Rummidge is a fictional city used by David Lodge in some of his novels, particularly ''

Changing Places ''Changing Places'' (1975) is the first "campus novel" by British novelist David Lodge. The subtitle is "A Tale of Two Campuses", and thus both the title and subtitle are literary allusions to Charles Dickens' ''A Tale of Two Cities''. It is t ...

'', '' Small World: An Academic Romance'', and ''

Nice Work ''Nice Work'' is a 1988 novel by British author David Lodge. It is the final volume of Lodge's "Campus Trilogy", after '' Changing Places'' (1975) and '' Small World: An Academic Romance'' (1984). ''Nice Work'' won the ''Sunday Express'' Book ...

''. It is based on the English city of

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the We ...

, colloquially known as Brummagem, and the University of Rummidge is based on the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university located in Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingha ...

, where Lodge taught English literature for decades. In an author's note before ''Nice Work'', Lodge says, "Perhaps I should explain, for the benefit of readers who have not been here before, that Rummidge is an imaginary city, with imaginary universities and imaginary factories, inhabited by imaginary people, which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world."

References

* *{{cite book, author=Maurice Charney, title=Comedy: A Geographic and Historical Guide, url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Og4ntxFQP2cC&pg=PA20, year=2005, publisher=Greenwood Publishing Group, isbn=978-0-313-32714-8, pages=20 Fictional populated places in England