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History of the Tame: The Industrial Revolution
The industrial revolution was the time when Birmingham, and the River Tame, came into its own. In the 16th Century iron was becoming an important thing to trade. The Black Country and surrounding areas were rich in iron ore and there were improvements in iron smelting techniques.
To make iron from iron ore you have to heat the rock to a high temperature and melt it. People used burning charcoal for this, made from wood. As the trade expanded more and more woodland was cleared for charcoal and manufacture moved in search of new timber. Bloomeries, forges and iron manufactories spread down the Tame Valley to Perry woods, Handsworth, Holbrook, Bromford and Aston. Charcoal was becoming expensive and rarer as the land was all cleared.
Then in 1709 Abraham Darby worked out how to smelt iron using coke (coal that has had the smoke-producing and sulphur compounds removed, and had been until then used for roasting malt for beer) and built the world's first 'coal-fired' blast furnace at Coalbrookdale. Until that time, blast-furnaces had been fired by wood or charcoal, which was becoming scarce and therefore expensive. Using a coal-derived fuel instead meant that Black Country iron-making could really take off. Birmingham had an established market and this became the trade centre.
Before this most manufacturing had been little cottage industries. Now the first factories started to be built. In Birmingham these were button factories on Hockley Brook at Soho and in Dale End. Early factories were powered by water and employed tens of people rather than hundreds.
The new iron meant that lots of things were easier and this was part of what sparked off the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly tools and machinery could be made cheaply and reliably. Watt's steam engine was built in Birmingham and began to revolutionize transport, mining and manufacturing. Coal-power meant that factories could get much bigger. The money and expertise with metals meant that Birmingham also became a centre for jewellery.
There was now loads of money and work around and Birmingham grew hectically. Between 1723 and 1815 the population of the city got eight times larger, from 12,000 to 100,000. This wasn't good news for the Tame, of course. The river now became polluted with raw sewage and industrial waste. The banks of the river were built over. The river was culverted in many places.
They may not have been looking after the river but it was important, as water was a vital form of transport. Many other major cities are ports or on big rivers - giving them good transport. Birmingham is completely landlocked and the Tame and it's tributaries weren't very large and only flowed into the Trent (not handy for goods going South). But the city was in the middle of the country.
In the 1760s the first canals were being built and the canny newly-rich merchants of Birmingham spotted their potential. From the 1770s onwards they built several canals around Birmingham, connecting with the major rivers and other canals. The canal system was like the motorway of its time and soon Birmingham was at the hub of the network.
By 1850 or so Birmingham had become the second biggest population centre in Britain. And it was such a centre for manufacturing of all kinds that it became known as "the city of a thousand trades". Birmingham became very prosperous thanks to good trade and transport, the massive increase in population, the money around for investment and the expertise and energy of it's people.
The River Tame had helped with this initially - supplying water, transporting goods, powering mills, but then was exploited and forgotten. The massive growth put too much stress on the river. Major pollution incidents in the 1860s and 1870s destroyed fisheries in the river and by 1945 the river was so polluted it couldn't sustain any life at all.
Sophia Collins
