Distance: 12 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: Medium

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox

A walk across the pastoral yet industrial terrain of north east Worcestershire into Birmingham. The walk takes in Tardebigge Locks, Tardebigge Church, the village of Alvechurch, Lower Bittel Reservior and the Wast Hills

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

The Earliest Permenant Way

In most people’s imaginings, with the exception of the far north of the county, which today has been hived off into Birmingham and the Black Country Metropolitan Boroughs of Sandwell and Dudley, Worcestershire was left largely bucolic and untouched by the industrial revolution.

This is wrong of course: just as today when the county with it’s predominantly rural self image, is bisected by major train lines and roads like the M5 which are essential to funnelling people and goods to other places, so in earlier times Worcestershire formed a similar transitory function.

Ever since people in what is now England and Wales, began making boats, people have been using the River Severn to get around on. The rich trove of archaeological artefacts dug up along its banks dating back thousands of years is testimony to this. As are the reams and reams of paper, parchment and vellum documenting how since the people of these islands began to develop contracts, codes and conduct and the courts with the power to enforce them, the river’s potential as a mighty highway has been subjected to taxes and tolls. Usually to the advantage of those who already possessed wealth and power and to the detriment of those who didn’t, and just had to pay up.

An extension of the ancient idea of making money by charging people to ship goods along an inland waterway, at a time when this was by far the most effective means of bulk carrying good long distances, was what lay behind the early industrial revolution mania for building canals. Which in turn, in the form of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal dug in stages between 1792 and 1815 was what brought the industrial revolution to mid-Worcestershire. A set of processes which the arrival of railways, and in the last 60 years, the M5 and M42 motorways, has depend and continued

Today, the sprawling Birmingham satellite town of Bromsgrove is utterly dominated by the car. Major roads slice through the town centre atomising it, much as they do through its motherlode, Birmingham. It’s initial growth from the sleepy cattle trading settlement immortalised on the page by the sentimental pastoral poet A.E. Housman, however, was triggered by the construction of a station on the mainline between the west midlands and the south west.

Sat at the bottom of the Lickey Incline, the steepest gradient on the UK’s railway network, the opening of Bromsgrove’s Railway Station facilitated the construction of the first tracts of the pre-First World War commuter housing which cluster around the town centre, along its major roads and near the station itself. Which set in motion the development of the town as an affluent – and rather staid – outpost of the West Midlands conurbation’s suburbia which defines its character to this day.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the gpx. from Dropbox

I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.

Thankfully, the fact that Bromsgrove Station was constructed on the edge of the town means that you don’t have to actually go into it to begin the walk. Since railway electrification was extended to the town from Birmingham in 2018, every second Cross City Line train leaving Birmingham New Street Station has terminated at Bromsgrove. Meaning that it is incredibly easy to get to the starting point of the walk from central Birmingham. Trains travelling north from Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford also stop there. Alternatively, and if you do fancy visiting Bromsgrove (in fairness the fascinating and moving Engineer’s graves from the earliest days of the town’s railway industry are well worth a look if passing through), then the Station is well sign-posted from the town’s bus station (with regular services to Worcester, Redditch, Kidderminster and Droitwich) and is just over a miles walk.

After just over one hundred metres, turn right again onto St. Godwald’s Road. After a short while you cross a bridge carrying you over the railway.

Then continue walking for several hundred metres past scattered suburban housing estates pepper potted amongst several of the numerous sports clubs which are a fixture of Bromsgrove’s edgelands. Be careful to mind the cars on this lane as some travel quite fast, and don’t always anticipate other road users might not be driving.

Presently you come to a T-junction, at this point take the right hand turn and walk a short way along Lower Gambolds Lane.

Shortly after this a footpath sign is reached on your left hand side pointing off into the fields next to a farmhouse style building.

Turn off the road here and use the pedestrian bridge to cross the small brook and head across the field.

There are sturdy, quite recently fitted gates in place to show you that you’re headed in the right direction.

Keep walking across the fields towards a house and outbuildings visible on the brow of the hill.

At the top there is another gate leading out onto a tarmacked lane.

