Distance: 5.8 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: easy

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

Walk through the suburban towns and villages of the Black Country, mostly along canal towpaths, through Dudley to Tipton home of the famed 19th Century prize fighter William Perry aka the “Tipton Slasher”.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

“Tipton Slasher”

Before the Queensbury Rules regularised and codified boxing there was bareknuckle prize fighting. An altogether scrappier affair, a “sport” that was wildly popular, but also of dubious legality. 

During the period when bareknuckle boxing was at its most popular, bouts were sometimes fought in locations like Flash, at the northernmost tip of Staffordshire, where fighters, promoters and punters alike, could easily flee into neighbouring Cheshire and Derbyshire if the forces of the law approached.  

One of the masters of the form was Black Countryman William Perry aka the “Tipton Slasher”. Born in 1819, probably in Tipton, then in Staffordshire (about as far from Flash as you could get while remaining in the same county), hence the nickname. Willam Perry started as a prize fighter in his mid-teens, first entering the historical record as a slugger in November 1835.

During a prize fighting career which spanned more than 20 years Perry developed a formidable reputation as a fighter. Winning over half the fights that took place he took on many battlers from the Black Country and wider Midlands, but also others from far further afield.

While Perry fought his first fight as a teenager in London where he is believed to have worked as a navvy, he mostly lived in the Black Country. In the late 1830s and early 1840s when he was in his prime, the Fountain Inn on Tipton High Street which stands to this day, was considered “the Slasher’s headquarters”.

This success was not to last. After a defeat in 1857 Perry retired from fighting still only in his late 30s. In a pattern repeated by numerous later generations of sportsmen he became a pub landlord running pubs in Wolverhampton and Bilston. 

It was in Bilston where he died in 1880 aged 61. A reasonable age for a man of his time and impoverished origins. However, it was years of alcoholism, doubtless encouraged and abetted by his years as a pub landlord which proved his undoing.

Nearly 150 years after Perry’s passing the “Tipton Slasher” remains a local hero and legendary figure in his hometown. Memorabilia associated with him can be viewed at the Black Country Living Museum just over the municipal boundary in Dudley, a supposed photograph is the local history collection of Tipton Library and a painting stands proudly on the front of The Fountain Inn looking out onto the high street. In 1993 a statue of the “Slasher” was erected on a tall plinth in the centre of Coronation Gardens.

It was in conjunction with this statute that I first encountered the story of William Perry. Back in 2019 when I was volunteering at Sandwell community arts charity Multistory’s Blast! Festival. Here at a poetry walk I heard a tale which lifts the story of the “Tipton Slasher” from the realms of legend into those of myth.

The story is that proud Tiptonians secretly snuck up the hill to Dudley and stole the body of the Tipton Slasher seeking to repatriate it. This purportedly happened quite recently, with Martin Collinson, the Tipton local historian and author who claimed responsibility, claiming to have reburied Perry’s remains beneath the Tipton Slasher statue in Coronation Gardens.

Who knows whether this happened or not. As far as the church authorities who manage the deconsecrated, but still existent and recently revamped, St. John’s Church in Dudley where Perry was buried, his remains have not moved. But in its bizarreness, a story which in some ways mirrors that of William Booth the Perry Barr Forger whose body was supposedly moved from Handsworth churchyard, it is a true Midland’s myth and one which deserves to become remembered as part of the “Tipton Slasher’s” wider legend.    

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 Old Hill to Tipton, via Dudley, begins at Old Hill Railway Station.

Upon alighting the train exit the station via the northbound platform (direction of travel towards Birmingham Snow Hill) and cross the station’s car park.

Once out on the road turn right and walk a short distance uphill.

Soon on the left you come to a gap in the wall leading straight onto the towpath of the Dudley No. 2 Canal immediately after the Gosty Hill Tunnel.

Upon reaching the towpath turn left and begin walking. You continue straight along the towpath for approximately two miles.

Turning onto the towpath there is an interesting array of bridges to walk beneath.

The next section of the walk is generally greener with the bank broken up a bit less frequently by industry and more often by new housing estates. These tend to be very conventional in form and layout, but are usually quite small and integrated with the older buildings around them, providing a more cohesive sense of neighbourhood than is the case for many larger out of town estates.

As I was walking along this section of the canal a blue painted, beautifully tended, narrowboat chugging along at just under the speed I was walking accompanied me much of the way.

A really nice touch is the creatively designed waymarkers, seemingly wrought from iron, which line the route, serving simultaneously as signposts, historical plaques and a public art installation. They are a reminder that many of the lumps and bumps, shady canal inlets and tumbled down creeper snagged walls lining the route, were once places of toil for thousands of workers. Sadly they’re clearly ten to twenty years old now and are falling into disrepair, but they inventively tell the story of the canal’s heritage and the multitude of industries that used to line the route as well as serving a practical purpose assisting travellers traversing the towpath.

