Update: The Crooked House pub closed in August 2023 and has since caught fire. This means that it is not currently possible to visit the location. It remains to be seen what is done with the ruins.

Distance: just over 4 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps

Highly varied mixed urban, suburban and exurban walk from the centre of the Black Country town of Dudley to the famous slanted, Crooked House pub on the edge of the village of Himley.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

The Public House Squiffier Than Its Patrons

Courtesy of the 1972 local Government Act, The Crooked House pub at Himley, today stands literally metres from the “official” edge of the Black Country, a mere stone’s throw across the boundary of the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley in South Staffordshire District.

Despite this quirk of local administrative geography, it is hard to think of a more solid Black Country institution than the Crooked House.

Originally constructed as a farm house in 1765, at a time when, undoubtedly, the distinctions between “public” and “private” houses was nowhere near as tightly drawn as it is today, by 1830 the building has indisputably become a pub.

By this time subsidence from the centuries of extensive – and in places intensive – coal mining undertaken around Dudley, had led to half the building beginning to steadily slide into the ground. Today one end of the initially level building sits 1.2 metres lower than the other.

This led to the property being commonly named the “Siden House”. “Siden” meaning crooked in the form of Black Country dialect traditionally spoken in Himley.

I first became aware of the Crooked House some years ago when I watched “Get High” a half hour video essay on what it is like to be an architecture critic with a fear of heights (heights being a phobia I also possess) created by Jonathan Meades for one of his BBC 2 series in the mid-1990s on Youtube.

The programme begins with a surrealistic sequence featuring Meades (who has family ties to the Black Country town of Oldbury and Worcestershire more widely) order a pint in the pub’s sloping bar and experience some of the optical illusions that the pub is known for. Even for those who have not spent a long afternoon imbibing its wears. These optical illusions are akin to a “gravity hill” and include seemingly poltergeist type activity like empty glasses sliding across tables and marbles rolling up the bar.

In the 1940s the building came very close to being demolished, not least because the subsidence had rendered it unsafe. The Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries company (now Marstons) bought the pub and undertook works to make it safe. No doubt realising that in the post-Second World War world of increasing leisure time, disposable income and personal mobility (roughly two decades before the introduction of breathalyser tests on the UK’s roads…), opportunity to visit the Crooked House could be a major draw for daytrippers.

Which it very much remains to this day.

The Walk

Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps

This walk to the Crooked House pub in Himley begins at Dudley Bus Station.

Overlooking Dudley Castle, Dudley bus station is a major Black Country transport hub.

From the bus station take the left hand exit towards Dudley’s market square.

Walk a short way along the road towards the yellow shop front of a branch of Heron Foods, and a crimson painted pub called The Castle.

Opposite these buildings turn left and walk into Dudley’s characterful marketplace which is very much the heart of the town.

If Wolverhampton is the undisputed capital of the Black Country then Dudley vies with Walsall to 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. 

Leaving the marketplace behind, you head uphill along Dudley High Street.

At the top, having crossed over several intersecting roads stands the so-called “top church” of St. Thomas and St. Luke.

Passing the church you reach the brow of the hill.

Continue walking as the road begins sloping downhill past a branch of ASDA on your right hand side.

After some distance heading downhill you pass a major interchange. Here there is a pub called The Lamp Tavern on your left.

Continuing down the hill you are rewarded with an excellent view across Worcestershire to the south and Shropshire to the north, across the little slither of southern Staffordshire that lies due west of Dudley.

A little further you come to a major road called Wellington Road, which off to your right uphill towards a set of council built high rise tower blocks.

Turn right and walk uphill towards these tower blocks.

Along the way you pass a small gurdwara named after Guru Nanak Singh Sabha on your right.

A little way after the gurdwara, turn left and walk a short distance along Maughan Street.

Here you cross over the road next to a small roundabout.

Then carry on straight down Russells Hall Road past some 1960s vintage flats and houses and patches of grassy parkland

Keep on walking along Russells Hall Road for a considerable distance.

This entire section of the walk consists of estates of houses built between the 1950s and mid-1970s, with an interesting array of post-war suburban housing styles, as well as other public buildings such as schools and a Co-op supermarket in a building that may once have been a pub or a working men’s club.

Presently you reach the end of Russells Hall Road.

Here, turn left and walk uphill for some distance.

You are still in an estate of houses and low rise flats which look like they were constructed in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

In the distance the chimneys of Dudley’s massive Russell Hall Hospital are visible on the horizon, whilst to the left you can see the flats you passed near on the edge of the town centre, on top of their hill.

