But the days of the old hotels, exclusive or otherwise, were in sight when the railway came. Another sort replaced them, and, although the kind in its turn has gone out of favour, examples may yet be found. Who does not know the typical hotel of, say, the Fifties and the Sixties, that abominably draughty type of building, all cold would-be magnificence and interminable flights of stairs, with lofty rooms, apparently built for a Titanic race fifteen feet in height, and, by consequence, never warm, and never with an air of being fully furnished. That such as these should ever have replaced the cosy old houses can only be explained on the score of fashion, for there are illogical and senseless fashions in architecture, as in everything else.

The railway era commenced in Birmingham with the opening of the Grand Junction and the London and Birmingham Railways in 1837 and 1838. The early railway engines and carriages, and, indeed, everything connected with those days of the rail, are curious nowadays, and not the least amusing are the comments then made on travelling by steam. “A railway conveyance,” said one, writing in favour of the coaches, “is a locomotive prison, and, the novelty of it having subsided, we shall seldom hear of a gentleman condescending to assume this hasty mode of transit.” That was a very bad shot at prophecy, but it was followed by a perfect howler in the way of error. “It has already been proved,” says this person, “that railways are not calculated to carry heavy goods.”

An early London and Birmingham train was an odd spectacle; the engine with immensely tall funnel, and a huge domed fire-box; the carriages modelled on the lines of stage-coaches, and their panels painted with high-sounding names. Luggage was carried on the roof, and the first guards rode outside with it, until the cinders and red-hot coals from the engine half blinded them and destroyed their uniform, when they quitted that absurd position and travelled inside. Early railway journeys were penitential for travellers, for, instead of rolling smoothly over wooden sleepers, the granite slabs to which the fish-bellied rails of that time were riveted, produced a continual jarring and a deafening rattle. Fares too, with less than a quarter of the accommodation now provided, were almost double what they are now, and the breaking-down of engines, and all manner of awkward accidents, disposed many to think a revival of coaches probable.

VI

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.”