The way out of Birmingham is dismal and unpromising, by way of Livery Street and Great Hampton Street. At the end of that thoroughfare—formerly known as Hangman’s Lane—Birmingham is left behind; but some seventeen miles of continuous streets, ill-paved and hilly, and infested with tramways, yet lie before the pilgrim.

Livery Street, so-called (at a hazard) because its granite setts jolt so unmercifully the cyclist who is rash enough to ride along it, gives an outlook on to close-packed, mean, and frowsy little courts and thoroughfares with grotesquely commonplace or absurd names—among them “Mary Ann Street.” Here and along Great Hampton Street, where the smuts from Snow Hill Station and those from adjacent factories now fall thickest, the Birmingham of little more than a century ago ended, and gave place to the open heath of Soho, enclosed only in 1793. “At the second milestone,” says an old Birmingham guide-book, “on the left, when you have passed through the turnpike, is Soho Factory, a magnificent pile of buildings”; but that great workshop of Boulton and Watt has long since disappeared and the turnpike itself forgot; while Soho Heath is covered, far and near, with streets of a terribly monotonous kind—as like one another as the peas in a pea-pod. The only landmarks and bright spots are public-houses. Not inns for travellers, but gin-palaces for boozers, where plate-glass, gas-lamps the size of balloons, and florid architecture give the inhabitants of these wilds their only idea of style and distinction, and that a mistaken one. All else is dull and grey. Such are Hockley and Soho, and such is Handsworth.

Between those two last Warwickshire is left behind, and Staffordshire entered—“Staffordshire ful of Queenys,” as an old writer has it. What he meant by that, no commentator appears yet to have explained, but it sounds complimentary.

The “elegant village” of Handsworth, as it is called by the author of that old guide-book already quoted, was built over the great surrounding commons, enclosed in 1798. That extraordinary person seems to look upon this enclosing and filching of public property as virtuous and altogether praiseworthy, and talks with unctuous satisfaction of “at least 150 respectable houses erected on land which lay formerly entirely waste. Plots of land”—he continues, with greasy delight—“have been sold from £200 to £1,000 an acre.”

He tells the same tale of the waste lands of West Bromwich, enclosed in 1801, and realising similar sums. These long thoroughfares, therefore, are nearly all built upon stolen property, and the rents of the houses should by right go into municipal or imperial coffers, instead of private pockets.

West Bromwich, the greater part of whose site was a rabbit-warren so late as 1800, is a continuation of this weary street. Here, perhaps, it was that Mr. Bull, “an eminent tea merchant,” while journeying on horseback from Wolverhampton to London in October, 1742, was overtaken by “a single Man on Horseback, whom he took for a Gentleman. After they had rode three or four miles,” the account continues, “the highwayman then ordered him to deliver, which Mr. Bull took to be in Jest; but he told him that he was in Earnest, and accordingly robb’d him of about four Guineas and his Watch, and afterwards rode with him three miles, till they came near a Town, when the Highwayman rode off.”

West Bromwich is now a busy ironworking town, with newly opened collieries and a population of 90,000. Just as the cuttle-fish obscures its surroundings by exuding an inky fluid, so do West Bromwich and Dudley, away to the left, belch forth clouds of smoke, and between them till the sky with a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. The road, running as it does at a considerable height, commands a good view of the clustered towns and districts of the Black Country, with the sullen-looking canals, collieries, blast-furnaces, and a hundred other kinds of the commercial enterprises of this wonderful hive of industry. Dudley, with its ancient castle on a hill-top, wreathed in inky fumes, and Dudley Port down below, with rows of brick and tile works spouting smoke so black and dense as to look almost solid, form the centre; with Tipton, Oldbury, Priestfield, and Swan Village as satellites offering their contributions to the general stock of grime and obscurity. At night all this is changed, and the chimneys that in daylight seemed only to smoke all become tipped with tongues of fire, casting a lurid glow upon earth and sky. Turner has left, in his weird picture of Dudley, a characteristic view of Black Country scenery; and Dickens, in the morbid pages of the Old Curiosity Shop, has described its darker and more repellent side. It is a country where every effort of Nature to put forth leaves and grass is thwarted. Land not built upon has been ransacked for mineral wealth and turned inside out, with the result that on the shale and debris only the scantiest and most innutritious of weeds can find a livelihood—and weeds commonly thrive where nothing else can exist.