Birmingham claims more miles of canal than Venice, a boast that is almost certainly true and that tells you something about the city. It grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a place that made things, buttons, guns, jewellery, steam engines, and the canals were the lanes that carried the raw metal in and the finished goods out. The thinkers of the Lunar Society, among them Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Joseph Priestley, met here at full moon so they could walk home by its light, and their dinner conversations helped shape the age of industry.
With nearly a million people, Birmingham is the second city of England and it feels like it: large, fast, a little rough, and full of surprises. The old canal basins around Brindleyplace have been turned into cafés and restaurants, the Jewellery Quarter still has working goldsmiths, and the Bull Ring market, which dates back to the twelfth century, has been rebuilt in aluminium discs and glass. Cadbury's model village at Bournville, just south, remains one of the more civilised experiments in industrial housing, and the Balti houses of Sparkhill and Sparkbrook have made the city a destination for curry.
Riding out of Birmingham is an exercise in patience and map reading. The ring roads and flyovers are dense and unforgiving, and the spaghetti of the Gravelly Hill interchange, a tangle of ramps built in 1972, is famous even to people who have never driven in England. Use the smaller roads and avoid the rush hour if you can. Once you reach the edges, the landscape opens, with Shropshire hills to the west for the Ironbridge Gorge ride and the Peak District to the north-east for the Derwent Valley mills.
Fuel is on every corner, and parking is best done at an out-of-centre garage. The city is cooler and wetter than you might expect, so carry a waterproof. After dark, the canal lights and restaurants make for a lively evening, and the city does not feel in the least bit asleep.