Towards the top of the hill there is a snicket on your right hand side.

Walk down this snicket and past a metal device put in place to stop motorbikes and other vehicles.

Behind this there stands a junction where footpaths go off in several directions.

Turn left and walk a little way uphill.

Soon the path forks, with the smaller branch on the right running steeply uphill.

Take this smaller steeper branch on the right uphill.

This path runs through a thicket of trees partway up the side of Barrow Hill.

Barrow Hill is the surviving core of a prehistoric volcano, extinct for hundreds of millions of years. It’s tough rocks, which are of a similar vintage to those that comprise the Malvern and Abberley Hills south west of Dudley, have survived erosion much better than the newer softer rocks which surround them.

Leaving the trees the path slopes steadily downhill.

The landscape in this area on the edge of Dudley is unusual and striking. There is something of a wild timeless quality to it, as if you could just as easily round a corner and happen-upon: medieval outlaws “on the country”, a defeated Early Modern monarch escaping justice, Victorian workers tramping to and from a mine or a quarry, or twockers in the 1980s or 1990s setting alight the latest vehicle they have taken for a joyride.

Near the bottom of the hill you enter woodland again.

Turn right here and head down a green lane.

Keep on going straight, and soon you reach a small pool of water surrounded by trees on your left and a set of electricity pylons straight ahead.

Head along the path towards the pylons.

There is a fence line and a gateway just before you reach them.

Then head along the path on the path beside one of the legs of the pylons.

Beyond the pylons you pass through a gate onto a short residential cul-de-sac.

Walk to the end of the cul-de-sac.

Here there is a main road.

On the far side of the main road there is a row of new red brick houses looking out onto the paddocks and heathland on the edge of the West Midlands conurbation.

Walk along this road as it slopes gently uphill.

Near the top of the hill stands The Forge pub, a reminder of how industrialised the area once was.

Having passed the pub, carry on downhill.

The road was fairly quiet when I walked the route and there are reasonable grass verges most of the way along, but it is worth taking care.

Presently you pass a cemetery on your right.

Shortly after walking past the cemetery you reach a main road.

Cross over the main road and walk up a residential road called Guys Lane.

The road slopes steadily uphill.

After five to ten minutes walking you reach B4176, Dudley Road.

Turn left when you reach it and start heading downhill.

There are some impressive views across a series of short pointy hills, comprising the fringes of the suburb of Borough of Dudley suburb of Lower Gornal.

At the bottom of the hill you pass a filling station.

Just after the filling station on your left the sign for the Crooked House pub appears.

Next to the sign there is the start of a driveway which leads to the pub.

Turn left down the driveway.

Follow the drive for some distance.

The pub is located in the middle of an unusual area. Very much an edge land, it falls partly in South Staffordshire District (where the pub lies) and partly in the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley.

This gives it a neglected, possibly even slightly seedy feel. The area is home to numerous landfill sites, both historic and current, and it is clear that there is plenty of freelance dumping of waste in the area as well…

The road is almost entirely enclosed by fences stopping people getting into the woods, and climbing up onto various old railway embankments and bridges, which once served some long vanished industry in the area, and from accessing the landfill sites. On paper there are public footpaths in the area, in practice I do not think that it is viable or safe to access where they supposedly run.

That said, people clearly do make use of it. A couple of lads were tearing about on motorised scramble bikes when I walked the route on a sunnyish Sunday afternoon in early March. There are even people so minded as to set up surrealistic art installations just off the path.

Presently you round a bend in the track near the towering cliffs of a working landfill site.

Then shortly after this the pub comes into view. And it is just as lopsided as you would expect.

Getting Back

To return from The Crooked House at Himley, I would advise heading back up the driveway you have walked down. Whilst there are supposedly footpaths in the area which lead a short way south to the edge of the town of Kingswinford, and their locations are marked on the map, I could see no sign that these paths were intact and accessible. Once back at the B4176 main road, I would advise heading to Gornalwood, a nearby suburban centre, to get the 17 or 27 bus back to Dudley bus station. This involves crossing over and turning right onto a road which slopes uphill. Part way along turn left and then follow another road flanked with suburban semis and bungalows for some distance. Here you eventually come to the road into Gornalwood which has numerous bus stops from which buses into Dudley can be caught.

It is also possible to get buses via Kingswinford to Stourbridge. The 17 bus also goes there. Stourbridge has the advantage of having railway stations, but unless you are going down towards Worcester, given that Stourbrdige is on the other side of Dudley Borough this probably does not offer much advantage over a fast bus from the centre of Dudley up towards Wolverhampton or across to Birmingham.