Welcome to the West Midlands

Welcome to Spaghetti Gazetti, an online magazine about the heritage, culture, arts, community, enterprise, environment and history of the West Midlands region.

The West Midlands is one of English regions and includes:

Birmingham
Coventry
Dudley
Sandwell
Solihull
Stoke-on-Trent
Telford & Wrekin
Walsall
Wolverhampton

Herefordshire
Shropshire
Staffordshire
Warwickshire
Worcestershire

The population of the West Midlands is around 5 million. The region has a fascinating mix of urban and rural communities and landscapes. It is the most culturally diverse area of Great Britain outside of the cosmopolitan capital city of London. The region's human history dates back to Iron Age and Roman times and later the area was at the centre of the industrial revolution with innovations such as iron forging in Shropshire and the development of the steam engine by James Watt in Birmingham and Smethwick.

The region's internationally celebrated writers and musicians of the past included William Shakespeare, Edward Elgar and JRR Tolkien. The region has also made a huge contribution to rock music producing world famous groups such as The Moody Blues, ELO, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. The region has also led the way in developing new cultural initiatives such as the Two Tone ska revival, UK based urban R&B and Rap music, British Banghra music and dance and the popular style of Balti cooking which has now been exported all over the globe.

The popoular local history writer Carl Chinn points to the fact that unlike other great cities of the world, our region's capital Birmingham has no great rivers, it is not a port and it was not built on a defensively strategic site. Instead, the area's great assets have been the skill base of our people. Birmingham developed during the last 1000 years out of a market town next to a small river, because people came here firstly from the surrounding rural shire counties seeking employment, then from the other countries of the British Isles (primarily Wales and Ireland), then from the nations of Europe and the Commonwealth and more recently from nations all over the globe.

People were drawn to our region because of the diversity of trade and industry, because of the religious freedom here for non-conformist religious traditions, because of the liberal and free thinking political attitudes of the people here, because of the minimal presence of a ruling upper class or capitalist elite and because of the diversity of communities and opportunty. This is why, in times of world recession, we have complete confidence that the people of our region will once again dream up ingenious new ways of providing goods and services to the rest of the world, we will once again make something out of nothing, just like the two figures in the Birmingham coat of arms, artistic and intellectual creativity will combine with technical skill and scientific innovation to regenerate the world's economy and inspire the world community.

Forward!