Fifty Great Things to Come Out of the Midlands. Robert Shore

26) The Industrial Revolution

      Britain entered the eighteenth century an agricultural nation and left it the world’s foremost industrial power – almost entirely thanks to Midlanders. Abraham Darby’s iron-smelting experiments at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire laid the foundations of the Industrial Revolution. But even more influential were the members of the Lunar Society, assorted Midland entrepreneurs, enthusiasts and inventors (including the great engineering duo of Matthew Boulton and James Watt) who gathered every month at locations around Birmingham to discuss their latest ideas and innovations. The result, as travel writer Arthur Young pointed out in 1791, was that Birmingham became ‘the first manufacturing town in the world’.

       25) The Phrase ‘Painting the Town Red’

      The origins of this expression are regularly traced to an incident that took place in the Leicestershire hunting mecca of Melton Mowbray on 6 April 1837, when the Marquess of Waterford and his hunting pals – high on pork pie, a local favourite of the horse-and-hound fraternity – went on a ‘spree’, daubing the buildings on the high street with red paint. To this day, the Midlands remains the best place to paint the town red, of course – Stoke-on-Trent and Northampton are much more thrilling nightspots than murky old Manchester or larky little Liverpool.

       24) Marmite

      It was a German scientist, Justus von Liebig, who first hit on the idea of concentrating, bottling and eating brewer’s yeast, but it took Midlanders to turn the dark, savoury paste into a worldwide phenomenon: the Marmite Food Extract Company was established in the great Midland brewing town of Burton-upon-Trent in Staffordshire in 1902 – the local Bass brewery provided the yeast. Catchphrase: ‘You either love it or hate it.’ Little-known fact: all Midlanders love it. Related tourist attraction: the magnificent Marmite Monument – or ‘Monumite’ – in Burton-on-Trent. It’s the Midland equivalent of the Angel of the North.

       23) Lampy the Gnome

      Lovely Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire contains portraits by Van Dyck and Lely. And that’s not all. There’s also little ‘Lampy’, reputedly the oldest surviving garden gnome in the world. He was imported from Germany in the 1840s by Sir Charles Isham, who is said to have been an ‘eccentric spiritualist’. Apparently Sir Charles’s daughters hated gnomes and later banished his collection. Lampy was secreted in a crevice, however, and survived the purge.

       22) Mass Tourism

      Leicester cabinetmaker Thomas Cook effectively invented mass tourism in the 1840s when he arranged for some 540 temperance activists to be carried by train to a rally in nearby Loughborough. This short anti-booze cruise was just the beginning: by the 1850s, Cook’s travel agency was transporting visitors in their thousands across the Channel to gawp at the splendours of the Paris Exhibition; by the 1880s it had its own fleet of steamers on the Nile. Note that there is very little tourism, never mind mass tourism, to the Midlands.

       21) Jet Propulsion

      It’s ironic that Coventry-born engineering genius Sir Frank Whittle, whose pioneering work would carry air travel to ever greater heights, was initially refused a place in the Royal Air Force on the grounds that he wasn’t tall enough. But little Whittle did not give in. Oh no. Early on in his career he realised that, to enable them to travel further and faster, aircraft would need to fly at greater altitudes to reduce air resistance. So he set about developing an engine capable of carrying air travel beyond the sound barrier, earning himself the title of the ‘father of jet propulsion’ in the process.