Distance: 7.1 miles

Difficulty of the Terrain: Medium

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

Almost entitely suburban walk, through lots of green spaces, between the Black Country towns of Halesowen and Tipton, following the route of the Dudley No. 2 Canal.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Walking the Bit of the Dudley No. 2 Canal With Water in It

Having spent a Sunday afternoon walking the drained and partly obscured route of the eastern section of the Dudley No. 2 Canal from Selly Oak to Halesowen, I rather fancied walking the section which is still in use as a canal. So, a few weeks later when my regular Wednesday off work came around, I decided to return to Halesowen and walk the rest of the No. 2 Canal up to Dudley and then on to Tipton where the Dudley Canal joins the Birmingham Canal Navigation mainline.

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.

On the morning I set-off I took the 11 bus from near where I live in Birmingham up to the point where Harborne turns into Bearwood on the Hagley Road and from there caught a Number 9 bus heading south west towards Stourbridge via Halesowen. After about 20 minutes on the bus I realised that it was heading down the dual carriageway near the ruins of Halesowen Abbey where it is possible to follow the path along the drained section of the canal to and across Leasowes Park. So, seeking to save myself the journey into the centre of Halesowen and back out again, I got off the bus at the next stop and walked the short way back up the dual carriageway to the modern housing estate just beyond the offices of Sandvik.

Here I turned onto the path which leads in short order to the semi-restored section of the Dudley No. 2 Canal and across the western edge of Leasowes Park. Having walked for a little over ten minutes, reaching the end of the park and the disused section of canal, I walked up a short steep slope leading out the park and on to the side of another main road.

From here I had to navigate my way to the beginning of the towpath of the fully navigable section. In front of me across the A-Road there were several roads winding down past industrial units and warehouses. The presence of gates on these roads however, suggested to me that I perhaps wouldn’t be especially welcome just wandering around there looking to see if I could find a way on the canal, so I really needed some further orientation.

A quick Google Maps consultation on my phone suggested that there was a footpath running in the direction of the canal a little further up the hill. This led me to walk a little up the hill along the side of the road to a set of crossing lights near a large out of town style branch of B&Q.

Once on the other side I headed a short way down a fairly steep access road, towards a gate leading onto a path way through some scrubby trees.

Having passed the trees I kept walking along a partially made path, along the backs of some modern industrial units into some woodland.

I caught my first glimpse of the canal, near the point where the navigable section began.

Beyond the line of the canal lay a marina full of boats. I thought to myself that it might have been nicer to have begun the walk amongst the boats rather than trudging through some fairly mediocre woodland behind a trading estate. A search of Google Street View once I returned home, though, disabused me of this notion. It does not appear possible to access the canal basin without a key for the gates, and there aren’t any especially obvious easy ways to get onto the canal from that side either.

So, I had in fact found the best way of reaching the canal. I walked for about five minutes in parallel with the waterway through the trees catching glimpses of it beside me from above.

Presently I came across a metal footbridge across the cut (old midlands term for a canal ditch) painted in black and white the colours of the old British Waterways Board. I walked across this and onto the towpath proper.

Having joined the towpath – turning right after the bridge – the walk sped up significantly. I moved quickly along the towpath through an interesting stretch of waterway, green and tranquil in many ways, but often punctured by the tops of the numerous factories and warehouse units which mark out this area of the Metropolitan borough of Dudley as still being very industrial.

There was also some quite fine street art sprayed, stencilled and tagged on the walls and canal infrastructure, amplifying the area’s quintessentially Black Country sense of being at once urban and surrounded by greenery.

After walking along the towpath for no more than half an hour I came to the Gosty Hill Tunnel. This half a kilometre long tunnel is an example of the immensely narrow earthworks cut by the Dudley Canal Company. It was constructed at more or less the same time as the long shut, now rather mythical Lapal Tunnel, which ran for an enormous 3.5 kilometres between Halesowen and Weoley Castle in Birmingham. So gives a good feel for what that – even narrower – tunnel must have been like.

Here the lack of towpath through the immensely narrow tunnel meant that I had to leave the cut so I headed up a short steep track onto the road.

Handily the road on top runs fairly parallel with the canal tunnel. Having reached the top of the hill I walked up a flight of very old looking steps between two houses.

Then reached a road junction with a fish n’ chip shop and a pub called The Lighthouse.

