101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 11 New Zealand

For most of living memory New Zealand was simply a fictional village which was used to rehouse spent characters from Neighbours. In Neighbours – and by extension all popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s – a trip to New Zealand was equivalent to the Eastenders trope of “going up West”: something other and exotic, but never seen.

All this was set to change when popular Birmingham pointy sword franchise The Lord of the Rings went to those sleepy antipodean islands in 2001. So popular was the film series that it single handedly regenerated New Zealand, taking this abstract idea of a place and fixing it in the minds of a generation of gap year students: a backpacking destination was born.

Before Birmingham’s intervention, the biggest cultural event to happen to New Zealand was the arrival of community radio DJ Henry Mitchell from Erinsborough. No Birmingham, no New Zealand. Imagine what David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy could do for Samoa.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 10. Breakdancing

The dying fly !

Okay, so James Brown got down and Afrika Bambaataa saw b-boy and the freak as a way to change the World with his Zulu Nation. But that was back in the seventies and was that really likely ever to cross-over?

Okay, yes, so the Rock Steady Crew were busting up the East Coast (not Lowestoft) in the eary 80’s but were they ever more than one-hit wonders?

No, what really made sure that street dance hit the mainstream and is still there thirty years later—battling with comic opera singers and amusing dogs on Saturday night telly—was the crew from Studio 3 of ATV on Broad Street. First introduced by Jasper Carrot, the b-boy stylings of lying on your back waving your arms and legs in the air was what really make breakdancing what it is today. So ingrained into British culture was ‘the dying fly’ that the dance at one point soared high in the RoSPA list of common causes of household injury.

Without Tiswas, no breakdancing. Without Birmingham, no Tiswas.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 9. Handwriting

Do you do little loops at the bottom of your y’s, do you draw little hearts over the top of your i’s? Do you, when actually pressed to use a pen at all after years of typing and texting, get all flummoxed and end up using block capitals so at least people have a fighting chance of understanding you? Well, you’ll never guess, Birmingham is responsible for that.

Y’see back in the 19th century people used quills for writing, it was a splodgy, blotty, ink-stained business. You had to be skilled and neat, you couldn’t develop your own style very much. But then John Mitchell. down in Newall Street, pioneered mass production of steel pens and suddenly writing just became a bit easier.

Soon thousands of people and dozens of companies were using Birmingham to make pens of different sizes and quality and the city gave easy communication to the world. And that lasted until a few years ago, because loads of us just don’t pick up a pen very often any more—and even the prime minister uses text speak. LOL.

Lots of love.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 8. HP Sauce

It’s made in Holland and named after a London landmark, so of course HP Sauce is the Brummiest thing going. It’s “the best known brown sauce in the United Kingdom” and slavered across sausages the length of the land, despite “brown sauce” sounding more like a euphemism for, well, shit.

If that’s not enough of a sauce based double-entendre for you,  HP Sauce became known as “Wilson’s gravy” in the 1960s and 1970s after Harold Wilson’s wife revealed he “covered everything” with it. Lucky old Mrs Wilson.

What gives it it’s unique taste is tamarind, and when the Midlands Vinegar Company launched the sauce back at the turn of the last century it was in Aston. The vinegar was made on one side of the A38 and piped over the road—you couldn’t get much more Brummie unless the tamarind pods were trod by Rustie Lee.

And then Heinz bought it and buggered off to the Netherlands, which to be fair sounds like a place brown sauce comes out of.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 7. Fannying About On A Yacht

When you pick up Hello! or flick to the most exploitative pages in the tabloids what are you likely to see? One may have upskirt pics of vulnerable young actresses, one may have charming stories where you get to see just what the kitchen looks like in the house Sienna Miller has hired for a photoshoot. But both with have long lens pics of celebrities fannying about on a yacht.

Yes, whether they’re oligarchs, sportspeople, singers or simply government ministers enjoying the free hospitality all famous people like to lay back on deck and sup cocktails. But back in the olden days, messing around in boats was done in the mode of people from Walsall like Jerome K Jerome; you had to row your-bloody-self, what good was that? The Black Country is rubbish.

But in 1982, thankfully, Birmingham took the lead and the Taylors, Rhodes-y and sweet little tubby Simon Le Bon showed everyone how it was done in the video to ‘Rio’. No-one quite set the template for looking rich on a boat like the Durannies, and I’m sure it was their time spent in Saramoons that done it.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 6. Dance Music

Since disco, all real pop music has been in thrall to the dancefloor and the beats are never more to the floor than when they are sampled. Synthesisers don’t cut it—unless you’re doing the Sparky’s Magic Piano bit on Mr Blue Sky—you need samples.

