Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Listen for the clock first. High above Chamberlain Square, a tower rises over pale stone, and its bell marks the hours across the city centre. Locals call it Big Brum. Below it, pigeons move across the paving, buses hum along the edge of the square, and people sit on the steps with coffee. You may be staying in West Bromwich, a short tram ride away. But this building sits at the civic heart of Birmingham itself, and the view from here is part of the story.

The museum opened in 1885. It shares its long Victorian frontage with the Council House, the seat of the city's government. That pairing was deliberate. Victorian Birmingham was a confident industrial town, full of workshops, foundries and metal trades. Its leaders believed that a modern city needed more than factories and drains. It also needed paintings, sculpture and objects from distant places that ordinary working people could see for themselves.

Here is the first surprise. Much of the money behind this building came from gas. The city ran its own gas supply in the late nineteenth century, and the profits helped pay for the museum and its galleries. A large hall in the building was once part of the municipal gas offices. Today it holds major exhibitions, and it still carries the name the Gas Hall. Birmingham's idea was simple and very practical: industry pays the bills, and art belongs to everyone.

That idea is written into the stone. Carved into the building near one of its entrances is a short motto: By the gains of industry we promote art. Many visitors walk straight past it. Take a moment to find it. Those seven words explain this museum better than any brochure. They tell you who paid for the collections, why the doors stood open to the public, and how a manufacturing town chose to see itself in the mirror of art.

A practical note before you go further. In recent years, large parts of the building closed for essential repair work, and the galleries have been reopening in stages. So the rooms you can enter today may differ from what a friend saw a few years ago, or from what an older guidebook describes. Ask at the front desk which spaces are open. Then let the visit follow whatever doors stand ready for you.

The collection most people travel for is the Pre-Raphaelite art. This museum holds one of the largest public collections of it anywhere. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of nineteenth-century English painters. They rejected the polished, formal style taught in academies at the time. Instead, they chose bright colour, close detail and serious subjects from myth, poetry and everyday life. Standing in front of their work, you notice every leaf, every fold of fabric, every strand of hair.

One of the leading artists linked to this movement was a Birmingham man. Edward Burne-Jones was born in this city and became one of the best-known painters of the later Pre-Raphaelite circle. His figures are long, pale and dreamlike. They often seem to drift through stories from legend. The museum holds many of his works, including drawings and studies. These show his careful hand at work, line by line, long before the finished picture appeared.

Look out, too, for a painting called The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown. It shows a young couple at the back of a ship, leaving England as emigrants. The sea is grey, the wind is cold, and their faces are tight with worry. It is a small, intense picture about a big human moment. In a city that grew through people arriving from elsewhere, the theme of departure and new beginnings feels close to home.

Now for the second surprise, and it comes from under a farm field. In 2009, a man with a metal detector searched land in Staffordshire, not far from here. He found gold. Then more gold. It became the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever discovered. The Anglo-Saxons ruled much of England in the centuries after the Romans left. Birmingham shares ownership of the hoard with the museum in Stoke-on-Trent.

The hoard is mostly fittings from weapons. There are sword pommels, hilt plates and many small pieces, often bent or broken. Some are set with deep red garnets, cut into tiny precise cells. Lean close to the cases if they are on display. The craftsmanship is astonishing at this small scale. Nobody knows for certain why the treasure was buried, or who buried it. Experts have offered several theories, but the full answer is still unknown.

The collections reach far beyond England. Among them is a large copper figure of the Buddha from India, more than a thousand years old. It stands taller than a person and is one of the most remarkable objects of its kind outside South Asia. Its presence here also raises questions that museums now discuss openly: how objects travelled during the age of empire, and whose story they tell. Pause in front of it and consider both its beauty and its journey.

If you need a rest, look for the Edwardian Tearoom. It sits inside one of the museum's industrial-era halls, under a glass roof held up by painted iron. Light falls from above onto the tables, and the room fills with the clink of cups and quiet conversation. It is a good place to sit for a while and think about what you have seen. Note how the iron frame echoes the metal trades that built this city.

When you step back outside, take in the square once more. To one side is the Council House. Nearby, Victoria Square opens out with its fountains and sculpture. Further around, newer glass buildings rise beside the old stone. Old and new Birmingham stand side by side here. Above you, the clock tower still keeps time. The next time it strikes the hour, remember the gas money, the carved motto, and the gold from a Staffordshire field.