Turn right onto this road and follow it a short distance, turn left at the bend in the road, and follow it down a short but quite steep hill.

At the bottom you will reach a bridge, this bridge carries cars and other road users over the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.

Here you are roughly halfway up the impressive Tardebigge Flight of locks which takes the canal to the level of the Birmingham Plateau before it flows into the city. With 30 locks, encompassing a total of 3.6km of canal, which serves to raise the water a total of 67 metres across the flight, they are the longest span of locks in the whole of the UK. A substantial engineering achievement when the navvies cut them in the late 1800s and early 1810s allowing boats to travel from what’s now West Midlands County and further north down to the River Severn and on to Bristol.

Cross over the bridge and turn onto the towpath on your left. From here the next section of the walk – covering a couple of kilometres – is quite straightforward as you just follow the canal footpath.

As you walk the extent of the gradient which the locks enable the boats to go up and down is apparent. The path is not steep at any point, but heading north towards Birmingham the fact you are ascending is apparent.

Whilst walking there are several interesting pieces of canal architecture to look at, like cottages built during the canal’s life as a major economic artery which it is worth taking in.

As is the engineering of many of the locks, and the canal itself.

After walking for some time, a large bank of earth appears on the right hand side of the path. Behind this sits the vast 100,000 metre square expanse of the Tardebigge Lake, a completely artificial reservoir, 12 metres in depth at its deepest point, built to supply water to the canal. It was this constant, steady, flow of water in all but the driest conditions which made the canal the first inland permanent way.

Presently the towpath rises high enough to enable walkers to peer across the water. It makes for a somewhat bleak vista, especially on a cold, grey day, when the trees have lost their leaves. Today the reservoir’s only main purpose is to supply the canal, with a limited number of slots for hobby fishing, but in decades past an angling club connected to the Cadbury’s chocolate factory in Bournville south Birmingham used to rent the rights to fish there. A prime example of how West Midlands people have long spilled out into the surrounding counties in their leisure time.

Immediately adjacent to the towpath, just above where the reservoir lies, is a tall, somewhat imposing, brick built building recently converted into several private homes. This is the former, very well preserved, steam powered pumping station for the canal. Coal fired steam engines were crucial to mataining a constant, consistent level of water in the canal, overcoming weather conditions and seasonality, enabling the watwerway to be used for trade in all conditions. The Tardebigge Engine House once housed a huge Newcommen steam engine whose massive beam was housed in the tall central part of the building. This was removed after the equipment became surplus to requirements in 1915 and later the building enjoyed an afterlife as an entertainment venue. In the 1970s and 1980s the building was an acclaimed nightclub for a time, specialising in soul, funk, disco and towards the end of its existence, acid house. In the 1990s it became a pub called The Tylers Lock which operated until 2007 when it closed down to make way for the residential development occupying the building today.

Following the Engine House, the towpath enters a brief flat section, before reaching the imposingly large Tardebigge Top Lock. This is the final lock in the flight and is twice the height of any of the others.

The view looking behind you is good at this point. It is quite striking from the top of the lock flight just how much the land rises. Whilst the lock keeper’s cottage, including plaques marking the foundation of the Inland Waterways Association in 1945 is worth stopping to admire.

Also worth taking in, is – St. Bartholomew’s – Tardebigge’s incredibly grand, imposing and unusual parish church perched on the brow of a steep ridge overlooking the canal. It was constructed in 1777 a generation before the canal reached the area.

Beyond the Top Lock the mouth of the 580 metre long Tardebigge Tunnel yawns around a bend.

On the other side of the canal from the towpath stand an interesting cluster of warehouses and boat repair stations, often with a small flotilla of narrowboats surrounding them. Many of these structures still perform their original function of fixing up the boats plying this section of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.

Like so many canal tunnels constructed in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries the Tardebigge Tunnel lacks a towpath, requiring anybody who wants to traverse it without a boat, to go “over the top”. Here the towpath runs up onto the old road between Bromsgrove and Redditch.

It is worth pausing here to look back at the view of where you have come from and St. Bartholomew’s Church.

