History of West Midlands - Definition and Overview

Most of the area now covered by the West Midlands was historically covered by other counties. Birmingham and Coventry were traditionally in Warwickshire; Wolverhampton and most of the Black Country were in Staffordshire and some of the Black Country was in Worcestershire.

The idea for a county encompassing the conurbation surrounding Birmingham was first put foreward by the Redcliffe-Maud Report in the late 1960s. In the original plans it would have been called a metropolitan area rather than a county and would have had radically different borders to the present West Midlands: the original plans excluded Coventry but included the Wyre Forest, Bromsgrove, Redditch, Tamworth, Lichfield, South Staffordshire, Cannock Chase and the area around Stafford.

In the event the Conservative government of Edward Heath was elected in 1970 and the original plans for local government reform were radically altered. The West Midlands county which eventually emerged in the Local Government Act of 1972 was much smaller than in the original plans, with the boundaries much more tightly drawn around the urban area surrounding Birmingham and the Black Country, but controversially it included Coventry. The county came into being in 1974.

The inclusion of Coventry into the new county was at the time highly controversial, as many people felt that Coventry had more in common with the Warwickshire area then with the Birmingham conurbation. To this day there have been calls for Coventry to be re-united with Warwickshire which to some extent have been heeded with the creation of a Coventry and Warwickshire NHS trust and a C&W chamber of commerce.

See also

• History of England