Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British-themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post.
Last week, we had a book review and a couple of travel posts, including one by Jackie with photos from inside the Tower Bridge in London. After looking at those, my husband is very excited to see those big engines!
During our upcoming trip to England, we’re going to spend a week in Birmingham. Most travel planners would consider that insane, but I promised Rick a trip centered around the Industrial Revolution and Birmingham was in the center of the Industrial Revolution in England. Besides, it turns out that the nicest hotel rooms in Birmingham are about the same price as middling hotels in London. I’m considering a studio apartment at the Rotunda, which will save us some money on food.
Steam engine moving water at ThinkTank in Birmingham, UK
The attraction we’re most excited about visiting in Birmingham is ThinkTank, the museum of science and industry. Among other exhibits, they have the oldest working steam engine in the world.
Then, we’ll do a bunch of day trips. Almost everything we want to see is near a train station, but we’ll have to rent a car or hire a car and driver in order to see the Ironbridge World Heritage Site.
Here’s our current list of day trips from Birmingham:
Severn Valley Railway. We’ll ride a train driven by a steam locomotive with a stop to visit a train museum.
Ironbridge. The world’s first cast-iron bridge and related attractions.
Black Country Living Museum. An open-air museum recreating the world’s first industrial landscape.
Gloucester Waterways. A boat ride on canals and exhibits about the canals in Great Britain.
Buildings at Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park. Using the science and technology from a century after the Industrial Revolution, women and men worked here to break the code used by Nazi Germany during World War II.
I put these and some other possible day trips from Birmingham on a Pinterest board with a map.
Have you been to Birmingham or the Midlands region of England? What did you see?
