Wolverhampton is an industrial city of a quarter of a million people, which grew up on the western edge of the West Midlands.

Wolverhampton is on flat ground with no significant rivers, so how did it become founded?

The earliest Saxon settlement was called Heatun. It was very small. The site became well known after 910 where the Anglo-Saxons won a decisive battle against the Danes.

It was this site that, in 985, King Ethelred granted lands at Heantun to Lady Wulfrun, and it was she who founded a new settlement in 985 as Wulfrūnehēantūn (which means Wulfrūn's main farm").

With power and wealth comes the church and prosperity. By 994, there was a monastery in Wolverhampton and this, in later years became the site for the current St. Peter's Church, which we shall be visiting shortly.

By Domesday in early Norman times, some 50 families lived here. But it was a place that was about to grow, and in 1179 it held its first market.

Throughout medieval times Wolverhampton, being by now at the centre of local roads, became a market place for wool coming from the Welsh hills. Wolverhampton was a staple town, meaning that the government recognised it as an official place which could trade with overseas countries, in this case through the port of Calais. First it was raw wool, and later cloth. This gave immense privileges to the town's merchants.

There is still a woolpack on the city's coat of arms. The medieval streets of the area called the Fold include Woolpack Alley in the city centre. It was the wealth from wool that allowed the extending of St Peter's church on a grander and larger scale.

But at the end of medieval times things began to change in the area around Wolverhampton. There was coal to be found under the ground. The earliest record of coal mining in the area was in 1273, but this was just for heating. However, it was to be the black gold of Wolverhampton.

But it was also a place where people began to make things. They had been skilled weavers. But slowly skills were adapted to new tasks. In these early years iron and brass were expensive to make and produced on a small scale. It was in Wolverhampton where many people saw their chances to make things in both iron and brass - including specialising in locks and keys. Chubb locks began in Wolverhampton. At this time all 30,000 Chubb locks and keys each year were entirely made by hand. So now you can see why the workforce grew.

This is the origin of Wolverhampton's engineering industry, and it was well established before the Industrial Revolution. But these skills allowed Wolverhampton to grow quickly right at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1709 Abraham Darby found a way to turn coal into coke for the smelting of iron at nearby Coalbrookdale on the River Severn. It was the end of charcoal for kilns and the start of the growth of coal. Just under fifty years later John Wilkinson (who started out in nearby Broseley) introduced coke at his Bradley Furnace at Bilston, at that time a separate town southeast of Wolverhampton. It was Wilkinson who caused the world's first iron bridge to be build at Ironbridge - he wanted it to get his products to market.

By 1750 the iron industry was growing quickly. Now coal was needed for ironworks, not just in Wolverhampton but to the east in what was to be called the Black Country. Canal networks were developed to carry the coal of Wolverhampton to the furnaces of the Black Country. Even locally, by 1790 the ironmaster John Wilkinson of Bilston was using 800 tons of coal each week alone.

Before the end of the nineteenth century coal production in the area was over 8 million tons a year, mainly from innumerable small pits.

Wilkinson was the inventor of a precision boring machine that could bore cast iron cylinders, such as cannon barrels and piston cylinders used in the steam engines of James Watt. His boring machine has been called the world's first machine tool. Wilkinson used steam power to provide the blast for his furnaces and later, with James Watt and Matthew Boulton, he used the steam engine in the forge and rolling mill.

During the nineteenth century there were over 100 furnaces in regular action in the Wolverhampton area.

Wolverhampton was, however, not just a place of basic materials.

Engineering skills were in great demand. Wolverhampton was the location of the first working Newcomen Steam Engine in 1712.

From this time, as steam engines could pump water out of deep pits, places like Wolverhampton were able to benefit from the coal and iron which had been too far underground. As a result, by the mid-19th century, Wolverhampton had grown spectacularly to become a wealthy town based on iron, steel and engineering, which took place in a multitude of small factories and workshops, each belching out smoke from their chimneys.

The wealthy industrialists who arose in this area had some of Wolverhampton's grandest houses built, out to the west, where the smoke was less likely to blow, and close to the still wooded countryside of Shropshire. The west of Wolverhampton is still the most leafy part of the city. We will visit it on the final leg of our journey.

In the 18th century Wolverhampton was on the main road from London to Holyhead from where people traveled to Ireland. This meant that many stagecoaches passed through the town bringing in more trade.

The first canal to Wolverhampton opened in 1772. Canals helped the industrial development of Wolverhampton by making it easier to move goods and raw materials to and from the town.

By 1750 Wolverhampton had a population of about 7,500 and it was growing rapidly. By 1801 it was over 12,000.

But it was the arrival of the railway in 1837 that was to transform the city, allowing its goods to reach all parts of the UK and beyond. Wolverhampton railway works began in 1849 with the purpose of making railway engines and rails for the extension of the Great Western Railway westwards. It was also at this time that famines in Ireland caused the arrival of many Irish labourers looking for work. Many Welsh labourers also arrived at this time.

Tinplate is sheet steel coated with tin to prevent it from rusting. By the early nineteenth century Wolverhampton was the most important centre for making items from tinplate.

Wolverhampton also made steel jewellery. Wolverhampton made things like buckles, sword hilts and jewellery from burnished steel.

As times moved on, so the basic engineering skills of Wolverhampton were put again to new uses as new inventions arrived. Wolverhampton became a centre of bicycle making and at one time there were 200 bicycle factories here. In 1930 the Wolverhampton trolleybus system was the world's largest trolleybus system. Wolverhampton was also the location of the UK's first set of traffic lights.

People from South Asia were the next set of those settling in Wolverhampton, beginning in the 1940s and continuing the city's tradition of immigration and enterprise.

In the mid 20th century many of the older Victorian age houses were replaced by council housing, especially in the 1960s and 70s. In this way many sturdy and characterful little homes were replaced by featureless council estates including tower blocks under the banner of progress. The same is true of the inner ring road, which effectively isolates the city centre from the rest of the city. The Mander Centre and the Wulfrun Centre were yet more features of this time of rebuilding.

It was also at this time that manufacturing industry in Wolverhampton began to. decline rapidly because of old fashioned expensive working ways and competition from overseas. This is the reason there are now attempts to change the city fortunes by encouraging science-based industries to base themselves here.