Birmingham

Metal, Markets and the Jewellery Quarter

Outside the Bullring, on the West Mall, there is a bronze bull by Laurence Broderick, and it is probably the most photographed thing in the city. Behind it stands the Selfridges building, one of only four in the country, clad in fifteen thousand aluminium discs and modelled on a Paco Rabanne sequinned dress. The two of them together — a farm animal and a frock rendered in metal — tell you most of what you need to know about Birmingham, which has never been shy about scale and doesn't especially care whether it all matches.

This is the country's second city, and it wears the title lightly. You come here to eat, mainly. Birmingham has twelve restaurants in the 2026 Michelin Guide, more than any UK city outside London, and it also invented the balti, and it keeps a Cantonese restaurant that runs sixty-five kinds of dim sum. A guest staying a few nights can bracket the whole range in a single day if they pace themselves.

Where you base yourself matters more than in most cities, because the character changes street by street. The Jewellery Quarter is the one to want. It sits a ten- or fifteen-minute walk from the centre, or one tram stop, and it is low-rise and red-brick and built to human proportions, which the rest of the centre is not. It is also still a working jewellery district. The Birmingham Assay Office is here, founded by Act of Parliament in 1773 after the industrialist Matthew Boulton lobbied for it, and it is now the busiest assay office in the world, hallmarking around twelve million items a year. You can walk past the place that stamps the gold and then get dinner two streets over.

Dinner in the Quarter is a good problem to have. 1000 Trades does seasonal British and is one of the most loved rooms in the area. The Button Factory has a rooftop terrace, Trentina is an independent Italian deli and kitchen making its own pasta, and the Indian Brewery pairs its own craft beer with Indian street food, which is a combination the city takes as read. Saint Paul's House pours cocktails over St Paul's Square. If you want the full production, The Wilderness is here too — chef Alex Claridge won it a first Michelin star in February 2026. For a quieter pint there is The Queens Arms, which has been serving ale since 1878, and The Jewellers Arms, which started life in the 1830s or 40s as the Goldsmiths and Jewellers Arms and eventually gave up half its name.

Creative Quarters, Heavy Metal and Canals

Digbeth is the other end of the register. It is the creative quarter and, reportedly, the oldest settlement in the city, going back to the seventh century, which is a lot of history for somewhere now defined by street art and indie bars. The centrepiece is the Custard Factory, the former works of Alfred Bird's custard empire, now studios and venues: Baked in Brick does pizza, NQ64 is a retro arcade bar, Golf Fang is crazy golf, and Chance & Counters is a boardgame café. The Digbeth Dining Club runs Thursday to Sunday as a permanent street-food venue with rotating vendors — burgers, noodles, kebabs, tacos — plus bars and live music. Kilder, on Shaw's Passage, does British charcuterie and cheese with craft beer; Passing Fancies placed third in the UK's top fifty cocktail bars in 2024; and Alfred Works is a food hall. The name Peaky Blinders is believed to have started at the Rainbow pub down here, though we'll come back to that, because almost none of the television series was actually filmed in the city.

For the canalside version of a night out, Brindleyplace and Broad Street cover it. This is the 1990s regeneration — tree-lined squares, waterside terraces, mostly mainstream and chain dining, Cosy Club and Bank and the Box sports bar and a canalside All Bar One. The Ikon Gallery sits on Oozells Square, free contemporary art in a neo-gothic former school. Broad Street is the nightlife strip, with a pavement Walk of Stars honouring Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and the comedian Jasper Carrott, and in 2019 the canal bridge here was renamed Black Sabbath Bridge, which is a thing a city does when it is quietly certain it invented heavy metal.

It did, as it happens. Black Sabbath were all Birmingham boys who grew up in the city and worked its factories — Ozzy Osbourne's childhood home was 14 Lodge Road in Aston. Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in a sheet-metal press, and the loose, down-tuned, power-chord sound came partly out of that injury. UB40, Duran Duran and Judas Priest are all from here too. The Crown on Station Street, where Sabbath played early gigs, is Grade II listed and gets called the cradle of heavy metal.

From Michelin Stars to Balti and Dim Sum

The canals are the thing everyone mentions and the claim is true, if you read it carefully. Birmingham has more miles of canal than Venice — the Canal & River Trust checked, and it comes out at about 35.7 miles here against Venice's 30.7. The inner network runs to around thirty-five miles; the full Birmingham Canal Navigations reach roughly a hundred, and at the industrial peak the whole thing exceeded a hundred and sixty. The first canal opened in 1768. The place to see it is Gas Street Basin, where the Worcester & Birmingham meets the older Birmingham Canal Navigations, now lined with bars and restaurants along the water.