With samples you can force the four to the floor, you can get the big beat started, let them know what the fatboy’s trippin’ and at least n-n-n-n-n-n-n-nineteen other things.

But the first way to do this was with a sampler-keyboard that used tape strips: the Mellotron. And that was developed by Frank, Norm and Lesley Bradley of Bradmatic Ltd. In Aston. In Birmingham.

And it also gave the world prog rock, for which we are very sorry.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 5. Comic Sans

Font family, and hatred magnet, Comic Sans MS was created by Microsoft’s Vincent Connare to be the textual voice of a cartoon dog called Bob who would in some way help people use computers. It looks friendly and soon became the Australian Question Intonation of typefaces: that is, used when the message is passive aggressive or just plain irritating in an effort to soften the blow.

Ignorant desktop publishers combined it with clip-art and Word Art to promote their workshops and sell their unwanted IKEA furniture on workplace noticeboards across the world and wound hipsters up something rotten in the process. Which, for a typeface, is something to be proud of.

But it, and easily set legible fontage in general, would never have been possible without Birmingham’s John Baskerville. The designer, free-thinker, and atheist, produced the first real usable typeface and started a real publishing revolution. Democracy in action, but it doesn’t please everyone.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 4. Hollywood

No, not Hollywood up by the Maypole. The real one of blockbusters and stars rather than Blockbuster, Poundland and burnt-out cars. Because without a certain city not very far away you’d not be watching George Clooney gurn with his chest out, nor would you be able to grin through gritted teeth at the antics of those Fourty Year Old Hangover chaps with the comedy.

We’d have missed the stars and the studio system, had to put up with only On The Buses between Ealing and Love…Actually. Or watched things with subtitles, confused as to exactly what all of the smoking men were mumbling about.

Because, movies are made of film, and film is made of celluloid. Which was a revolutionary new type of thing called a thermoplastic , first created as Parkesine in 1862 by Alexander Parkes in, yes you’ve guessed it, Birmingham.

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 3. The Football League

Football has had a long and evolutionary history taking in local rivalries, struggle with authority, class warfare and co-optation, and paganism; but enough of St Andrews. Everything we know about football today originated on the other side of the city: from fixture congestion, to dead rubbers, from runaway leaders to mid-table obscurity, cynicism and playing for the draw.

All because the Villa’s lushly bearded William McGregor was fed up with cup ties and friendlies and knocked football-admin heads together from around the country and instigated the Football League. So we not only have him to thank for the spread of the sport across the week and the country, but also for professionalism. For without regular games there was no way to build crowds and make money. So Birmingham created and at once ruined the modern game. It created John Terry.

And in reality created Port Vale verses Yeovil on a wet Tuesday night in November, not quite what he intended when he wrote: “clubs are compelled to take on teams who will not attract the public.”

101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No 2. Nuclear War

Schoolchildren in the 1950s and ‘60s spent as much time learning how to Duck and Cover in the event of a nuclear missile attack as they ever did about algebra and home economics. They grew up in a perpetual and very real fear that the Cold War would one day escalate into a mind-boggling violence that would be played out on a global scale. Their own kids fared no better, exposed as they were to a seemingly out-of-control 1980s arms race that was, such was the fascination of the time, to be apparently conducted in outer-fucking-space.

These fears were constantly backed up with footage and accounts of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan by Allied Forces at the end of World War II, on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with powerful (childrens!) fiction such as Raymond Briggs’ “When The Wind Blows”, and the still-terrifying-but not-for-kids BBC drama, “Threads”.

Two generations of children, then, had a very clear understanding of how the world would eventually and inevitably end. It would end in a rain of fire, where dying instantly within the 1-mile blast zone was infinitely preferable to surviving the explosion and then waiting for the sweet release of choking one’s last breath, some weeks later, if you were very lucky, in a refugee camp riddled with the radiation pox and human shit.

None of this death, destruction, fear and creeping terror would have ever been possible without the city of Birmingham.

In the early 1940s, at the city’s University, Rudolph Peierls and Otto Robert Frisch developed a technique whereby Uranium Bombs could be constructed with a critical mass of only 6 kg, which made them a viable airborne threat. This development lead directly to the creation of those deadly missiles dropped on Japan and to 40 years of enduring panic.