It is the second-largest city, urban area and metropolitan area in England and the United Kingdom , [b] with roughly 1. A market town of Warwickshire in the medieval period, Birmingham grew in the 18th-century Midlands Enlightenment and subsequent Industrial Revolution , which saw advances in science, technology, and economic development, producing a series of innovations that laid many of the foundations of modern industrial society. The Watt steam engine was invented in Birmingham. The resulting high level of social mobility also fostered a culture of political radicalism which, under leaders from Thomas Attwood to Joseph Chamberlain , was to give it a political influence unparalleled in Britain outside London, and a pivotal role in the development of British democracy. The damage done to the city’s infrastructure, in addition to a deliberate policy of demolition and new building by planners, led to extensive urban regeneration in subsequent decades. Birmingham’s economy is now dominated by the service sector. The development of Birmingham into a significant urban and commercial centre began in , when the Lord of the Manor Peter de Bermingham obtained a charter to hold a market at his castle , and followed this with the creation of a planned market town and seigneurial borough within his demesne or manorial estate, around the site that became the Bull Ring. The principal governing institutions of medieval Birmingham — including the Guild of the Holy Cross and the lordship of the de Birmingham family — collapsed between and , [42] leaving the town with an unusually high degree of social and economic freedom and initiating a period of transition and growth.
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