City Information

First mentioned in the Domesday book as being worth 20 shillings, Birmingham was just a small settlement in the early Middle Ages. Apart from the village where the market, church and castle of the Lord of the Manor were located, there was just a large expanse of park and heath land to the west and north. Known as Birmingham Heath, this is the location today of Winson Green and Hockley.

Surrounding Medieval Birmingham were half a dozen villages that would much later become part of the modern city. Then classed as Warwickshire were Aston, Edgbaston and Sheldon, Handsworth and Harborne in Staffordshire and Yardley, Kings Norton, Moseley and Northfield in Worcestershire. All of these areas today still retain their medieval churches, which are a useful guide to where the old villages lay. Aston in particular was a very large parish, taking in Duddeston and Nechells, Erdington and Bordesley.

The first two areas to grow and industrialise were Birmingham itself and Aston, with an increasingly feint distinction between the two. Now home to Millennium Point and many businesses, the boundary between Aston and Birmingham was the River Rea to the south-east and AB Row to the north.

The first extension to Birmingham's boundaries came in 1838 when Edgbaston became part of the town. This was followed by the inclusion of Harborne, Saltley and Balsall Heath in 1891. Now termed as the inner ring, terraced housing had sprung up to accommodate the fast-growing population.

The advent of suburban railways and tramways had a profound effect, enabling better-off tradesmen, clerks and their families to live out of the town centre, but commute easily to work. As these families moved outwards, factory owners moved out further still; wishing to live in large detached houses and to benefit from the commuter lines, substantial properties and bigger gardens found in the likes of Moseley and Handsworth.

New Year's Day in 1912 marked the biggest change in Birmingham's local history, when the outlying villages of Handsworth, Yardley, Small Heath, Kings Norton, Aston and Moseley became part of the City, forming Greater Birmingham. Already half a million, Birmingham's population almost doubled overnight.

With the additions of Perry Barr in 1929, followed by parts of Castle Bromwich and Sheldon two years later, far less radical boundary changes have taken place since. In 1974 the Royal Borough of Sutton Coldfield became part of Birmingham and most recently, Frankley was added.

The creation of Greater Birmingham in 1912 allowed the City to relieve a growing shortfall in accommodation by building housing in areas that had previously been fields. Such was the pressure to build huge numbers of houses after the First World War and beyond, that the vast estates of Weoley Castle and Acocks Green, Castle Vale and Bartley Green were created, including Kingstanding, Europe's largest estate.

The end result is one of the biggest cities in Europe, an area of 80 square miles, with a million people benefiting from the diversity and vibrancy of the communities that make Birmingham what it is today.