this continent has some of the world's finest attractions from palaces and castles and churches, museums and bridges to a scotch whisky experience, dreamy canals, trams and funiculars to a multi-coloured apartment block Hundertwasser House comprising apartments, offices, private terraces and 250 trees and bushes. The quality of this colour photography is second to none and all are reproduced on very glossy heavy stock paper. 192pp, 23.5 x 22cm.