Distance: 1.4 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

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

How to get to Avoncroft Museum on foot starting at Bromsgrove Railway Station. The walk takes a little over half an hour and is mostly along flat, paved paths.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Heritage Building Sanctuary

Situated on Bromsgrove’s south western flank, Avoncroft Museum was founded in 1967 to preserve architecturally significant buildings from across the western Midlands at risk of demolition.

Today the museum, probably most famous for its working post windmill, sprawls across 19 acres including wildflower meadows, pasture, traditional varieties of apples and pears orchards and woodland as well as 25 historic buildings dismantled and transported to the site.

I have not been inside for well over a decade, however, as a child I was taken there many times in the 1990s and 2000s. I doubt it has especially changed, still being home to the historic buildings which range from rare examples of agricultural, workshop and commercial buildings from Worcestershire, Shropshire, Herefordshire and beyond. To a late medieval merchant’s house, a 1940s prefab from Birmingham lived in up until the 1980s and a tall fibreglass church steeple originally erected in Smethwick. 

As is common for living history and preservationist museums there are also a variety of little voluntary groups and societies who make use of the site. At Avoncroft this includes the national telephone kiosk collection and Bromsgrove’s miniature (albeit large enough to site on) model railway club.  

It was the late medieval merchant’s house however, which got Avoncroft going in the 1960s. It once stood in Bromsgrove town centre and was scheduled for demolition due to road widening. After a preservation campaign which attracted support from George Cadbury Jnr. the house was dismantled in 1962 and its pieces transported to the grounds of Avoncroft College (an adult education college for farm workers established by George Cadbury Jnr. which no longer exists) on the edge of Bromsgrove.

Here the structure sat under tarpaulins for a couple of years until a series of public lectures in 1964 led to public interest in restoring the medieval house. Here a slight family connection emerges once more, as after they moved to Birmingham in 1967 for a job my Grandpa took at the Selly Oak Colleges (another Cadbury family adult education establishment) my Dad vaguely recalls being taken out to spend a weekend camping at Avoncroft where the restoration was underway.

The establishment of Avoncroft Museum can be read as both a throwback to the “folk museum” movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries and (like Blists Hill, Acton Scott and Crich Tramway Village) as a quintessential example of late 20th Century British preservationism in action. 

While it is not on quite the same scale as some of the region’s other living history museums and more catholic and eclectic in terms of its geographical and chronological reach, Avoncroft does excellent work maintaining the buildings it has rescued to date, and continues working to rescue other neglected and threatened structures large and small.

Current projects include once commonplace, everyday buildings from across the western Midlands, and particularly Worcestershire, like: a dismantled threshing barn from northern Warwickshire, a Victorian cricket pavilion currently lying derelict in Worcester, an 18th Century former farm worker’s cottage also from near Worcester, a nailer’s cottage from which once stood in Bromsgrove, and an outdoor shelter once used by inpatients at a mental hospital. Proof that Avoncroft’s work preserving ordinary but important buildings continues just as it has since the 1960s.

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 from Bromsgrove Railway Station to Avoncroft Museum begins from the station forecourt.

Exit the platforms via the station’s footbridge, heading to the left once up on the bridge, and then walk down the steps to the entrance onto the station forecourt.

Once out on the forecourt turn left and walk across the car park.

On the far side there is a footpath leading through a fence onto a new building housing estate.

Upon reaching the road turn left and walk a short distance towards a stand of trees.

Here there is a tarmac footpath running off to the left. Turn left and walk along it.

Follow the path as it runs through the trees paralleling both the railway running south towards Worcester, Cheltenham and Bristol and also the estate of new build houses.

Presently you come out onto a road in an estate of new build houses. Here take a cul-de-sac running left and keep walking straight.

Turn left again onto a driveway at the bottom of which there is another footpath at the end.

Follow this footpath as it runs straight along the line of the railway tracks for quite some distance.

Presently you come out beside a road running down towards the scattered village of Stoke.

Follow the footpath to the right onto the road. Then walk along the pavement heading to the right, walking away from the railway line.

Walk along the road for some distance. Soon the pavement runs out, so take care, as while the road is pretty straight meaning that visibility is good both for you and for drivers, motorists do travel quite fast along it, and traffic even when I walked the route late morning on a Friday was pretty heavy.

Presently you approach a junction. Here, turn left down a quiet road.

Then pretty much immediately on your left you come to the entrance to Avoncroft Museum.

Turn left and walk along the museum’s driveway passing through the car park until you come to the entrance.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

To get a train either north back towards Birmingham or south towards Worcester and Malvern either retrace your footsteps, or head for the A38 which runs near Avoncroft, and follow it northwards until signs point off to the right towards Bromsgrove Railway Station. Bromsgrove is better served than many places in Worcestershire by buses but there is no longer a regular service to Birmingham. Buses depart from the town centre towards Redditch and Kidderminster as well as south towards Worcester.