ELLE DECOR Goes to Birmingham

Forged from an unlikely mix of Anglo influence and industrial might, Alabama’s largest city is in the midst of a downtown revival, even as it retains its small-town Southern charms

By Beaty Coleman

Call it a city of Anglophiles, if you will. Streets named Canterbury, Cambridge, and Balmoral wind through neighborhoods of classic Tudors with lattice-paned windows and steeply pitched roofs. Lawns are manicured and edged with neatly trimmed boxwood hedges. In the villages that border the downtown area, antiques stores seem to spring up around every corner. The trial of the controversial, thoroughly entertaining, and recently convicted former mayor, who talked of reincarnating Trafalgar Square downtown, forced citizens to adopt yet something else from the Brits—a dry sense of humor.

The name itself, taken from a flourishing city across the pond, Birmingham, England, during the Industrial Age, is a fitting moniker. In the late 1800s, the three raw materials needed to produce steel—coal, iron ore, and limestone—were discovered in and began being extracted from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, a phenomenon that transformed what had been a cornfield into the South’s booming industrial epicenter: Birmingham, Alabama. In fact, at the turn of the century, steel and iron production generated such an explosion in population and wealth—think Silicon Valley in the 1990s—that the town garnered the nickname the Magic City.