Distance: 6.5 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

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

Towpath walk from the large north Worcestershire village of Alvechurch on the Birmingham Cross City Line to Kings Norton canal junction in south west Birmingham.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Five Times Wealthier Than Birmingham

Like most people most of what I learnt at primary school has become a hazy mulch over the course of the past two decades. But one thing which did stick with crystal clarity – for some reason – is that in the late 11th Century at the time of the Domesday Book, Birmingham was valued as being good for a single pound of taxation each year. While Kings Norton about six miles south west of the city centre was deemed worth taxing at five pounds a year.

To state the obvious this means that nearly 1,000 years ago property comprising the settlement at Kings Norton was considered five times more valuable than that of the cattle trading hamlet of Birmingham.

Despite having been incorporated into Birmingham along with a large slice of northern Worcestershire in 1911, there still remains something distinctive about the area.

Whilst it can hardly be considered rural in character, Kings Norton fairly unusually amongst Birmingham’s suburbs, has a village green which has evolved over the centuries (as opposed to being an early 20th Century developer’s artificial creation like the green at Bournville) rather than a high street.

This large green space is dominated on one side by a Kings Nortons parish church St. Nicholas. Its spire dates from the 15th Century, and like so many parish churches in the Midlands region, it stands prominently on top of a hill that is high in comparison to many others in the area.

Near the church stand several other buildings which are unusually old by Birmingham standards. This includes a half timbered one room grammar school and the conjoined former Saracen’s Head pub and number 10 The Green building. These structures won BBC TV’s Restoration in 2004. A programme where different historical buildings competed for restoration funding. A format which with hindsight seems like the perfect distillation of the 2000s boom in both popular history and public participation television.

Alongside the church and the newer structures around the green these old buildings add to the sense that Kings Norton is still a north Worcestershire village as opposed to having been long incorporated into Birmingham.

The agent for Kings Nortons eventual incorporation was its location near key transport infrastructure. Not least the junction constructed in 1796 between the Worcester and Birmingham Canal (near its intersection with the ill-fated Lapal Canal from Dudley) and the Stratford Canal. The tollhouse for that stretch of canal stands to this day.

Later the railways brought factories as well as access for commuters into central Birmingham which led to the first major house building in the area. Then between the 1930s and the 1970s, following incorporation Birmingham City Council built a series of new peripheral council estates to house residents displaced by the slum clearances in the inner city.

Yet something distinctive, and a few of the qualities of a small north Worcestershire town or village remain, to a greater extent than in many other south Birmingham suburbs.

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.

Arriving at Alvechurch Railway Station exit left from the southbound platform via a set of steps onto the main road.

Once up the steps and onto the road turn left and cross the bridge over the railway line. Take care at this point as there is not a clear pavement and cars travel quickly in both directions along what is a narrow road.

Shortly after crossing the railway bridge on your left you come to a path sloping down to the canal towpath.

Once on the canal towpath turn right and walk underneath the bridge next to where you have come down.

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.