Distance: 6 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

Get the routes: via Ordnance Survey Maps

Canal towpath walk in the West Midlands between the two Black Country town of Stourbridge and the iconic Merry Hill shopping centre.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!

I was born several years after the Merry Hill shopping centre in Brierley Hill near Dudley opened, and about a decade after the Round Oak Steelworks which stood adjacent to it shut.

As a young child in the 1990s I vaguely recall being taken there a few times, including a proper youngster to see the monorail, which shut in 1996. Later as a teenager studying GCSE Geography in the mid-2000s I remember being shown a grainy, crackly, VHS in class about the negative impact Merry Hill’s opening had upon the viability and vibrancy of nearby Black Country town centres in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I then largely did not think about the place for a decade or more until I read Sam Wetherell’s brilliant Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain during the second year of COVID.

In the book Sam Wetherell (who is a lecturer in the History Department at the University of York where I studied for my undergraduate degree, though he was not on the faculty then) uses Merry Hill as a case study of how the big, car-centric, purpose built shopping centre emerged as a critical new space in post-1970s Britain.

Like it’s peers the Trafford Centre just south of Manchester and Meadowhall on the northern edge of Sheffield, Merry Hill was ostensibly built as a regeneration project.

The Round Oak Steelworks established in the early 19th Century by the family that became the Earls of Dudley in 1860 dominated the town of Brierley Hill’s economy until 1982 when it shut. A major victim of the early 1980s recession deliberately induced by “monetarist” policies introduced by the Thatcher government from shortly after they won power in 1979 and began laying the ground for a major socio-political counter offensive against the labour and social movement’s gains during the 20th Century.

Of course, as is often the way with regeneration projects, Merry Hill was not quite what its developers the Richardson Brothers claimed. Following Round Oak Steelwork’s closure in 1982 the area it was situated and its environs was declared an “Enterprise Zone” by the national Conservative government. Pointedly, the area included greenfield land used for farming, characteristic of the incredibly mixed use that is typical of the Black Country.

It was on this farm land that Merry Hill was constructed, with the first shops opening in 1985, and the whole complex, including an early multiplex cinema having opened by 1988. The actual area beside the Stourbridge Canal where the steelworks stood had to wait until 1990 before the first offices, bars and restaurants opened on its site as part of the “Waterfront” development. In the form of a Tata Steel railway depot which occupies another part of the site, it retains connections to the metals industry to this day.

Now well into its fourth decade Merry Hill is a well established part of the West Midland’s landscape. Its impact upon the surrounding areas is inarguable, however, it could be said that as in the United States the shopping centre, which is recent years has itself faced pressure for the growth of online shopping and a long squeeze upon incomes alike, is now the town centre for the part of the south west Black Country where Merry Hill sits. It continues to reinvent itself and is an essential place to visit for anyone who is interested in the modern English Midlands.

The Walk

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One of my favourite things about visiting Stourbridge is the train ride between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town. Stourbridge Junction is the mainline station where frequent trains run between Worcester and Birmingham, and then onto Dorridge, Stratford-upon-Avon and several times a day down to London. Stourbridge Town is a little branch line station a tad over a kilometre from Stourbridge Junction, immediately adjacent to the town’s bus station. Shuttling between them every 10 minutes is the Stourbridge Town Shuttle. It is rare enough in the UK these days to have a little inter-urban branch line serving a single stop in a town centre, it is even more unique that they have their own bespoke train unit serving them. Possibly the most unique train in regular service in the country, the Parry People Mover (British rail class 139) is a tiny, incredibly efficient gas powered railcar. Capable of carrying up to around 40 people, it constantly shuttles the short way between the mainline station and the town centre. Check it out below:

Despite having operated very successfully in Stourbridge since 2009 the idea has yet to catch on elsewhere in the UK, perhaps because of the lack of appropriate railway lines to utilise the concept. Something which I think is a real shame. But anyway, onto the walk…

Having reached Stourbridge Town Railway Station exit from the single platform onto the concourse for the bus station.

Turn left and walk round towards the main terminal of the bus station.

Just before you reach the main terminal you’ll come to a flight of steps on your left which lead down into an underpass.

Once in the underpass walk across to the far side and then head up the left hand ramp onto St. John’s Road.

