Any building which has survived over two hundred years in the middle of a busy city, must have seen great change and must have been forced to adapt itself to many shifts in its social setting. The elegant spire, the rather formal building in its square, with Georgian elegance hints at the world of Mozart and the world before the French Revolution. But not before the Industrial Revolution, for this church was built to honour the great pioneers of our industrial world, whose memorial tablets line its walls.

It was the church of Matthew Boulton (whose pew was No. 23 ). James Watt (who didn't go to church much but held the freehold of pew 100 ), Ralph Heaton, Edward Thomason and many others among the earlier manufactures and merchants who made Birmingham famous as the town of 'a thousand trades', of buttons and buckles, and of Brummagen brass, It was built in 1779 on land given by Charles Colmore, and served as a status symbol to the aspiring middle class. One of four churches built under an act of 1774 to meet the growing needs of an increasing population, it was designed by Roger Eykyn of Wolverhampton, with Samuel Wyatt of London as consultant architect, who also designed the fine altar-piece. Francis Eginton, who was originally employed by Matthew Boulton as a glass painter, made the fine East window - the 'Conversion of St Paul' - 1789, copying a painting commissioned for the purpose by Benjamin West, the President of the Royal Academy. This window was Egington's best and most renowned work. It is interesting that the Ladies of Llangollen, who recorded in their diaries their contact with the fashionable world through smart young men on their way to Ireland through Holyhead, tell on three occasions of hearing of the "fine new window at St Paul's Chapel in Birmingham.

As St Paul's, (for eighty years not a parish church in its own right but a daughter church, or "chapel -of-ease" of St Martin's), began to set itself up as a fashionable church it acquired some splendid silver plate. No one knows how the church of Matthew Boulton acquired London made silver, but somehow it collected flagons and chalices made by Hester Bateman, a woman silversmith whose work is now in great demand among collectors. This is now in safe keeping at the Birmingham Assay Office.

For the first fifty years of its life, St Paul's was, as it began - the church of middle class manners and music. The first Vicar, William Toy Young, a scholar and musician, was just the man for the job. So was the fine character who was his Curate for twenty years and who succeeded him as Vicar for a further thirty years He was Rann Kennedy, classics master at King Edward's School. Rann Kennedy was the father of Benjamin Hall Kennedy, the great headmaster of Shrewsbury and author of the Latin primer still widely in use in places where small boys are shaped by the dead languages.

Rann Kennedy hit the first great change in St Paul's. In 1832 the great assembly of the labour unions on Newhall. Hill, took place. 200,000 trade unionists gathered there in perfect order with their flags and banners to press their demands whilst protesting their- loyalty. 'The great Reform Bill of 1832 was the sign of the government's capitulation. No one knows how much that great meeting in St Paul's Parish contributed to that reform, Poverty clearly did most. It is unlikely that Rann Kennedy in St Paul's, (good Christian man that he was, showed enthusiastic support for the demonstrators on Newhall Hill. The result of reform was an increase in prosperity and growth in the towns. You can read it as from a book in the baptism registers of St. Paul’s - in 1823, three baptisms; in 1824, four; in 1825, three; in 1830, eight, in 1339, twelve; in 1840, forty! The population explosion was on. From then on the social pattern changed. The back to back artisan house began to accommodate the increasing number of craftsmen in the growing jewellery and in the small metalware businesses The new pre-occupation of the Church and its clergy was with poverty, illiteracy and education. P.H.C, Latimer, (who was High church) and in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies R. B. Burges who was Evangelical), did quite fantastic work in meeting the new social need. Burges and his four curates and two scripture readers, visited all the 16,000 people in the parish four times a year- - and kept a record of it all! They had reading and writing classes for 2,000 people a week - 120 classes a week - and 2,000 children, young people and adults in Sunday Schools and Bible Classes on Sundays. The faithful well-to-do became more and more a source of funds, to help in the good work rather than the object of the good work

This was the time when the church schools of the parish came into being. Burges made the schools at Spencer Street (closed in 1968) and Camden Drive his main concern. An interesting sidelight on social change is found in Burges' efforts in the eighteen sixties to get free of the frustration of the pew-freehold. When the church was built, one thousand sittings were sold at £5 per time to finance the building and launching of the church. These freeholds were owned and bought and sold and bequeathed. When the evangelical Burges worked himself into his grave among the humble poor, he couldn't get them to church because there was nowhere where they were free to sit! A hundred years after the church was built, after great campaigning, he managed to shake off this stranglehold, at least so far as the gallery was concerned.

The other great incumbency was that of W. H. Smith - whose thirty-three years are still remembered. He was a huge eccentric, with a capacity for knocking down men of whose behavior he disapproved! He had a different world to cope with In his time the "Jewellers' Church" gradually ceased to be the home of the manufacturers and merchants. They had by then all moved out to Edgbaston and Moseley, and, while they still retained some affection and loyalty for the place, they saw it chiefly as a place from which "good work. was done" amongst their workers. It gradually became a shabby ruin and a typical down-town church, a situation sadly confirmed after local bombing during the 1939-45 war.

Unless a new function for St Paul's had appeared its condition (and the disappearance of its population through slum clearance) would have settled its fate. However, scores of thousands of people worked daily in the parish in jewellery factories and in other plants great and small. At one count since the war there were 1,500 separate factories in the parish - a number now greatly reduced by amalgamations and by "factory slum clearances"  though the number must still be uniquely large.  Nowhere could there be a church more ideally situated to act as the centre of the Church's  industrial mission. Time will bring other changes but the clergy of St Paul's and their devoted small community have found plenty to do in making friends with managers and trade unionists and with representatives of other aspects of the complex institutional life of our age

In one respect the wheel of change has come full circle - because of one thing which did not change, i.e. the superb acoustics of St Paul's Church Music has been performed at St Paul's from the very beginning. The young Mozart was a friend of Rann Kennedy's wife Julia. They held large and unprofitable concerts to pay for Eginton's window ( he never got his money !'). We have re-established the tradition and though the concerts are still unprofitable, more and more people are discovering the joy of making music in a building which flatters and encourages them.

The Parochial Church Council completed an extensive programme of restoration between 1985 and 1994 with the assistance of the Birmingham City Council, Duchy of Corwall, English Heritage, local business and other benefactors. The Coat of Arms erected on the West Wall in 1996 represents that of George III in whose reign St Paul's Church was built.