BIRMINGHAM, a large town of the hundred of Hemlingford, in the county of Warwick, 109 miles from London. It stands on the verge of the two counties of Worcester and Salop, so that some of the villages, which may be fairly considered as suburbs to Birmingham, are in reality in those counties. It consists of two parishes, has no corporation, but is governed by two officers called bailiffs, because their predecessors were such to the lords of the manor of Birmingham before any town was built upon it. The appearance of Birmingham is by no means prepossessing; most of the streets are narrow and crooked, and the houses, though respectable, are in general upon a small scale. There are no public buildings deserving of notice; and from the nature of the extended manufactories, mostly carried on by machinery kept in motion by steam, the whole has rather a gloomy and cloudy look. It is by the rapid progress that the town has made in the arts, by its extension, by the increased opulence of the inhabitants, and by the vast augmentation of its population, that Birmingham is to be estimated. These have risen with the improvements of the navigable canals, and of the roads, by which fuel and the metals are brought at a cheap rate to the workshops of the manufacturers, and the heavy goods made are conveyed at similar low rates to the distant places of consumption. It would be more difficult to say what is not, than what is made here, in articles of iron, silver, gold, copper, brass, steel, mixed metals, glass, wood, horn, ivory, and stone. It has been called the toyshop of Europe; but although the smallest trinkets are prepared, it nevertheless produces the heaviest articles, even anchors, cannon, and chain-cables. In spite of the smoke and steam of the engines, this town is remarkably healthy; and the deaths in proportion to the number of inhabitants are fewer than in the other large places, London, Liverpool, and Manchester. The places of worship are numerous;
those of diversion or amusement few. The town is well Bar and cheaply supplied with provisions and with corn, chiefly through the means of the canals. The inhabitants at different periods have been as follows, viz. in 1801, 73,670; in 1811, 85,753; and in 1821, 106,722.