The lesson to be learned from the Lunar Men is that they did not wait for grants from central Government or the European Union or for some huge corporation to move in and take things in hand but that they drove innovation from their own passion and inquisitiveness about how the world worked, or could work. If Birmingham and cities like it, not just in England but around the world, are to become engines of innovation once again then they need to take a step change in how they go about doing that. Our ambition is to be one of the biggest, most successful cities in the world once more.” “Birmingham was once a world leader due to our innovations in manufacturing, and the city is finally experiencing a renaissance. Likewise Andy Street, Managing Director of John Lewis and Chair of the Greater Birmingham & Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership had this to say about Birmingham in his University of Birmingham Business School Advisory Board guest lecture last year: I am trying to start a “Make it in Birmingham” campaign, to get high-tech industries – film, animation, virtual reality, gaming – all into one place, a place where people make things, which is what Birmingham has always been.” “It’s typical of Brum that the modern world was invented in Handsworth and nobody knows about it. In a recent interview in the Guardian Knight says: This is something that was neatly summed up by Steven Knight, creator of the BBC television programme Peaky Blinders set in the lawless backstreets of Birmingham in the 1920’s.
It’s now sometimes hard to believe that these great cities were the powerhouses and engines of the industrial revolution that changed not just England but the whole world. You don’t have to live in the UK to have heard that Birmingham, like many of the other great manufacturing cities of the Midlands and Northern England has somewhat lost its way over the century or so since the Lunar Men were creating their “objects of beauty and poetry of bizarre allure”.
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Yet their powerhouse of invention is not made up of aristocrats or statesmen or scholars but of provincial manufacturers, professional men and gifted amateurs – friends who meet almost by accident and whose lives overlap until they die.” They create objects of beauty and poetry of bizarre allure. They discover new gases, new minerals and new medicines and propose unsettling new ideas. “Amid fields and hills, the Lunar men build factories, plan canals, make steam-engines thunder. The history of the Lunar Society and the people involved has been captured in the book The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow. The three figures in it: Matthew Boulton, James Watt and William Murdoch were the tech pioneers of their day, living in and around Birmingham and being associated with a loosely knit group who referred to themselves as The Lunar Society. The above photograph is of a statue in Centenary Square, Birmingham in the UK.
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