Crossing over I followed the road past The Lighthouse, through an estate of pleasant, immensely respectable seeming 1970s vintage semi-detached houses. The vibe and feel of the area distilled something of the essence of the Black Country. Scraps of suburbia, amidst a landscape of greenery and short sharp escarpments. There are lots of fine views right across the region on offer during this section of the walk.

At some point imperceptibly, I walked across the boundary between Dudley and Sandwell. The logo on street name plates and wheelie bins changed from the bubble font and swoosh of Dudley, to the six squares representing the six constituent towns of Sandwell. This reflects another characteristic of the Black Country, how fluid it is, with communities often very distinct in their own way, flowing into each other.

There is an incorrect stereotype of the Black Country as backwards, insular and impoverished. A region left adrift and becalmed by the passing of it’s industrial heyday. The areas passed through walking along the navigable section of the Dudley No. 2 Canal disprove this mightily. Busy factories and warehouses line sections of the waterway, whilst in others, new estates of large houses with gleaming cars from smart marques, or older houses nicely restored with beautifully tended gardens, look out onto the banks. This area, consisting of the towns and large villages of Halesowen, Old Hill, Cradley Heath and Rowley Regis, has a modestly prosperous feel. It’s residents in their spacious yet reasonably priced houses find work in the area’s factories and offices, or further afield along the Jewellery Railway Line in Worcester, Droitwich Spa, Kidderminster, Stourbridge or central Birmingham.

Nearing where the Gosty Hill Tunnel ends, allowing for the rejoining of the towpath, there stands a group of very nice 19th Century, or perhaps partially even older, buildings. A small industrial settlement clustered around either the canal itself or some long vanished industry, still lived in and forming a neighbourhood to this day.

Presently the canal re-appears on the right hand side.

Turning onto the towpath there is an interesting array of bridges to walk beneath.

The next section of the walk is generally greener with the bank broken up a bit less frequently by industry and more often by new housing estates. These tend to be very conventional in form and layout, but are usually quite small and integrated with the older buildings around them, providing a more cohesive sense of neighbourhood than is the case for many larger out of town estates.

As I was walking along this section of the canal a blue painted, beautifully tended, narrowboat chugging along at just under the speed I was walking accompanied me much of the way.

A really nice touch is the creatively designed waymarkers, seemingly wrought from iron, which line the route, serving simultaneously as signposts, historical plaques and a public art installation. They are a reminder that many of the lumps and bumps, shady canal inlets and tumbled down creeper snagged walls lining the route, were once places of toil for thousands of workers. Sadly they’re clearly ten to twenty years old now and are falling into disrepair, but they inventively tell the story of the canal’s heritage and the multitude of industries that used to line the route as well as serving a practical purpose assisting travellers traversing the towpath.

A personal favourite amongst the components of this canalside installation was situated on the side of a ruined tollhouse. It comprises a black and white pencil rendering of a man in mid-19th Century workers clobber wielding a spray paint can in place of the tools of his trade, tagging the words “Tollman Was Ere” in hot pink pink on the side of the building. A neat idea with a lot of warmth behind it, which ties the memory and presence of the workers who created and tended the canal, to its present use as a place of leisure, recreation and creative expression.

During this section of the walk the wild and dramatic escarpment of the Rowley Hills is in view. The highest point at 271 metres above sea level is Turner’s Hill, which is the highest point in the West Midlands county and bristles with two radio transmitters which are visible from miles around. On a clear day the hills are visible from the Malverns thirty miles away on the other side of Worcestershire.

A short distance further on after a bridge – just after a small newly built housing estate – the canal enters parkland.

This is Sandwell Council’s Warrens Hall Nature Reserve. It sits on the edge of the large village of Netherton in the Borough of Dudley. Today there is a wild beauty to the Nature Reserve which runs up to the Rowley Hills.

If you look closely at the tops of the mounds where on sunny days picnickers sit, children sit and sunbathers gather black dirt is visible. This is the spoil from the enormous Windmill End Colliery which worked the site up until 1928. That nearly 100 years later it’s waste is still visible in the landscape years of mining created, is testimony to the sheer volume of work that went into driving it’s tunnels 160 metres underground.