Then once you are ready to continue on your way, turn right and head a short way down the road towards a cluster of houses gathered just above the marina.

Here on your right is a snicket running along the side of one of the houses marked (albeit not especially clearly from the direction you are coming) with a footpath sign.

Follow this footpath a short way into a stand of trees and before you, you see the new road between Bromsgrove and Redditch, though you will have heard it first.

This wide dual-carriageway has the appearance of a quasi motorway, and was constructed a little over a generation ago to promote the growth of the nearby Redditch new town which expanded greatly in the 1970s and 1980s.

Waiting for a gap in the traffic, you can head down a short flight of steps onto the hard shoulder and then across the carriageway to the central reservation.

Here if the road going in the over direction is clear you can cross to the other side and head up the opposite set of steps.

Here again you’ll pass through a copse on top of an embankment and out onto a small field.

Cross the small field, following the outline of the path in the direction of a red brick house.

Look to exist the field onto the road beyond via a gate located on the left side of the red brick house.

Here to your left is a lane branching off and you turn down here.

Presently on your left hand side the canal becomes visible again through the trees. After walking for several minutes you come to a t-junction. On the far side of the road a scattering of canal related buildings and narrowboat moorings are visible.

Next to you on your left there is a bridge over the canal. Cross over this and walk along the lane running behind the row of buildings, some residential, some the offices of a canal boat hire and services company, running along it.

A short way past these buildings there is a waymarked sign pointing through a hedge on your right hand side. This narrow pathway leads back onto the towpath.

The next section of the walk takes you through some of the most pleasant rolling countryside on the route.

On this relatively remote and tranquil section of the canal it is quite common to see various forms of wildlife. I saw a couple of herons poised on the towpath in wait for fish, that swooped off as I approached, for instance.

This said the presence of the grim red roofed hulk of a prison, and the ominous sight of several battery farming sheds, serves as a reminder that even here several miles from any towns or Birmingham’s southern fringe, this is very much a person-formed and tightly controlled landscape.

Presently another narrow old tunnel without a footpath is reached.

This necessitates another up and over the top detour, this time through a small copse above the tunnel’s portal, the path marked by a device to stop motorbikes or similar vehicles getting onto the towpath.

After the copse walk across an open field heading for the woods on the other side.

Once the woods are reached follow the path through the trees, heading steadily down a slope for several hundred metres.

Eventually the canal curving away from the end portal of the tunnel is reached and the walk rejoins the towpath.

The walk then continues along the towpath

The next section of the walk approaching the large comuterbelt village of Alvechurch is through fairly thick woodland, which gradually opens out on the right handside of the towpath as Alvechurch is approached.

Alvechurch in its current form was shaped very much by the canals and railways. Like Bromsgrove it is very much a satellite of Birmingham, but being smaller, and having had a station on the Cross City Line since 1980, it is far less dominated by cars with those working elsewhere, being more likely to get the train into the West Midlands conurbation. The existence of the station also offers you a means to end the walk early, should you wish to do so.

Canals have also shaped the village, both in their initial incarnation as industrial waterways, and in through their post Second World War revival as places for leisure.

Entering Alvechurch you pass by a large boatyard serving both hire craft and vessels with private owners.

As well as a marina recently cut into the side of the canal full of yet more waterways crafts.

The canal’s initial industrial purpose is reflected in how Alvechurch village has grown up around them. Numerous old buildings – including a number of pubs where lunch or refreshments can be sought – back onto the canal, clearly indicating that they have developed in tandem with it. Today many of them have a privately owned boat moored alongside, but in the past they may well have been service buildings for the canal.

On the far side of the village there is a winding hole allowing canal boats to reverse. Walk around this and continue to follow the towpath.

Presently the sound of heavy traffic can be heard once more. This is coming from the concrete bridge with the high parapet which stands across the canal. It is the bridge which carries the M42 motorway which runs from the M5 along the southern flank of Birmingham in the direction of Solihull, Coventry and Leicester.

The presence of such structures is a reminder of the strange hinterlands that lie on the edge of major built up areas. The strange mixture of the infrastructure which underpins everyone’s way of life, and bucolic hangovers protected by planning law, which comprises greenbelt areas.

