Birmingham compared to Sheffield

In most case the origins of economic activity depend on the local availability of the bulkiest raw materials the power to process them and the ease of transport for bringing in any missing ingredients and taking out the resultant product. Sheffield fits the ideal almost perfectly. Coal is available closer to the centre of Sheffield than to Birmingham, iron was available although for the best products Swedish iron was also imported from very early times. Other raw materials, clay for crucibles, stone suitable for grinding, limestone for fluxing, an abundance of windy sites for creating draughts in blast furnaces, but, most importantly, water were all right there. The water in the form of the River Don enabled the transport of heavy goods right into the town, while the strongly flowing streams running helter-skelter down the edges and into the Don at the north and west of town provided power for the conversion of the raw materials into products. Birmingham had few of these benefits. No major river; the River Trent by-passes Birmingham and is a sluggish thing at best. A Geology that provided few useful ingredients until we started to build concrete jungles and the sand and gravel came into their own. The coal of Staffordshire and the cast iron of the Black Country were the main materials available reasonably close at hand, but there was no transport infrastructure to bring them into Birmingham until the second half of the eighteenth century. So Birmingham had to depend on a miserable collection of streams and the strength of its workers and it had to develop trade in high value goods that could be transported by pack-horse. The reason why these displaced persons came to Birmingham was because nobody else wanted to. Birmingham is built on its lack of advantage. The influx in the sevententh century was due to a parallel, but different form of disaffection. By this time the revolution created by Gutenberg in Germany and his English follower, Caxton, in making the word of God available to the common man had given the opportunity for wider education and reinforced the dissenting movement as people realised that the Church's teaching was self serving and largely unrelated to what was actually in the Bible. In England the antics of Henry VIII added to the disaffection with the established church and the ensuing power struggle between factions within the Church together with Henry's inability to produce a viable succession created a difficult environment for many of strong beliefs.

"By the middle of the eighteenth century, Birmingham was the most important centre of such trades (i.e. brass and copper)and its brass and copper goods were known far and wide - not only in this country, but all over the continent, in France, Italy, Germany and Russia...."

"The disadvantages of carrying out such a manufacture in Birmingham must have been very serious, since none of the great highways passed through the town....Nevertheless Birmingham attained a place of eminence in the industrial world... There must have been some very powerful factors.. which were able to overcome the ... bad communications"

"One of the most important of these influences was the great incursion of Dissenters into Birmingham. Between 1660 and 1700..." "The chief reason for this influx is found in the persecution which followed the Restoration (of the monarchy). In 1662 an act of conformity was passed, ... and a further act in 1665 "for restraining non-conformists from inhabiting the corporations" and providing persons preaching the Conventicles to "come within five miles of any city or town corporate, or borough that sends burgesses to the Parliament""
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Extracts from Chapter 5 of "The English Brass and Copper Industries to 1800", by H. Hamilton.

The migration of dissenters to Birmingham, Unitarians and, later, Quakers were prominent among these, parallels at the time of the restoration of the monarchy the major movement of puritans to America forty years earlier, in the reign of Charles I. The same motivation that created America was to create Birmingham.