Historical Buildings in Birmingham: Terracotta, Brick and Iron, by Era

Birmingham's historic buildings are not what a visitor expecting a cathedral city will look for, and the reason is straightforward. The place expanded hardest in the Victorian period and rebuilt itself repeatedly afterwards, so its best older work is industrial, civic and commercial and not either ecclesiastical or defensive in character.

The distinctive material is terracotta. Moulded red clay could be produced locally in quantity, cost far less than carved stone and stood up to industrial soot considerably better, so the late-Victorian civic centre went up in a deep red of a kind that few other British cities are able to show.

Corporation Street carries the most emphatic examples, where the Victoria Law Courts present a facade of banded red mouldings, deep window arches and carved foliage panels.

It is worth looking up rather than along, because almost all of the invention on these particular buildings sits well above the level of the shopfronts.

That habit of decorating the upper storeys is general across the centre. At street level much has been altered or replaced over a century of retail, while three floors up the original moulding, turrets and gable detail frequently survive intact and go entirely unnoticed by almost everybody passing in the street below.

Little medieval fabric remains, which tells you something about how thoroughly the city remade itself. Aston Hall, built between 1618 and 1635 and standing in its own park north of the centre, is the substantial early survivor within easy reach of the city centre, and it now runs as a museum.

In the centre proper, St Philip's on Colmore Row is the oldest significant building, a small baroque cathedral in its own churchyard.

It holds four Burne-Jones stained glass windows made for the building itself, which is a considerable thing to come across inside a working city-centre church of that size.

Two buildings cover this better than any gallery could. The Back to Backs on Hurst Street is the city's last surviving court of back-to-back housing, shown by timed guided tour through four homes each of them furnished for a different decade of that particular court's long recorded history of occupation.

The other is Rowton House at 145 Alcester Street in Highgate, a Grade II listed block opened in 1903.

It gave working men a private cubicle for sixpence a night in place of a dormitory bed, with a tailor, a barber and a shoemaker all of them working on the premises.

For sheer concentration of surviving fabric the Jewellery Quarter has no rival in the city, because it was never comprehensively redeveloped. Its streets of three-storey brick workshops with large upper windows survive in numbers, built for daylight to work precious metal by and not for any kind of outward appearance.

What separates it from a conservation area is that the trade is still there.

A district that works for a living wears differently from one that has been preserved, and the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, a workshop left untouched since 1981, sits right in the middle of that district.