William Shakespeare, poet and dramatist, was born in 1564 in Stratford-on-Avon, an utterly typical heartland town, Stratford remains very much as Shakespeare knew it, with its streets of black-and-white houses, constructed around frameworks of midland oaks. The Bard of Avon's plays are performed regularly at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in a setting by the river so beautiful that even the great wordsmith might have gulped and stuttered in embarrassed inarticulacy as he tried to find words to describe it. Yet the Bard's greatest memorial isn't the theatre - it is the English language itself, carried around the world through the medium of his works.

It was in the English heartland that the Industrial Revolution was born. At Coalbrookdale, the Severn - England's longest river, cuts a gorge through the Welsh borderland hills. This ravine is straddled by an iron bridge - the world's first, placed there in 1779 by the pioneer industrialist Abraham Darby as a way of announcing and advertising to the world that the age of the machine had arrived. Many of the original workings in this gorge - the world's first factory site - are preserved in a remarkable open-air museum.

Britain's second largest city, Birmingham, was created from nothing by this revolution of iron. The city, the centre of Britain's motor and metal-working industries, lies at the heart of the Midlands and of a remarkable network of canals - Birmingham itself has more navigable waterways than Venice, and they smell a lot better. The canals, given over to pleasure-boating now, penetrate to all corners of the heartlands and are a passion with Midland people, who maintain the flights ("staircases") of locks, the old bridges, lock-keepers' cottages and aqueducts and the brightly-painted narrowboats with loving zeal.

The waterways tie Birmingham to the other great Midland cities, to Leicester, which once kept the old British Empire replete with dry socks and underpants; to Nottingham, where the statue of Robin Hood presides, arrow poised at the heart of anybody who tries to double-park; to Coventry, capital (or should that be saddle?) of bicycle-manufacture, and the great shoe-making centre of Northampton, which still proudly displays the footwear worn by Queen Victoria at her wedding (Princess Diana went elsewhere for shoes and look what happened to her). The sweat and grandeur of these places is well caught in the Museum of the Black Country, at Dudley. Yet despite the conurbations, you are never far from magnificent countryside. The Peak District National Park intermingles moorland, lofty crags, and trout steams with inns that have catered for centuries to the pleasures of walkers and the stories of fishermen, often taller than the surrounding peaks; Sherwood Forest retains patches of oakwood that Robin Hood would have recognised, if not stolen for firewood. The area has more than its share of stately homes, from noble Chatsworth in its setting of fountains and man-made waterfalls, to the mellow redbrick of Compton Wynates. Perhaps the happy combination of old and new is best seen at Coventry Cathedral, where the magnificent new cathedral lies alongside the bombed but still proud ruins of its medieval predecessor.

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