In front of the Nature Reserve as you continue along the towpath the remains of wharfs which once enabled boats to dock near the colliery and other industries such as sawmills, foundries and brickworks which once clustered along the banks of the canal in this area.

Today in the tranquil environment of the Nature Reserve with Black Country residents of all ages out relaxing and enjoying themselves by the waterside the area’s heavy industrial past seems very far away. But the entire landscape, that the people enjoy (not least the canal) and the settlements where they live their everyday lives, would not exist without the shadow of this carbon intensive history.

Presently the canal reaches a junction. Here the old meandering line of the Dudley Canal heads off towards the centre of Netherton and a long way round to the 2.9 kilometre long tunnel that takes it beneath Dudley to Tipton and the Birmingham Canal Navigation. Feeling like I needed some lunch by this point after well over an hour of walking, I decided to head a quicker, albeit less picturesque way into Dudley.

Turning right over the canal bridge I found myself near Cobb’s Engine House.

This structure which has left to become a picturesque ruin, once housed a Watt stationary steam engine which up until it was discontinued in 1928 when the pits shut, pumped 1,600,000 litres of water a day out of the coal workings into the neighbouring canal cuts. The steam engine, a rare surviving example of a kind which was used for water pumping and similar tasks from the late 18th Century onwards, still exists and is in working order in Michigan in the USA. It was purchased in 1930 shortly after the Windmill End Mine shut by Henry Ford who shipped it across to his industrial museum. An interesting example of an emerging form of hydrocarbon capitalism choosing to aggrandise itself with an obsolete key artefact from an earlier kind.

Adjacent to where Cobb’s Engine House sits lies the entrance to the Netherton Tunnel.

This grand piece of mid-Victorian engineering was cut in the 1850s and was the last tunnel of any substance dug on the UK canal network. Opened in 1858 it provides a short cut underneath the Rowley Hills and the Sandwell village of Tividale to the canal basin at Dudley Port and the Birmingham Canal Navigations. In contrast to the older tunnels cut in the 1790s by the Dudley Canal Company, this tunnel is big. So big that two narrowboats can pass each other going different directions inside and there is space left over for a towpath on either side. If I’d fancied it, I could have cut my walk short and headed to the Birmingham Canal Navigation this way. However, it was a nice day and I had no particular desire to walk over two miles through the dark for the best part of an hour, so I decided to leave the canal network and head into Dudley town centre.

Crossing the bridge over the branch canal leading to the Netherton Tunnel I walked down a path across a small clearing and through some trees on the edge of the Nature Reserve. Keeping on the left all of the way.

Having crossed another clearing a small modern housing estate appeared in view on my left hand side.

Presently the pathway I was walking along turned into a cul-de-sac called Gads Green.

At the bottom of Gadds Green I turned right onto St. Peter’s Road and began walking up the hill to Dudley Town Centre.

After walking for just under 10 minutes up the hill I came to a major roundabout.

Here I turned right onto Buffery Road.

After a short distance up Buffery Road I crossed over and turned left onto Summerfield Road.

The main items of interest here are some council houses from the immediate post-war period built in an unusual fashion with the upper storey apparently prefabricated from metal. Though, interestingly, whether due to renovation or some quirk of the original design, only a few houses are constructed in this fashion.

At the bottom of Summerfield Road, Buffery Park comes into view.

On entering the park I walked straight ahead on the path walking along the bottom of the park, which is flanked by some interesting cottagey inter-war era council houses.

At the far corner of the park I turned right and walked across the remainder of the park.

It’s quite a nice park, shady, with grassy areas and a large children’s playground. The ground in this area is pockmarked as if hacked at or suffering from subsidence from the centuries of mining which took place around Dudley.

At the far end of the park I turned right along Prospect Row and walked through an area of factories, warehouses and small building maintenance and plant hire operators.

On my left hand side the 18th Century steeples and post-war office blocks of central Dudley were clearly visible.

It’s more or less impossible to get lost at this point, but I turned left onto Blackacre Road and then found my way across the ring road into the town centre up Flood Street.

Having had lunch I spent a short while looking around Dudley. If Wolverhampton is the undisputed capital of the Black Country when Dudley vies with Walsall be the second city. Whilst the overall population of Dudley Borough is well over 300,000 the town itself can claim around 100,000. This gives it the feel of a large market town, which in many ways it is.

