Spirit of Place: The Battle of Camp Hill

The Camp Hill area of Birmingham started off life called Kemp Hill after the landowner. The name got informally then permanently changed because it was where Royalist Prince Rupert set up camp at the Ship Inn when he thought he'd come up here giving it large to predominantly Parliamentary Birmingham in the Civil War. The battle took place on Easter Monday, 1643.

He wanted to get to the nearby Black Country to obtain more armaments and thought that going through the unfortified then small town (population about 5,000 in 1650) of Birmingham would be easy. He found that his men (numbers given vary between 1,400 and 2,000) were no match at all for only 300 townsmen armed only with what they happened to have and some soldiers from the Lichfield garrison. Prince Rupert went, 'Bugger me, I wasn't expecting this,' and they were forced to withdraw. They then had another go and were forced to withdraw again.

And here we have the true meaning of the immortal words, 'Made in Birmingham'. We've been working on our rep for centuries.

Eventually of course the town succumbed and Prince Rupert was widely critcised for then burning an unfortified town and killing a clergyman.

The site of the inn is now marked by a plaque on a traffic island and there is a weather cock supposedly shot by Prince Rupert himself in the museum.

You can read a contemporary account in A True Relation of Prince Rvpert's Barbarous Cruelly against the Towne of Brumingham here. 

Oh alright, I know you want to see that Arthur Shelby also understands what Made in Birmingham means!

Arthur Shelby is 100% made in Birmingham and proud of it! 😂😂 #PeakyBlinders pic.twitter.com/b2p5rWHyGt

— BBC One (@BBCOne) July 16, 2019