The title of this book suggests that this it is primarily about the Birmingham workhouse, but in reality it is a wider study of poor relief in the city, and also touches upon Birmingham's changing morphology. Chris Upton spent over 10 years researching the topic before his death in 2015, and the volume has subsequently been completed by his wife, Fiona Tate, and colleague at Newman University, Ian Cawood. A wide range of sources have been used to reconstruct Birmingham's poor relief, including workhouse accounts, minutes, parliamentary returns, diaries, newspapers, court records and various printed materials. Much of the focus is top-down but through careful analysis we see insights into the lives of the poor themselves.

The book is made up of 13 short chapters which explore various themes. Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6 and 8 analyse the poor law system in Birmingham, its management and how and why the Birmingham workhouse opened in the 1730s. Chapters 6 and 8 are particularly original as they analyse the officials and workers that administered relief. Most other studies tend to focus on indigent populations and not those who maintained the system. A fairly unique organization of various guardians, overseers, assistant overseers, vestrymen, masters, matrons and clerks is found to be active in Birmingham, which helped to bring the upper and lower echelons of society together. The number of employed individuals was complemented by the many people who worked for the parish on an ad hoc basis such as surgeons, midwives, nurses, apothecaries and so on.

Work and employment are intermittently discussed throughout the volume. Workhouse inmates and the outdoor poor were employed in a wide range of roles. For example, the parish owned 30 acres of land and would get parishioners to farm the estate and mine sand to generate cash and produce for the workhouse (chapter 7). Others were employed in domestic duties such as washing and cooking or made pack-thread and mop-yarn. Most of these measures for work would change at various times as they were not conceived as long-term schemes and authorities often lost money from them (chapter 13).

The poor that used the workhouse were largely composed of the most vulnerable such as the elderly, sick and young, as we would expect (chapter 4). From 1797, children were increasingly housed in the Birmingham Asylum for the Infant Poor, rather than the workhouse and individual foster homes. The young were given some education in the institution and were expected to undertake work to teach them industriousness and basic moral and religious ethics (chapter 11). Most sick people were treated in an infirmary positioned behind the main workhouse building (chapter 9). The mentally ill who were classed as dangerous or curable were sent to specialist institutions, whereas those that were categorized as ‘harmless’, ‘manageable’ or uncurable were left to live out their remaining days in the workhouse (chapter 12). The findings appear to indicate that paupers were given decent burials at the expense of ratepayers if they lost their battles with sickness (chapter 10).

A particular strength of the volume is its meticulous research and utilization of a range of statistics from parliamentary and archival sources. Many of the topics touched upon in the book are under-researched (such as overcrowding, agency, social relations, alternative workhouse currencies and so on), yet the findings are rarely related to the wider historiography and workhouses elsewhere. The organization of the book is slightly haphazard too. For example, the chapters that analyse how the poor were managed by parochial officials such as overseers, guardians and masters (6 and 8) are separated by a chapter on parish lands (7). The book would have also benefited from chapter subheadings. Had Upton lived longer, it is possible that these issues would have been eradicated through further edits. In sum, this is a very well-researched book which includes much information on poor relief in Birmingham and its surrounding area. It will be of most interest to local historians, but scholars of urban history, the early modern period and poverty will also benefit from reading it.