Soho achieved world-wide significance in the late eighteenth century when industrialist Matthew Boulton opened his ‘Soho Manufactory’ one of the earliest factories which stood on what is now Factory Road at the junction with South Road. Matthew Boulton resided at nearby Soho House and remained there till his death in 1809. The house became the meeting place of the Lunar Society which included such leading lights of the day as Erasmus Darwin, Dr William Small, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt, Dr William Withering, Joseph Priestly and others.

To the south of Soho Road was located Birmingham heath across which James Brindley built the Birmingham Canal connecting Birmingham with Wolverhampton and the Black Country. Completed in 1769 the canal carried supplies of iron ore and coal to Birmingham and prompted some early industrial development including the Soho Foundry (1795) where Boulton and Watt manufactured steam engines for export throughout the world. Thomas Telford later engineered a new canal which cut across many of the loops of Brindley’s earlier contour canal. In the mid nineteenth century a large part of the heath was used to build the Borough’s Prison (1849) now Birmingham Prison, Asylum (1850) – which later became All Saint’s Hospital – and the Workhouse (1850), now part of City Hospital.

The Jewellery Quarter is Europe’s largest concentration of businesses involved in the jewellery trade and produces 40% of all the jewellery made in the UK. It is also home to the world’s largest Assay Office, which hallmarks around 12 million items a year. Matthew Boulton was one of the people who petitioned to have the Assay Office established here in 1773. Historically the Jewellery Quarter has been the birthplace of many pioneering advancements in industrial technology including electroplating by George Elkington and the first man-made plastics invented by Alexander Parkes. The area was also for many years at the centre of the world’s pen trade.
The Jewellery Quarter is now home to many creative industries and heritage attractions. 

Urbanization was rapid from the mid nineteenth century onwards with people moving to Birmingham from more rural parts of the UK and Ireland. In the twentieth century many people moved to major cities such as Birmingham from all over the world, especially from the Caribbean and parts of South Asia such as Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Today Soho and Jewellery Quarter Ward is a very culturally diverse area and proud of it. It is also a young Ward, with a younger age profile than the city average.