Indeed, after passing under the M42 the walk enters one of it’s most scenic stretches. Which is also roughly the halfway point if you are intending the walk all of the way to King’s Norton Junction.

Trees on the wooded banks of the cut cast shadows in the water.

Nicely kept cottages with lovely garden’s cascade down to landing stages.

Red bridges sit prettily amidst the trees.

After a short while walking the towpath opens up onto the embankment of the “lower” of the two Bittell Reservoirs. This network of lakes entirely created by people exists to feed the canal with water. Their purpose is the same as at Tardebigge – to overcome the forces of untramelled and unmediated nature and keep the level of water in the canal consistant.

To my mind it is a somewhat windswept spot, but is generally prettier than the reservoir several miles back at Tardebigge.

Walking along it as well as the lakes themselves there is a great view out across the rolling landscape and hills of northern Worcestershire running to your right.

Having passed the Reservoirs the canal is now very close to the southern boundary of Birmingham.

After the reservoirs the cut reverts to being wooded.

However, you are approaching the suburbanised village of Hopwood which is surrounded by several hotels serving people visiting Birmingham or the wider West Midlands.

Here there is a decent canalside pub, positioned in such a way as to suggest that it is seeking to attract custom from both the waterway and the nearby A441 road, which carries traffic to and from the nearby motorway. I stopped for a late lunch there at a pretty reasonable price.

Continuing on the way, you pass under the A441 by bridge, and step out into a section of the walk which can only be described as “greenbelt proper”. The field pattern feels largely as if it hasn’t changed since the time of the Second World War.

After about 10 minutes walking the trees thicken again.

Here stands the southern portal of the Wast Hills Tunnel. Running for just under 2.5km it is the longest tunnel on the Worcester and Birmingham Canal and amongst the longest canal tunnels in the entire country.

As canal tunnels constructed in the 1790s go, it is quite wide, two narrowboats are able to squeeze past one and other. However, the roof is very low and there is no towpath. Though all told I would rather not walk 2.5km more or less entirely through the dark.

To avoid the tunnel the towpath climbs quite steeply up it’s wooded bank to the bottom of a lane.

A couple of derelict buildings which look like they might have originally had something to do with the canal stand here. They were tinned up and apparently alarmed on my visit, and had a slightly eerie vibe.

The lane leading from the canal quickly turns onto Wast Hills Lane, a very quiet road (I was only passed by a handful of cars whilst I was walking along it), which leads to the edge of Birmingham.

Turn left once you reach it and keep on walking.

A bit like the Lickey Hill and the Clent Hills further east the Wast Hills mark the boundary between the Worcestershire plain and the Birmingham plateau. Whilst they’re a fairly small and slight range of hills in the grand scheme of things, they are a lot higher and steeper than the rest of the terrain on the walk, so having covered quite a few miles to get this far I felt fairly tired going up them. Like their eastern cousins they are a bit of a leisure area, with footpaths criss-crossing them, however, they’re a lot quieter and less well known than either the Lickeys and Clents.

As I walked up the road there were several footpaths leading off on either side, which suggested the possibility of a cross country route into Birmingham. However, I could tell from my map that the most direct way to rejoin the towpath at Hawksley was by continuing up the lane, so I decided not to try and explore them.

Presently, after a fairly steep climb, the crest of the hill is reached.

On my right-hand side I was interested to spot the University of Birmingham’s Observatory. This building constructed on a shoestring in the mid-1980s allows staff and students from the University’s Astronomy Department to conduct their own studies into what is in outer space.

A few hundred metres beyond the observatory on the left hand side of the road stands an interesting very old looking partly timbered building, standing in parkland, which is also worth a glance at.

By this time however, you are reaching the edge of Birmingham.

At this point take care crossing the busy road which is in front of you. There is a good pavement on the other side.

Turn right once you’ve crossed the road and walk the short distance towards the entrance of Bracken Way.

Turn left down this short suburban road and then left again onto Longdales Road.

