Britain's Second City — the Balti Triangle, canal miles, Cadbury's birthplace, and the Peaky Blinders landscape
Birmingham is the UK's most populous city after London and one of Europe's youngest by median age, with a culinary scene that punches well above its weight: the Balti Triangle along the Ladypool Road corridor is where Birmingham invented the balti curry — a style of dish so specific to the city that a geographic indication application has been submitted to protect it. The city has more miles of canal than Venice, a world-class symphony orchestra, and the Grand Hotel restored to its Victorian opulence after 20 years of closure.
Birmingham was an 18th-century powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution — home to Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and the Lunar Society — a group of Enlightenment thinkers who met monthly and effectively drove the intellectual engine of the Industrial Revolution. The Victorian city that emerged was shaped by Joseph Chamberlain's radical municipal reforms in the 1870s, which demolished slums and built the grand Corporation Street corridor. Mass immigration from the Caribbean, South Asia, and later from across the globe built the modern city's cultural richness and gave it the Balti Triangle that d…