In the centre around the marketplace especially, Dudley’s heroic period as a cradle of industry in the 18th and 19th Centuries, as well as it’s genuine affluence in the 20th Century prior to the 1970s is visible everywhere making for interesting sightseeing.

It also has a curiously seaside, or holiday resort feel for a town that is roughly 70 miles from the sea. There is the old fashioned sweetshop Teddy Gray’s whose products are manufactured in the town through processes which haven’t changed since prior to the Second World War. There’s also the impressively well preserved castle on it’s hilltop, accessed from the town centre by a ski lift and a zoo. The zoo possesses internationally renowned animal pens by the libertarian communist architect, and Soviet emigre, Berthold Lubetkin who built similar modernist structures in the late 1930s for London Zoo.

There’s also two grand former theatre and cinema buildings down the slope from the zoo and castle, on the way out of town, which I walked past once I’d had my lunch. Heading down Castle Street where the market takes place, out along Castle Hill where the two former venues are situated, I paused to look at them for the time. The art moderne cinema is now a meeting place for Jehova’s Witnesses, well tended but inaccessible. The smaller Hippodrome Theatre on the other side of the road lies abandoned, albeit in apparently relatively good shape considering it has been out of use for decades.

Like many other Black Country towns such as Bilston, Wednesbury and West Bromwich, Dudley suffered from the severing of it’s railway connections in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For nearly half a century the former railway cutting sat overgrown on the edge of the town running alongside the rocky outcrop where the Castle lies. Today it is a hive of building activity as new offices, research facilities and educational institutions are erected on it. Like Bilston, Wednesbury and West Bromwich in the late 1990s when the first West Midlands Metro Line opened, Dudley will soon be reconnected to railed transport, when a new tram line extending tho Brierley Hill opens in 2023.

At the bottom of Castle Hill I turned left at a roundabout onto Tipton Road.

I walked along Tipton Road for around ten minutes.

Heading past Dudley Archives and the Black Country Living History Museum on the way.

Shortly after passing the entrance to the Museum I arrived at a busy crossroads where the Tipton Road crosses the Birmingham New Road.

On the other side of the road begins the small Sandwell town of Tipton where the Dudley Canals meet the Birmingham Canal Navigations mainline, heralding the end of the walk.

Having crossed the Birmingham New Road, I saw the bank of the Dudley Canal, recently emerged from the Dudley Tunnels, whose northern portal is inside the Black Country Living History Museum, on my left. I headed down a narrow pathway and rejoined the towpath turning right.

The canal water in Tipton is famously clear, and the day I was there was no exception.

I walked a short way alongside the incredibly clear water to a junction in the canal. Here I turned left and walked a short way to a footbridge.

Once on the other side I had to double back on myself and walk back to the junction, which was a bit annoying, but only added a few minutes to the journey. Continuing in the direction I was already travelling in at the junction I headed towards the centre of Tipton.

he centre of Tipton is a pleasant canalside green space called Coronation Gardens, which is presided over by a statue of the “Tipton Slasher” an early 19th Century bare knuckle fighter who hailed from the town and was champion of England for many years.

The area around Coronation Gardens is lovely with some nice canalside houses in inventive styles and benches where you can sit and look at the wonderfully clear water. Nearby on the other side of Owen Street is The Fountain Inn. This canalside pub is an old school Black Country boozer, but one which has moved with the times offering an outdoor terrace by the canal, and a small range of good beers which everybody (who likes beer) will be able to find something they appreciate. It’s also, despite it’s old fashion qualities and aesthetic not the kind of pub where anybody is going to mind you having a soft drink or asking for a cup of tea. Reputedly – in classic sportsman style – the Tipton Slasher bought the pub with his fight prize winnings and retired there.

Getting Back

From the Fountains Inn you can either head back straight to Tipton Railway Station which offers trains back towards Birmingham or on towards Wolverhampton, as well as buses to West Bromwich and elsewhere. Or you can continue along the Dudley Canal towpath a short way from the pub to where it meets the Birmingham Canal Navigations mainline. Having walked all this way there is a short route back towards the station along the towpath of the Birmingham Canal Navigation which takes no more than ten minutes. You turn left where the Dudley Canal joins next to The Old Brush Bar and Grill, a recently refurbished family orientated desi pub. The railway line runs along an embankment adjacent to the canal so it’s difficult to lose your way.