Lichfield on the main routes from London to the north-west and Birmingham to the north-east. It also became a centre of great intellectual activity, being the home of many famous people including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward; this prompted Johnson's remark that Lichfield was "a city of philosophers". In the 1720s Daniel Defoe described Lichfield as 'a fine, neat, well-built, and indifferent large city', the principal town in the region after Chester. During the late 18th and early 19th century much of the medieval city was rebuilt with the red-brick Georgian style buildings still to be seen
Garrick Theatre fire Garrick Theatre fire A fire killed eight young girls at the Garrick Theatre, Hereford, England, in 1916. The theatre was built in 1882 and renamed in 1909 after David Garrick, the actor and theatrical manager, who was born in Hereford in 1717. In 1916, during World War I, a fund-raising concert was held "for the benefit of the Herefords and Shropshires" (two local county regiments, the former actually being part of The Worcestershire Regiment; the latter the King's Shropshire Light Infantry) at the Garrick Theatre, Hereford. One of the turns was provided by more than forty local school-children, wearing snow