Birmingham Nua · Co. Tipperary
A landlord's industrial dream, printed on its own money, in a Tipperary hill.
New Birmingham is not a village that grew. It was designed. Around 1800, a landlord named Sir Vere Hunt looked at the Slieveardagh Hills and saw something practical: coal seams under the ground and a labour force above it. His plan was to build an industrial village from scratch, modelled on the English city that had become the symbol of manufacturing ambition. He called it New Birmingham.
The plan was grand and the execution was strange. Hunt issued his own currency - tokens bearing his name, 'Vere Hunt's tokens' - for use among workers in the settlement. It was a closed economy in a closed landscape: the workers were paid in money that only worked in the village, and the village only worked as long as the mine did. Coal mining did continue here, on and off, long after Hunt's particular experiment fizzled. The Slieveardagh coalfield was one of the few in Ireland with any commercial yield, and it kept drawing investors and workers back in various forms through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.
What's left is a small, quiet place in the hills between Killenaule and Ballingarry. The grand ambition is gone; the landscape absorbed it. You come here for the idea of it - the folly of a man who thought he could build Birmingham in south Tipperary and issue his own money to prove it - more than for anything standing.