From here turn left down the side road immediately ahead of you onto Stourbridge High Street. As you walk to the High Street on your right hand side stands the Red Cone pub (a nod to the town’s historic status as a major centre of the glass industry) and a branch of the West Bromwich Building Society.

Once you reach the High Street, turn right and walk straight along it for about five minutes. Stourbridge has a fairly lively town centre and there are plenty of shops including a large branch of TESCOs in a shopping centre on the left of the High Street from which you can buy provisions for the walk if needed.

Presently you come to a y-shaped junction. The small square-like area here was at one time the town’s marketplace. On your left the tall red brick gothic tower of the old Stourbridge Borough Council Town Hall rises up gauntly.

Having reached this junction carry on straight across it and down the gently sloping road on the other side.

After a couple of minutes walking the road narrows into a short path which leads up an underpass.

Once inside the underpass turn right once you reach a small sunken square in the middle of it (I turned left at this point, but this was a mistake… Albeit not a disastrous one).

Having walked up the ramp onto the side of the dual carriageway, take an almost immediate left down Canal Street, just after you cross the road bridge over the River Stour. As you turn first the Old Wharf Inn and then the Bonded Warehouse are on your right hand side.

Presently as you pass these buildings and enter a long strip of roughly paved land serving as a car park the area takes on the familiar trappings of a canal terminus, with narrowboats visible on your right hand side.

Presently you come to one of these anti-moped and motorcycle gates which stop people driving onto the towpath. This marks the start of the Stourbridge Canal Towpath.

Once on the pleasant towpath the next mile or two of walking is incredibly straightforward. You just follow the line of the canal along the towpath.

It is a pleasant walk, with a few interesting sights along the way.

Suburban Stourbridge is pleasant, not least because the people are also incredibly friendly. I was walking along the canal on a busy Friday morning and practically everybody I passed who was heading in the direction of Stourbridge town centre cheerily said hello to me. Not something that you’d get in Birmingham, or indeed most parts of the West Midlands conurbation, nor for that matter walking in most parts of urban or semi-urban Britian.

Along the way you walk across several bridges leading into what once must have been wharfs for long shut and demolished factories or warehousing areas.

You also pass The Ruskin Glass Centre, a workshop complex which is home to numerous craft businesses working with glass, which continue to keep the flame of the town’s glass working traditions alight.

Presently you arrive at Wordsley Junction. This is crossed by a bridge.

Walk straight across the bridge.

On the far side turn right heading up the towpath past a series of lock gates.

This leads through suburban Stourbridge past a series of former glassworks, some retaining their distinctive, bottle shaped, conical cones. One of them is the Red House Cone, now the site of Stourbridge’s revived glass museum, and a place where glass is made to this day.

Presently after walking straight along the canal for some distance a medium sized modern factory with a tall, thin white chimney comes into view.

Here the canal forks. There is a brick bridge to your right, turn right here and cross over the waterway, continuing on the towpath as it runs past the factory to the right.

This is where the canal enters Brierley Hill. You follow the canal as it loops around before heading north towards Merry Hill Shopping Centre and the middle of the Dudley.

Sections of this part of the walk are very industrial, others are far more residential, a mixture of interwar council housing and more post-1970s privately built estates, in terms of their character.

Presently you reach a modern road bridge, and encounter lampposts for illuminating the towpath in the dark. This is the sign that you have reached the area around the gargantuan Merry Hill Shopping Centre.

The first stages of Merry Hill were constructed in the late 1980s ostensibly as a regeneration project to reclaim the site of the Round Oak Steelworks which shut in 1982.

This is not in fact the case. Rather the shopping centre was built on farmland beneath where the steelworks once sat.

Just before you reach the Waterfront Development (which is actually built on the steelworks site), off to the right there is a flight of steps which runs down to where the shopping centre stands.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

Merry Hill has its own bus interchange, with services going back towards Stourbridge with its railway stations, as well as into Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Dudley. As well as a wide array of towns and villages across the Black Country and out into south Staffordshire and north western Worcestershire. At some point in the near future Dudley will be connected to the West Midlands Combined Authority’s Metro tram network (this looked a year or two away at the time of writing in 2023). Brierly Hill will be connected up to the Metro at some stage, but probably not until the late 2020s at the earliest.