Birmingham: what to see in 1 day

Victoria Square is a good starting point: the city's civic center, dominated by the Victorian Council House and fountains.

From here you enter the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, free admission, hosting one of the world's most important Pre-Raphaelite collections, with paintings by Burne-Jones and Rossetti in the main rooms.

After leaving the museum, a twenty-minute walk reaches the Jewellery Quarter, the neighborhood housing the city's goldsmiths' workshops for generations.

Here is the Jewellery Quarter Museum, in the former Smith and Pepper factory: the machinery and work benches remain exactly as they were when production stopped in the eighties, offering direct insight into how gold was worked in the city.

Back in the center, early afternoon suits walking along Birmingham's canals, which exceed Venice's in total length.

The most picturesque stretch runs between Gas Street Basin and Brindleyplace, where old red brick warehouses have become restaurants and bars facing the water, ideal also for a lunch break.

Late afternoon closes with the Bullring area, the shopping center redesigning the city's heart, recognizable for the metallic disk facade of the Selfridges store.

Adjacent stands the medieval St Martin church, whose outdoor market preserves one of the few traces of pre-industrial Birmingham.

Birmingham is well traversed in a ring between Victoria Square, the Jewellery Quarter and the canals of the center, closing itself in the area of the Bullring.

More peripheral quarters like Digbeth, with its street art scene, and destinations requiring a separate journey such as Cadbury World in Bournville remain left out, but a few hours are enough to grasp Birmingham's shift from industrial city to vibrant cultural center of the United Kingdom.