Wolverhampton had a prolific bicycle industry from 1868 to 1975, during which time a total of more than 200 bicycle manufacturing companies existed there, but today none exist at all. These manufacturers included Marston, Sunbeam, Star, Wulfruna and Rudge.The last volume manufacturers of bicycles left Wolverhampton during the 1970s, the remnants which shut down during the 1980s being small companies including Percy Stallard (the former professional cyclist) and Jack Hateley.

Wolverhampton High Level station (the current main railway station) opened in 1852, but the original station was demolished in 1965 and then rebuilt. Wolverhampton Low Level station opened on the Great Western Railway in 1855. The site of the Low Level station, which closed to passengers in 1972 and completely in 1981, is currently undergoing redevelopment. Wolverhampton St George's (in the city centre) is now the northern terminus for the Midland Metro light rail system. Wolverhampton was one of the few towns to operate surface contact trams and the only town to use the Lorain Surface Contact System. Trolleybuses appeared in 1923 and in 1930 for a brief period, the Wolverhampton trolleybus system was the world's largest trolleybus system. The last Wolverhampton trolleybus ran in 1967, just as the railway line through the High Level station was converted to electric operation.

Location of the UK's first set of traffic lights at Princes Square: the poles are painted with black and white bands as they were originally.

England's first automatic traffic lights could be seen in Princes Square, Wolverhampton in 1927. The modern traffic lights at this location have the traditional striped poles to commemorate this fact.

In 1918, David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, announced he was calling a General Election at "The Mount" in Tettenhall Wood. Lloyd George also made his "Homes fit for heroes" speech at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre in the same year. It was on the idea of "Homes fit for heroes" that Lloyd George was to fight the 1918 "Coupon" General Election.

Wolverhampton was represented politically in Victorian times by the Liberal MP Charles Pelham Villiers, a noted free trade supporter, who was also the longest serving MP in parliamentary history. Lord Wolverhampton, Henry Hartley Fowler was MP for Wolverhampton at the turn of the century. Sir Geoffrey Le Mesurier Mander, a member of the Mander family, was Liberal MP for Wolverhampton East from 1929 to 1945, distinguished for his stance against Appeasement and as a supporter of the League of Nations; known as "the last of the Midland radicals". More recent members have included the Conservative mavericks Enoch Powell and Nicholas Budgen. In 2005, former Bilston councillor and MP for Wolverhampton South East, Dennis Turner entered the House of Lords as Lord Bilston.

Powell was a member of Edward Heath's Tory shadow cabinet from 1964, until he was dismissed in April 1968 following his controversial Rivers of Blood speech in which he warned of massive civil unrest if mass immigration of black and Asian commonwealth inhabitants continued.

Large numbers of black and Asian immigrants had settled in Wolverhampton in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly in the Whitmore Reans, Blakenhall, All Saints and Heath Town areas. Wolverhampton is home to a large proportion of the Sikh community, who settled there during the period (1940–1970) from the Indian state of Punjab. Today, the Sikh community in Wolverhampton is roughly 8% of the city's population.