e inhabitants call the Hardware
Village, a healthy, ugly town, standing upon several hills, crowned with
smoke, but free from fog.

The old railway station stands at the foot of one of these hills, leaving a
drive of a quarter of a mile through a squalid region, almost as bad as the
railway entrance into Bristol, before entering into the decent part of the
town; but the new station, now in course of rapid completion, will land
passengers behind the Grammar School, in New Street, the principal, and,
indeed, only handsome street of any length in Birmingham.

At the old station there is an excellent hotel, kept by Mr. Robert Bacon, who
was so many years house steward to the Athenaeum Club, in Pall Mall; and at
the refreshment-rooms a capital table d'hote is provided four times a-day, at
two shillings a-head, servants included, an arrangement extremely acceptable
after a ride of 118 miles.

[NEWTON ROAD STATION, NEAR BIRMINGHAM: ill16.jpg]

At the new station similar refreshment-rooms are to be provided, and it is to
be hoped that the architect will plan the interior first, and the exterior
afterwards, so that comfort may not be sacrificed, as it usually is in
English public buildings, to the cost of an imposing portico and vestibule.

As a railway starting point, Birmingham has become a wonderful place. In
addition to those main lines and branches passed and noted on our journey
down, it is also the centre at which meet the railroads to Derby and
Sheffield; to Worcester, Cheltenham, Gloucester, and Bristol; to London
through Oxford, by the Broad Gauge Great Western, to Shrewsbury and Chester
through Wolverhampton, beside the little South Staffordshire lines, which
form an omnibus route between Birmingham, Walsall, Dudley, and Lichfield, and
other iron nets "too tedious to describe."

To a stranger not interested in manufactures, and in mechanic men, this is a
very dull, dark, dreary town, and the sooner he gets out of it the better.
There are only two fine buildings. The Town Hall, an exact copy externally
of the Temple of Jupiter Stator at Rome, built of a beautiful grey Anglesey
marble, from the designs of Messrs. Hansom and Welch, who also undertook to
execute it for 24,000 pounds. It cost 30,000 pounds, and the contractors
were consequently ruined. A railway company would probably have paid the
difference; but, in such cases, communities have no conscience, so the people
of Brummagem got the Hall of which they