Distance: 5 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

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

Walk from central Wolverhampton to the National Trust’s Wightwick Manor, primarily along the towpaths of the Birmingham Canal Navigation Main Line and the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Manor House Socialism?

These days Wightwick Manor located on Wolverhampton’s leafy western fringe – as a volunteer proudly told me on my visit – is considered amongst the National Trust’s “top treasure houses”.

Interestingly when it was acquired by the National Trust in 1937 as an early donation to their “country houses scheme” it was relatively new having only been completed in 1893. The equivalent of the National Trust preserving a building from the late 1970s today. 

At the time it’s half-timbered early arts and craft style, William Morris wallpapers and paintings and other artworks by local artists from the Pre-Raphaelite School were pretty passe, becoming actively despised in the decades that followed.

Since the 1960s, initially in almost countercultural fashion, and over the last 40 years by the mainstream, the art of the middle to late 19th Century has been accepted into the canon of good taste. 

Wightwick Manor had been constructed by Samuel Theodore Mander, part of a family of Wolverhampton industrialists who owned a major paint and varnish manufacturer in the city.

There is a popular assumption that the great 18th and 19th manufacturing dynasties were entirely self-made people. An assumption which is typically false. The Mander family who had been major landowners and solid pillars of genteel society in the western Midlands since the middle ages, are rather more typical of those who seriously augmented their fortunes during the industrial revolution.  

Regardless, upon its construction Wightwick Manor was a strikingly modern house kitted out with central heating and electric lighting, despite elements of its design and styling harking back to pre-modern times. 

Many in the Mander family were interested in “progressive” ideas – broadly defined – and in Victorian times being a radical and a leftist often meant looking back to before industrial capitalism as towards a future beyond it. Despite having grown their wealth first through landownership and then through the efforts and creativity of others due to their control of the capital employed in industry, Samuel Theodore Mander and others in his circle, were drawn to the ideas of the libertarian socialist Oscar Wilde and William Morris (the latter of whom was also a Marxist). 

Wightwick Manor was designed by the architect Edward Ould to principals which Samuel Theodore Mander had heard Oscar Wilde expound at a lecture in Wolverhampton in 1884. Designs from William Morris’ company are prominent throughout the house.

Samuel Theodore Mander died in 1900 leaving the house to his son Geoffrey who was then just a teenager. It was he, who convinced the National Trust (through handing over a slab of shares in the family paint and varnish company) to take on the largely unaltered house in 1937. He and his wife continued to curate the house and act as tour guides to visitors up until his death in 1962.

In addition to being a pioneering National Trust volunteer Geoffrey Mander was probably the last local industrialist to be a Liberal MP, holding onto the party’s long standing safe seat of Wolverhampton East from 1929 until the Labour landslide in 1945. During that time he was one of the party’s lead spokespeople in foreign affairs. Unlike many of his fellow Liberals he appears to have had, had a clear and instinctive grasp of the reality and implications of fascism and in particular Nazism, being a strong supporter of both the League of Nations and a sharp critic of appeasement.

Indeed it is perhaps unsurprising that after his defeat to a Labour Party candidate in 1945 that he binned British liberalism off, in favour of joining the country’s main socialist party serving in later life as a Labour member of Staffordshire County Council. As business owners go, Geoffrey Mander seems to have been unusually favourably disposed to trade unions, having been willing to recognise the TGWU as a bargaining partner, and been willing to conceded to his workers benefits like pensions, healthcare and Saturday closure, as well as becoming one of the Midland’s first industrial employers to institute the 40 hour week in 1931.

Today, in addition to the house and gardens, Wightwick Manor is a noted centre for late Victorian pre-raphaelite and arts and crafts movement art. Works in the collection include paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Marie Spartali Stillman, Elizabeth Siddal among others, with the site being said to host one of the largest public collections of artwork by women artists in the country. Many of these works are in the house itself, whilst an outbuilding has been converted to host a gallery of work by painter Evelyn De Morgan and her husband, ceramicist William De Morgan.

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 the National Trust’s Wightwick Manor on Wolverhampton’s western fringe near the boundary with Staffordshire, begins at Wolverhampton Railway Station.

Upon leaving Wolverhampton Railway Station by its main exit onto the forecourt walk straight ahead towards the white suspension bridge leading into the city centre.

Just prior to reaching the bridge there is a footpath off to the left waymarked for the canal.

Turn left here, then right, to reach a pavement next to the busy St. David’s ring road around the centre of the city.

Once on the pavement turn right, walking beneath the bridge from the station across the road into central Wolverhampton.

Keep walking straight along the pavement on the other side of the bridge. Next to you on the right runs the Birmingham Canal Navigation Main Line. Which you soon will join.

Presently you come to a junction with traffic lights which you cross.

Here there is a small canal wharf surrounded by parkland. Turn right after crossing the road, then left onto the canal towpath.

Once on the canal towpath, keep heading right walking straight ahead.

The first phase of the walk is through a primarily industrial area on the edge of Wolverhampton city centre.

Then past the tall chimney of the city’s incinerator.

After that the canal runs through residential areas.

Eventually passing through nature reserves and park land towards the north of the city.

Here the towpath reaches the final lock gate where the Birmingham Canal Navigation Main Line joins the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal.

Just after the lock gate there stands a red brick bridge across the canal. Approach this bridge. 

Level with it off to the right there is a flight of steps. Walk up these steps.

At the top of the steps turn left and follow the path around for a short distance until you reach a bridge across the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal to your left.

On the far side turn left and begin walking down the towpath again as it runs along a wooded cut.

On the far side turn left and begin walking down the towpath again as it runs along a wooded cut.

Keep on walking along the towpath as it passes through a green corridor in suburban north Wolverhampton.

Presently you pass beneath a distinctive metal, trestle style, former railway bridge.

On the far side of the bridge you enter a stretch of canal – still inside Wolverhampton – but with a distinctly rural feel.

Approaching the edge of the city and the boundary with Staffordshire for real, you come to a road bridge.

Here there is a path running off to the right up beside the road and off the towpath.

Turn right here and exit the towpath. Once on the pavement turn right and walk a short distance straight ahead to a crossroads.

Upon reaching the cross roads, walk across the road to the left.

On the far side there is a crossing point opposite the Mermaid pub.

Having crossed over the road here, turn left.

Walk straight along the road for a couple of minutes (passing the bus stop which’ll take you back to Wolverhampton).

Presently on the right there is a gap in the hedgerow and a gate marked as a pedestrian access for Wightwick Manor.

Turn right here, then right again once on the property’s driveway.

Walk up the hill to the admissions hut and the entrance to the National Trust house and grounds.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

At the time of writing (January 2023) the Number Nine bus from Bridgnorth to Wolverhampton provides an hourly service from the bus stop beside the Mermaid pub just down from Wightwick Manor. The last one is a relatively early 17:32, but this is after Wightwick Manor closes for the day. The bus runs back into central Wolverhampton (a bus stop on the other side of the road is called at by services running the opposite way back towards Bridgnorth). Once in Wolverhampton city centre the bus runs around the edge of the main shopping centre finishing at the bus station a stones throw from the Midlands Metro and railway station.