Top Things to Do in West Midlands, England

Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum is one of the United Kingdom's most substantial and engaging science museums, located in the heart of Birmingham at Millennium Point, a landmark development in the Eastside district of the city centre. It is operated by Birmingham Museums Trust and serves as the city's principal venue for exploring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in an interactive and family-friendly environment. The museum holds a remarkable collection of over 200,000 objects, spanning working steam engines, historic vehicles, medical equipment, natural history specimens, and cutting-edge interactive galleries, making it genuinely one of the more impressive regional science museums in England. It is particularly celebrated for being home to one of the finest collections of steam-powered machinery in the world, including the oldest working steam engine in existence — Matthew Boulton and James Watt's Smethwick Engine of 1779 — which alone makes the museum a site of extraordinary historical significance for anyone interested in the Industrial Revolution. The museum's story is deeply rooted in Birmingham's industrial heritage. Its origins can be traced back to the Museum of Science and Industry, which operated for decades in Newhall Street before the collection was transferred to the new Thinktank facility at Millennium Point, which opened in 2001. Birmingham was, of course, the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, and figures like Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and the wider circle of the Lunar Society transformed manufacturing, engineering, and scientific thought from this very city. Preserving and displaying the artefacts of that transformation has been a civic priority for well over a century. The move to Millennium Point allowed for a far more ambitious presentation of this heritage, with modern interactive galleries sitting alongside authentic historic machinery in a way that draws direct lines between Birmingham's past innovations and the technological world of today. Physically, the museum occupies a striking modern building that forms part of the Millennium Point complex, a large red-brick and glass development that includes a university faculty and a large public atrium. Inside Thinktank, the experience shifts dramatically depending on which gallery you are in. The ground-floor machinery hall feels genuinely awe-inspiring: enormous steam engines tower overhead, their iron and brass components gleaming under gallery lighting, and on specific demonstration days some of this machinery is actually put into motion, filling the space with rhythmic mechanical sound and the faint smell of warm oil and metal. Upper galleries have a brighter, more contemporary feel, with hands-on exhibits aimed at children and teenagers covering topics from the human body to weather systems and digital technology. The overall effect is of a place that manages the rare balance of being both a serious repository of historic objects and a lively, accessible destination for families. Millennium Point and the surrounding Eastside district have undergone considerable regeneration since the early 2000s. The area sits just east of Birmingham's traditional city centre and is now home to Aston University, Birmingham City University facilities, and a growing number of modern residential and commercial developments. Curzon Street Station — the site of the future HS2 Birmingham terminus — lies close by, meaning the neighbourhood is at the centre of one of the most significant infrastructure investments in British history. Walking distance from the museum brings you to the Custard Factory creative quarter in Digbeth, the Bullring shopping centre, and New Street Station. The Jewellery Quarter and the broad cultural offerings of Brindleyplace are reachable within a short journey. It is a part of the city that feels actively in transition, balancing its Victorian industrial bones with twenty-first century ambition. One of the museum's most popular additional attractions is its Planetarium, a full-dome digital theatre that presents shows about astronomy, space exploration, and the universe. Planetarium shows run throughout the day and require a separate ticket, but they are widely considered excellent value and are a highlight for visitors of all ages. Thinktank also has an outdoor Science Garden, which is freely accessible and contains large-scale interactive exhibits and sculptures that work well for younger children who might find the indoor galleries overwhelming. The rooftop garden offers views across the surrounding cityscape and is a pleasant place to decompress between gallery sessions. The museum has a café and gift shop, and the wider Millennium Point building contains further food and seating options in its atrium. In terms of practical visiting, Thinktank is very well served by public transport. It is approximately a ten to fifteen minute walk from Birmingham New Street Station, and the nearby Moor Street Station is marginally closer still. Several bus routes stop along the surrounding streets. There is limited on-street parking in the immediate vicinity, but Millennium Point itself has a multi-storey car park attached to the complex. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday during standard hours, and on bank holidays; it is typically closed on Mondays outside of school holiday periods. It is fully accessible for wheelchair users and pushchairs throughout its main galleries, though some older interactive elements can be trickier to navigate. Booking tickets in advance online is recommended during school holidays, when the museum becomes very busy with families and school groups. A fascinating footnote in the museum's history relates to the Smethwick Engine itself. This Newcomen-type pumping engine, built in 1779 and associated with the great partnership of Boulton and Watt, was used to pump water back up the locks of the Birmingham Canal at Smethwick. It is the oldest surviving rotative steam engine known to still function. Having an object of that age and world-historical significance quietly housed within a regional museum in a modern Eastside building is the kind of discovery that sneaks up on visitors — you might walk past it before the full weight of what you are looking at sinks in. That quiet coexistence of the enormous and the overlooked, the world-class and the locally cherished, is perhaps what defines Thinktank most honestly.

The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley in the West Midlands is one of the most ambitious and successful industrial heritage museums in Britain, an open-air site of approximately 26 acres built around a reconstructed canal-side industrial village that brings the working-class history of the Black Country region to life through carefully restored and recreated buildings, working period industry and costumed interpretation. The museum opened in 1978 on the site of a former coal mine and canal basin and has grown to encompass over fifty historic buildings relocated from across the region. The heart of the museum is the reconstructed Black Country village of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, a street of shops, houses, a pub, a working fish and chip shop, a fairground and various industrial workshops that together recreate the environment of a working-class Black Country community at the height of the region's industrial prosperity. The buildings include a chain shop where anchor chain is made by hand using methods virtually unchanged since the nineteenth century, a glass-cutting workshop, a chemist, a baker and a school, all staffed by costumed guides who interpret the displays in character. The museum occupies the site of the Dudley Canal Tunnel, a remarkable piece of early industrial engineering that passes beneath Castle Hill for nearly three kilometres, and boat trips through the tunnel provide an extraordinary experience of underground industrial archaeology. The tunnel was opened in 1792 and was an important commercial waterway during the height of the canal age, and the boat trip through the darkness offers a vivid sense of the underground landscape of coal mines, limestone workings and canal tunnels that underlies the Black Country landscape. The museum has recently developed a 1940s section, recreating the period of the Second World War and the years of austerity that followed, extending its chronological range and adding another layer to its interpretation of this uniquely industrial British region.