Distance: Around 6 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 between Bromsgrove and. The walk takes in Tardebigge Locks, Tardebigge Church, two canal tunnels and the village of Alvechurch.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Journey to Ambridge?

Connected to the West Midlands conurbation by the Cross City Line, Alvechurch today is an affluent dormitory for Birmingham.

However, as a rural centre for the farms and smaller villages surrounding it, it has a long history and pedigree. In the late 8th Century the village was given to the Bishops of Worcester by the king of Mercia. The bishops constructed a palace at Alvechurch which existed until it was demolished in the 17th Century.

In the secular sphere the village grew in importance at the end of the 18th Century when it was bisected by the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, bringing it into the then burgeoning national waterways network. A firm connection with the canal remains central to the village and its identity to this day. Which is little surprise, as Alvechurch is bisected by the canal and home to several marinas.

Despite its ecclesiatical and industrial past, as well as its present tight integration into Birmingham and the wider West Midlands, Alvechurch has a strong connection to how many British people see the countryside. It was where The Archers TV radio serial creator Godfrey Baseley was born in 1904. Something which lends credence to the idea that the fictional Ambridge is located somewhere in an imagined Worcestershire. Godfrey Baseley retained ties to Worcestershire throughout his life, dying in Bromsgrove in 1997.

The Walk

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

Bromsgrove Station was constructed on the edge of the town meaning 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 reached.

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.

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 would have been working buildings.

Reaching the marina is a sign that your journey has nearly reached its end.

There is a road bridge at the far end of the marina on the edge of the village.

At this point you can either continue a little way further along the canal towpath into the centre of the village, or you can turn right and head off the towpath onto the road.

Once on the road turn right. Take care here as the road is narrow, quite busy and does not have pavements.

A a short distance off to your right you can see Alvechurch Railway Station.

To reach it walk a little further crossing a bridge over the line below.

Just after the bridge there are steps leading down to the station to your right.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

From Alvechurch Railway Station it is possible to get trains to Birmingham and to Redditch. At Barnt Green you can change trains to catch services in the diection of Bromsgrove, Worcester and Hereford. There is also a limited bus service to Birmingham, Redditch and elsewhere.