The name itself is a complaint. Solihull comes from the soily hill where St Alphege's church was built, a knoll of stiff red marl that turned to sucking mud whenever it rained. The medieval congregation must have arrived in boots and curses. The church they raised on that inconvenient slope was begun around 1220 by Hugh de Oddingsell, and the deep grooves still visible on its south doorway tell another story. Those marks were left by men sharpening arrowheads in the 1360s, when the king required every able male to practise archery on Sundays. The long scores were made by broadhead points, the round depressions by bodkins. Six centuries on, you can run a finger along the same stone where a 14th-century yeoman steadied his shaft.

Solihull has a curious gift for missing the violence that shaped its neighbours. The Industrial Revolution that hammered Birmingham and the Black Country into smoke and iron rolled around the town rather than through it. When civil war split England in the 1640s, armies clashed at Edgehill to the south and Camp Hill to the north, and the very first Roundhead-Cavalier skirmish unfolded just up the road at Curdworth Bridge. Solihull stayed largely untouched. Prince Rupert was reportedly headed there to meet King Charles when Parliamentary forces intercepted him near Kings Norton. The town watched history rush by on the high roads and kept making cloth and shoeing horses. The High Street still went by the name le Smythestret because of the blacksmiths who worked it, drawing fuel from the great trees of Arden that pressed in on every side.

The 20th century finally found Solihull, and the way it arrived was unmistakably industrial. In 1870 the metallurgist James Fern Webster moved to Whitlocks End and worked out how to make aluminium cheap enough to use for ordinary objects, ending the era when bars of the stuff were displayed alongside the French Crown Jewels. By 1878 his Solihull Lodge factory was producing 100 pounds of pure aluminium a week. Half a century later, in 1936, the government bought up two local farms and built a shadow factory - one of the deliberately rural sites designed to hide aircraft production from German bombers. After the war, in 1948, Rover moved in. The Land Rover would be designed and built there, and the plant has been making the marque ever since. Birds Custard, Triumph motorbikes from nearby Meriden, Lucas headlamps from Shirley - the town's modern story is told in objects that ended up in millions of British garages and kitchens.

On 8 July 1939, with war two months away, Neville Chamberlain and the Duchess of Kent cut the ribbon at Elmdon Airport. The Art Deco terminal, designed by Norman and Dawbarn, looked like a confident message from a country that still believed in peace. Within weeks the airport was requisitioned for the RAF. When it reopened to civilians in 1946, Birmingham still had no airport of its own and ended up borrowing Solihull's. In 1960 the place was rechristened Birmingham International, a name that has always carried a note of injustice for locals. The railway station built to serve it had to be called Birmingham International too, even though the trains stopped eight miles short of Birmingham. Some Solihull residents still call the place Elmdon, as a small daily act of correction.

Drive in from the M42 and the first thing that registers is how green everything is. Three-quarters of the borough sits inside the West Midlands Green Belt, and Solihull defends that line the way a parish defends its boundaries. The village of Meriden, just inside the borough, was for centuries claimed as the geographic centre of England - a 1920s recalculation moved the true centre into Leicestershire, but the listed stone monument on the village green hasn't budged. The Touchwood shopping centre, opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2002, sits where Touchwood Hall once stood at the end of Drury Lane. Mell Square preserves the name of the town clerk who planned its 1960s redevelopment. Even the Mayor's Range Rover with the Sol 1 plate is a small, deliberate insistence: this town has its own story, and it does not intend to forget it just because Birmingham is close.