If the Michelin count is why you came, Opheem is the top of it — two stars, chef Aktar Islam doing progressive Indian, the only two-star kitchen in the city. The signature is an achaari Pink Fir potato with mango and tamarind, a reworked Delhi aloo tuk that gets water-bathed, grilled, deep-fried and turned into foam, which is more engineering than most potatoes receive. There is lamb raan and a seafood rasam too. Adam's, on Waterloo Street, holds one star for Adam Stokes's refined modern British — halibut with sea vegetables and oregano, salt-marsh lamb with wild-garlic purée and a morel stuffed with duck-liver mousse. Simpsons is another one star, set in an Edwardian villa in Edgbaston, known for tapenade bread rolls, soufflés, and pairings that shouldn't work on paper: banana and foie gras, beef with snails and haggis.

The balti is the other pilgrimage, and it points south of the centre to the Balti Triangle, spread across Sparkbrook, Sparkhill and Balsall Heath along Ladypool Road, Stoney Lane and Stratford Road. The dish was invented here. Adil's on Stoney Lane, founded in 1977, calls itself the home of balti cuisine, and its owner Mohammed Arif says he brought the idea from Kashmir — spices cooked in vegetable oil rather than ghee, boneless meat, served fast in a pressed-steel bowl and eaten with naan and no cutlery. The Triangle held thirty-plus balti houses in its 1990s heyday and now runs to a handful. Shababs has been a mainstay since 1987 and grown from twenty-two covers to a hundred and twenty-two, bring your own booze. Shahi Nan Kabab has served balti since 1984; its chef, Azhar Mahmood, once cooked for the Pakistani navy.

Parks, Tolkien and Civic Landmarks

Then there is dim sum in the Chinese Quarter, in Southside, which also takes in Theatreland and the Gay Village. Chung Ying Cantonese at 16–18 Wrottesley Street is the city's oldest Cantonese restaurant, established in 1981 by the Wong family and still Wong-run, with the largest dim sum selection in the UK — more than sixty-five dishes, from siu mai to char siu buns. Wing Wah, pagoda-style, moved into Chinatown in 2019. People drive in from across the Midlands for it.

For all the eating, the city is greener than its reputation allows — 591 parks and open spaces across more than 3,500 hectares, more than any equivalent-sized European city. Sutton Park runs to 2,400 acres and is the largest urban nature reserve in Europe, a National Nature Reserve with seven lakes, heath, woodland, wild ponies and muntjac deer. Cannon Hill Park in Edgbaston is the family pick, 250 acres with a boating lake, funfair, mini golf and land train, next door to the MAC arts centre. Winterbourne House keeps a rare Arts-and-Crafts villa garden of seven acres, built in 1903–04 for the Nettlefold family. And out at Hall Green, Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog are a working watermill and a patch of ancient woodland that happen to be Tolkien childhood haunts — he grew up in Sarehole from 1896 to 1900, within three hundred yards of the mill, and called those the happiest years of his youth. Sarehole became Hobbiton and the Shire; Moseley Bog fed the Old Forest. Two Edgbaston towers, Perrott's Folly and the Edgbaston Waterworks tower, are the models usually cited for the Two Towers of Gondor.

The markets are older than any of it. Birmingham's has run since a royal charter granted to Peter de Birmingham in 1154 — the Corn Cheaping — and the Bull Ring name probably comes from bull-baiting, dogs set on a tethered bull, popular from around 1200. The Bullring Rag Market on Edgbaston Street is a vast indoor hall of some 350 stalls selling fabric, haberdashery, textiles and household goods, and it sits right beside the shiny 2003 shopping centre, which is a fair summary of how the city holds its past and present in the same eyeline.

Connections, Day Trips and Dry Bournville

The architecture rewards a slow walk. Symphony Hall opened in 1991 with the CBSO under a young Simon Rattle and gets called an acoustic triumph by the Sunday Times and the best concert hall in the country by the Telegraph; it has a raise-and-lower canopy and a reverberation chamber that adds fifty per cent to the hall's volume when its giant doors open. St Philip's Cathedral on Colmore Row is a compact Baroque church of 1715 holding four monumental Pre-Raphaelite windows by Edward Burne-Jones, made by Morris & Co. between 1885 and 1897 — the Last Judgement, his masterpiece, was installed the year he died. The Library of Birmingham on Centenary Square is the largest public library in the UK, free, with a Secret Garden roof terrace and city views.

Getting here and out is straightforward. New Street sits directly beneath the Grand Central shopping centre and runs to London Euston in about an hour and twenty; Snow Hill and Moor Street handle Chiltern and local routes, Moor Street being the atmospheric restored one, handy for the Bullring. The Metro trams run from Grand Central out to Wolverhampton, and the airport is around eight miles east. For day trips, the Black Country Living Museum at Dudley is twelve miles off — twenty-six acres of cobbled streets and canal docks, and the principal place where Peaky Blinders was actually shot. Stratford-upon-Avon is twenty-five miles south, the Cotswolds are down the M40, and Ironbridge Gorge, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is about thirty-five.

One more thing to know before you plan a big night: Bournville, George Cadbury's Quaker model village built to lift workers out of the city's cramped back-to-backs, is dry. No alcohol has been sold within the historic estate since it was laid out in the 1890s, and none is sold there today. You can tour Cadbury World and eat all the chocolate you like. You just can't get a pint to go with it.