Birmingham, Warwickshire


Kearsley's Traveller's Entertaining Guide Through Great Britain (1803):

Birmingham, a large and populous manufacturing town , seated on the side of a hill. The lower part is filled with the workshops and warehouses of the manufacturers and consists chiefly of old buildings . The upper part contains many new and regular streets . It has two churches, several chapels and meeting-houses for every denomination of different era. It has an elegant theatre, and a good public library. Its manufactures are chiefly in hardware such as metal buttons, buckles, plated goods of all kinds, japanned and paper-ware etc. It is plentifully supplied with coal by means of a canal to Wednesbury in Staffordshire. Birmingham goods are dispersed throughout the kingdom and exported in great quantities to foreign countries where, in respect of show and cheapness , they are unrivalled: that it is become to use the emphatical expression of Burke, "the toy-shop of Europe". The improved steam-engines made here by Messers Bolton and Watt deserve to rank among the productions of human ingenuity. Two miles on the l. is Soho, Matthew Bolton, esq. Further on the r. is Aston-park, Heneage Legge , esq. and two miles further on the r. is Sandwell, earl of Dartmouth.

Inns:Lloyd's Hotel, Swan, Castle.

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Quotations
 Chapter 36 
"Only think! well, that must be infinitely provoking! I have quite a horror of upstarts. Maple Grove has given me a thorough disgust of people of that sort; for there is a family in that neighbourhood who are such an annoyance to my brother and sister from the airs they give themselves! Your description of Mrs. Churchill made me think of them directly. People of the name of Tupman, very lately settled there, and encumbered with many low connections, but giving themselves immense airs, and expecting to be on a footing with the old established families. A year and a half is the very utmost that they can have lived at West Hall; and how they got their fortune nobody knows. They came from Birmingham, which is not a place to promise much, you know, Mr. Weston. One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound: but nothing more is positively known of the Tupmans, though a good many things I assure you are suspected; and yet by their manners they evidently think themselves equal even to my brother, Mr. Suckling, who happens to be one of their nearest neighbours. It is infinitely too bad. Mr. Suckling who has been eleven years a resident at Maple Grove, and whose father had it before him -- I believe, at least -- I am almost sure that old Mr. Suckling had completed the purchase before his death."
 

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