Economy
The Industrial Revolution flourished in Birmingham and the surrounding Midlands towns, allowing many factories, foundries and businesses, including sword, gun and pistol manufacturers, watchmakers, jewellers, goldsmiths, attorneys, physicians, surgeons, apothecaries and chemists to prosper. 

The city's workmen design and constructed railway carriages, steam engines, and even - unusually for somewhere so far from the sea - ships, which were made as pre-fabricated sections, then assembled at the coast. 

The Midland Bank (now part of HSBC) opened for business in Union Street, Birmingham, in August 1836. 

Until 2003, coins were manufactured at the Birmingham Mint, the oldest independent mint in the world. 

Famous brands from the "city of a thousand trades" include Bird's Custard, Typhoo Tea, Brylcreem, Chad Valley Toys, BSA, Bakelite and the Birmingham wire gauge which was a main provider of musical instrument wire in Britain for many years. 

Breweries Ansells, Davenports and Mitchells & Butlers had their origins in Birmingham, as did Cadburys chocolate, HP Sauce and the MG Rover Group. 

In the First and Second World Wars, the Longbridge car plant built everything imaginable from ammunition to tank suspensions, steel helmets, Jerricans, Hawker Hurricanes, Fairey Battle fighters, Horsa Gliders, mines and depth charges, with the mamoth Avro Lancaster bomber coming into production towards the end of WWII. The Spitfire fighter aircraft was mass produced for the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, at Castle Bromwich. 

Birmingham's history as a transport manufacturer is extensive, with firms like BSA, Norton, Ariel, and Velocette motorbikes, LDV vans, Wolseley police cars, Morris, the Mini, Austin, MG Rover Group, Lucas Aerospace, Tyseley Locomotive Works, The Dunlop Tyre Company, the Midland Red Bus Company and a UK branch of Alstom trains, formerly the Midland Railway Carriage and Wagon Company.

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Birmingham"