Distance: 8 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Mostly towpath walk along the Birmingham branch of the Grand Union Canal from Solihull to Digbeth on the edge of Birmingham city centre.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
Grand Union Into Birmingham
In 1793, halfway through the prime sixty year period in the late 18th and early 19th Century when canals were rapidly constructed across the English Midlands, a canal between Digbeth then on the edge of Birmingham and the county town of Warwick was authorised. It was called, with out any particular originality, the Birmingham and Warwick Canal.
From Warwick it was possible for bargees to proceed steering their crafts as far as London. Sailing down a network of canals built and maintained by a large inchoate group of companies.
The canal was initially successful, providing a fairly direct link from the West Midlands to London. However, this did not last, with the canal’s profitability being chipped away at by rival routes and from 1833 by a Birmingham to London railway following a similar route.
Indeed, as early as the 1840s the canal’s flagging fortunes led its owners to countenance a scheme to sell the waterway to a railway firm for reuse of the canal as a trackbed.
This did not come to pass with the canal company staggering on instead. Over time the little canal companies between Birmingham and London amalgamated, coming over the course of decades to form a continuous line of integrated waterways between the two cities. A process which was completed in 1929 with the formation of the Grand Union Canal Company.
Unusually for a British inland canal the Grand Union was extensively modernised in the 1930s so as to better enable canal freight to compete with rail and road transport. All in all, the modernisation scheme was not a great success. Despite significant investment into widening the canal for larger boats, straightening it to enable faster journey times and enhancing infrastructure such as locks, freight traffic continued to fall vertiginously and had essentially ceased by the start of the 1970s. The end of this era is depicted in the (fairly dreadful but fascinating) 1964 film The Bargee, which centres around a commercial barge on the Grand Union Canal.
The afterlife of this attempt to bring the canal into the 20th Century, does manifest itself however, in the fact that the Grand Union is far more like a water based motorway than the sleepier, more meandering narrow canals that make up the bulk of the navigable inland waterways in the UK.
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.
This walk to Birmingham starts at Solihull Railway Station.
If arriving by train, descend from the station’s island platform to the subway below. Then turn right.
Once out on the road running past the station which is lined with bus stops, cross over the road and turn right.
At the top you come to a roundabout which you cross heading to your left.
Take the second exit on your left heading northwards around the edge of Solihull Town centre.
Presently you come to a second roundabout.
Also cross this heading left and again take the second exit on the left.
Keep on walking straight heading into the residential area of Lode Heath immediately north of Solihull Town centre.
Soon you come to the busy Severn Star Road which you cross, before continuing northwards.
Continue on heading straight along the road.
Presently you pass the Mill Pool Spinney nature reserve off to your left.
Here you are approaching the line of the Grand Union Canal which you follow into Birmingham.
Soon the wooded top of the canal cut comes into view.
You reach a bridge across the cutting. Cross over the bridge.
On the far side of the bridge on the right hand side of the road there is a path off to the right leading to beside the canal and the towpath.
Head off to the right down this path.
Once down on the Grand Union Canal towpath turn right.
You now follow the towpath for six to seven miles into central Birmingham.
The first section through the Solihull suburb of Olton is heavily wooded and through a deep cut.
After walking for some distance you emerge out of this section and pass under a bridge into Acock’s Green on Birmingham’s eastern fringe.
Keep on walking along the towpath for several miles.
Presently the white chimney of the Tysley Incinerator where most of Birmingham’s rubbish is burnt comes into view beside the canal.
The towpath runs near it and the wider industrial area within which it is situated marks the dividing line between the inner city and the suburbs.
Soon you approach and pass beneath the bridge carrying the Chiltern Mainline across the Grand Union, approaching the Acker’s Trust outdoor activity centre.
In some regards this part of the walk is quite green and leafy in terms of its feel, not unlike the earlier sections of the walk from Whitlock’s End to this point near Tyseley.
Soon however, it takes a turn for the more industrial. You approach Sparkbrook, with Small Heath also only a stone’s throw away on the other side of the railway tracks that run just to your right.
