The culture of Birmingham is dominated by
the city's deep-seated tradition of individualism and experimentation, a key
factor that underlay its role as the birthplace of developments that would
shape the modern world, and its growth from a remote and obscure market town
into one of the major cities of Europe. This unusually fragmented but
innovative culture has been widely remarked upon by commentators. Writing in
1969, the New York-based urbanist Jane Jacobs cast Birmingham as a one of the
world's great examples of urban creativity: surveying its history from the 16th
to the 20th centuries she
