WEST MIDLANDS (COUNTY) - Geography and history
The West Midlands metropolitan county area is at the centre of the West Midlands region. It is one of the smallest counties in area in the United Kingdom, covering an area of 900 km2, but is the centre of the largest concentration of population in the country outside of London. The vast majority of the county's population (2.6 million in 2002) live in the West Midlands conurbation based on Birmingham. The other centre of population is Coventry, a city of around 300,000 people in the far east of the county.
Lying in the geographical centre of the country, the county is at the heart of the national motorway network. Routes converging on Birmingham are the M6, the principal road route from the Midlands to the Northwest, the M5 running from Birmingham to south Wales and the Southwest, and the M40 from Birmingham to London. Motorways also run east to link with the East Midlands and to connect with the M1 motorway, which runs from London to the northeast. Electric railway services run south to London and north to Glasgow, while other express routes link the West Midlands with the east coast and the Southwest. The region's major international airport, located to the south of Birmingham, is the fifth largest in Britain in terms of the numbers of passengers carried.
Manufacturing in decline
The West Midlands has been a centre for the production of iron since before the eighteenth century and consequently the region expanded into engineering and manufacturing at an early stage. Latterly, the predominance of these industries, particularly metal manufacturing and engineering, allowed the area to specialize in particular products such as weighing machines, locks and guns. In 2001, 19 per cent of those in employment worked in the manufacturing industries, with metals and vehicle engineering, component supply and electrical engineering being important. Employment in manufacturing has however been declining for some decades and this has led to unemployment in some areas. The location of the county at the centre of the West Midlands region and at the hub of the country's communications networks is potentially a significant asset, and efforts have been made to attract industry to the area. The National Exhibition Centre to the south of Birmingham is an example of this.
Densely populated, but numbers are falling
The overall population density of the county was of 2,900 inhabitants per km2, one of the highest in the United Kingdom. None of the districts of the West Midlands has a population of less than 200,000 and the district of Birmingham has the largest population of any local authority district in the United Kingdom, nearly one million persons, in 2002, in an area of 270 km2. Solihull is the least densely settled, with Birmingham and Wolverhampton both over three times as densely populated, but it still had over 1 100 people per km2 in 2002. In line with the pattern for urban areas throughout the United Kingdom, the population of the West Midlands has been falling in recent decades (down 3.7 per cent since 1982), largely to new towns and smaller centres in the adjacent counties of Warwickshire, Hereford and Worcestershire, and Shropshire. Only Solihull and Dudley increased in population size over this period.
The importance of the production industries to the districts of the West Midlands varies, from employing over a third of the work force in Walsall to the north in 2001, to just under a quarter in Birmingham in the south. Consequently, the service industry sector is the smallest in Walsall, and the largest in Birmingham amounting to almost three-quarters of the work force. The concentration of services in the major towns is however less marked in the West Midlands than in other regional centres of Britain, due at least in part to the preponderance of engineering throughout the county.
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