The canal is now fringed by industrial buildings, many still in use, others lying empty. There’s also a very tall old pub – not a pub anymore – over on the left in Sparkbrook.
Descending into Birmingham there are great views of the warehouses and workshops along the route. You pass a timber yard and some factory buildings hard at work.
Here you are very much walking along the southern fringe of Small Heath. Peaky Blinders fans, alongside waterways lovers and industrial heritage aficionados alike, will appreciate the old canal wharf, still intact with little awnings for the barges sticking out over the canal, as if the transport of goods by water only stopped yesterday.
Further on, underneath a sturdy brick bridge, you come to a flight of locks.
Before passing under a mighty girder bridge, carrying the railway south east, down to Solihull, Leamington Spa, Oxford, London and the south coast.
This leads round to a large pool where the barges – once – would presumably have waited and organised themselves.
Looking back you can see the top of the spectacularly grand church set-up by Anglican Christians in around 1900 to try and reach the people of inner-city Birmingham. Yet another example of Birmingham’s exuberant late Victorian and early 20th Century architecture. It looks like the kind of thing Charles I would have erected as a summer palace for watching plays, prior him deciding to wage war on his own people and Parliament cutting off his head.
Passing under a low road bridge there is a wonderful mosaic piece of public art depicting a narrowboat.
After the bridges you can tell that you are nearing Birmingham city centre. An 18th Century looking building stands amidst the warehouses.
A little further on, under another low bridge, you cross a steep humpbacked bridge over a redundant, but still existent branch canal.
You are now approaching the creative-cum-industrial-cum-property speculator’s delight, that is Digbeth.
The old industrial buildings brood gothically, and the street art, as exuberant as any Birmingham building project from circa 1900, brightens up many of the surfaces.
You pass a few more Peaky Blinder’esque wharfs.
Then on your right, snaking beneath you through its brick culvert is the River Rea. Another key waterway that gave life to Birmingham’s industries. This walk does not go along it, but catching sight of it as it flows up to eventually join the mighty River Trent and flow out to the North Sea, is a nice bonus.
Just after the Rea on your left hand side in Minerva works. Home to many of Birmingham’s creative spaces such as the East/Central European focused Centrala art gallery, events space, cafe. As well as media art space VIVID Projects, contemporary gallery and studio space Grand Union and studio, project and exhibition space Stryx.
Just after Minvera works on your left, stands a squat brick building, about three storeys high with what looks like a terrace of houses in front of it. It is almost directly inline with Birmingham’s iconic Rotunda, a cylindrical tower block which is more or less the sole surviving part of the 1960s incarnation of the Bullring shopping centre development.
The building before you is the Junction Works which was being used as offices by one of the Grand Union Canal Company’s predecessors at the dawn of the 19th Century. It is arguably the oldest office building (built as offices at least) in the city, if not West Midlands County full-stop. When I walked the route in spring 2022 it was in the process of being renovated into and art gallery, studio space and office space once more, by Grand Union (due to be completed in 2023).
Soon you pass first under a road bridge, then under a footbridge bridge.
On the far side turn hard to the left.
Then cross over a humpbacked bridge you have just walked over.
From the top of the bridge there is a superb view of the southeastern part of Bimingham city centre.
On the other side you are nearly at the end of your walk.
Follow the towpath a little further past a tiny community garden on your left.
Also on your left is a short quite steep ramp.
Turn left and walk up these steps.
At the top you are standing near the upper end of Digbeth where it turns into Birmingham city centre proper. This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
From where the walk ends there are a myriad of public transport options. The Cross City Line runs metres away from where you finish. Buses to east and south east Birmingham run along many of the roads nearby if you head south towards Deritend High Street and Cheapside. Moor Street, which offers trains heading back towards Whitlock’s End, as well as towards Solihull and up towards the Black Country is five minutes walk away. Buses from the city centre and New Street Railway Station are little more than ten minutes away, as are many of the city centre sights and attractions.