The first part of Birmingham that you walk through largely consists of privately built infill housing from the 1980s and 1990s. However, as you continue along Longdales Road you come to the edge of the Hawkesley Estate and begin to see the tops of tower blocks in the distance.

The Hawkesley Estate is one of the vast suburban estates Birmingham City Council built on the southern fringe of the city between the mid-1960s and the early-1980s.

Due to the depravation wrought by deindustrialisation and the resultant un and underemployment, as well as the steady impact of budget cuts upon the city from the late 1970s onwards, Hawkesley, like the neighbouring estates of Pool Farm and Primrose Hill gained a reputation for being “rough”. This reputation is largely unwarranted today, however, the area remains subject to significant material deprivation and whilst not unattractive, lacks all manner of amenities.

As you walk towards the centre of the estate the towers come closer and the houses become (relatively) older. Here and there parts of the estate have been demolished, often replaced with newer housing, some of it recently constructed by the council, much more of it by housing associations or private developers building on spec.

After walking a fair way along Longdales Road, a grassy roundabout with trees on it is reached, which is situated opposite the tower blocks and a community centre.

Walk around the roundabout, ignoring the first turning which leads out onto the A441, and head down the hill along Green Lane.

Green Lane provides a contrast between the estates’ newer kind of housing constructed very recently by Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust, which has constructed several small new council estates across the city in recent years and the estates’ original style of housing constructed around 50 years ago. The new estate is on the left hand side of the road, the old on the right.

At the bottom of the hill turn left and walk along Shannon Road. On your right, presently, you will see the recently reconstructed bulk of the Ark Kings Academy – Secondary Phase. As I was walking past a little after 15:00 the area was swarming with children in their early to mid teens. Incredibly well behaved in the main, and all dressed in the horrible and hideously fussy and over formal uniforms academy schools seem to delight in making their pupils wear.

Just after the school Shannon Road ends in a t-junction.

On the farside of the road, a little way further up, in the shadow of a small cluster of blocks of flats is a gravel path and a little row of white painted cottages which look like they long predate the modernist estate around them.

Cross over the road and walk towards these across the grass or around the paths as you prefer.

As you approach the cottages, the track which runs in front of them starts to slope down towards the steps that join the towpath.

This unpreposing suburban location is the northern portal of the Wast Hills Tunnel.

Walk down the slope and rejoin the towpath.

At this point as the waymarkers along the canal will tell you, you are only around 1 km from the finish of the walk at Kings’ Norton Junction.

Walk along the heavily wooded towpath and underneath a rather impressive road bridge.

Then continue along as the sides of the canal become resplendent with the backs of industrial units.

Presently you will see a modest road bridge with a couple of red doored holes punched in it. These openings were added during the Second World War to many canal bridges in the Birmingham area so as to aid the fire brigade in quickly getting water in the event of fires. They’re apparently still in commission today.

Just after the bridge there is a row of modern cottages adjoining a row of older cottages. Walk past this continuing along the towpath and you’ll walk alongside a narrow copse demarking Kings’ Norton Park Playing Fields from the towpath.

After the stand of trees you’ll see the canal widen into a t-junction with a tinned up building on one side of the towpath and a red brick bridge leading across to another towpath straight ahead.

This is Kings’ Norton Junction where Worcester and Birmingham joins the Stratford Canal. This is the end of the walk, but you could continue further into Birmingham along the canal from here.

The building – tinned up and apparently under refurbishment on my visit – is the old toll house where canal users had to handover money for shipping their cargo along the waterways.

From here turn left off the canal and walk across the playing fields in the direction of Kings’ Norton’s imposing and prettily sited parish church.

Getting Back

From King’s Norton Junction or King’s Norton Church, it is a 10 minuite walk up a short, but somewhat steep hill to King’s Norton Railway Station on the Cross City Line. This is served by trains going north into Birmingham New Street and south to Bromsgrove and Redditch. The station is actually in Cotteridge from where the 11 Outer Circle Bus can be caught. From the centre of King’s Norton it is possible to get the 18 towards Northfield and Bartley Green and the 45 and 47 along the Pershore Road via Cotteridge, Stirchley, Selly Park and Edgbaston into the city centre.