A personal favourite amongst the components of this canalside installation was situated on the side of a ruined tollhouse. It comprises a black and white pencil rendering of a man in mid-19th Century workers clobber wielding a spray paint can in place of the tools of his trade, tagging the words “Tollman Was Ere” in hot pink pink on the side of the building. A neat idea with a lot of warmth behind it, which ties the memory and presence of the workers who created and tended the canal, to its present use as a place of leisure, recreation and creative expression.

During this section of the walk the wild and dramatic escarpment of the Rowley Hills is in view. The highest point at 271 metres above sea level is Turner’s Hill, which is the highest point in the West Midlands county and bristles with two radio transmitters which are visible from miles around. On a clear day the hills are visible from the Malverns thirty miles away on the other side of Worcestershire.

A short distance further on after a bridge – just after a small newly built housing estate – the canal enters parkland.

This is Sandwell Council’s Warrens Hall Nature Reserve. It sits on the edge of the large village of Netherton in the Borough of Dudley. Today there is a wild beauty to the Nature Reserve which runs up to the Rowley Hills.

If you look closely at the tops of the mounds where on sunny days picnickers sit, children sit and sunbathers gather black dirt is visible. This is the spoil from the enormous Windmill End Colliery which worked the site up until 1928. That nearly 100 years later it’s waste is still visible in the landscape years of mining created, is testimony to the sheer volume of work that went into driving it’s tunnels 160 metres underground.

In front of the Nature Reserve as you continue along the towpath the remains of wharfs which once enabled boats to dock near the colliery and other industries such as sawmills, foundries and brickworks which once clustered along the banks of the canal in this area.

Today in the tranquil environment of the Nature Reserve with Black Country residents of all ages out relaxing and enjoying themselves by the waterside the area’s heavy industrial past seems very far away. But the entire landscape, that the people enjoy (not least the canal) and the settlements where they live their everyday lives, would not exist without the shadow of this carbon intensive history.

Presently the canal reaches a junction. Here the old meandering line of the Dudley Canal heads off towards the centre of Netherton and a long way round to the 2.9 kilometre long tunnel that takes it beneath Dudley to Tipton and the Birmingham Canal Navigation. Feeling like I needed some lunch by this point after well over an hour of walking, I decided to head a quicker, albeit less picturesque way into Dudley.

Turning right over the canal bridge I found myself near Cobb’s Engine House.

This structure which has left to become a picturesque ruin, once housed a Watt stationary steam engine which up until it was discontinued in 1928 when the pits shut, pumped 1,600,000 litres of water a day out of the coal workings into the neighbouring canal cuts. The steam engine, a rare surviving example of a kind which was used for water pumping and similar tasks from the late 18th Century onwards, still exists and is in working order in Michigan in the USA. It was purchased in 1930 shortly after the Windmill End Mine shut by Henry Ford who shipped it across to his industrial museum. An interesting example of an emerging form of hydrocarbon capitalism choosing to aggrandise itself with an obsolete key artefact from an earlier kind.

Adjacent to where Cobb’s Engine House sits lies the entrance to the Netherton Tunnel.

This grand piece of mid-Victorian engineering was cut in the 1850s and was the last tunnel of any substance dug on the UK canal network. Opened in 1858 it provides a short cut underneath the Rowley Hills and the Sandwell village of Tividale to the canal basin at Dudley Port and the Birmingham Canal Navigations. In contrast to the older tunnels cut in the 1790s by the Dudley Canal Company, this tunnel is big. So big that two narrowboats can pass each other going different directions inside and there is space left over for a towpath on either side. If I’d fancied it, I could have cut my walk short and headed to the Birmingham Canal Navigation this way. However, it was a nice day and I had no particular desire to walk over two miles through the dark for the best part of an hour, so I decided to leave the canal network and head into Dudley town centre.

Crossing the bridge over the branch canal leading to the Netherton Tunnel I walked down a path across a small clearing and through some trees on the edge of the Nature Reserve. Keeping on the left all of the way.

Having crossed another clearing a small modern housing estate appeared in view on my left hand side.

Presently the pathway I was walking along turned into a cul-de-sac called Gads Green.

At the bottom of Gadds Green I turned right onto St. Peter’s Road and began walking up the hill to Dudley Town Centre.

After walking for just under 10 minutes up the hill I came to a major roundabout.

Here I turned right onto Buffery Road.

After a short distance up Buffery Road I crossed over and turned left onto Summerfield Road.

The main items of interest here are some council houses from the immediate post-war period built in an unusual fashion with the upper storey apparently prefabricated from metal. Though, interestingly, whether due to renovation or some quirk of the original design, only a few houses are constructed in this fashion.

At the bottom of Summerfield Road, Buffery Park comes into view.

On entering the park I walked straight ahead on the path walking along the bottom of the park, which is flanked by some interesting cottagey inter-war era council houses.

At the far corner of the park I turned right and walked across the remainder of the park.

It’s quite a nice park, shady, with grassy areas and a large children’s playground. The ground in this area is pockmarked as if hacked at or suffering from subsidence from the centuries of mining which took place around Dudley.

At the far end of the park I turned right along Prospect Row and walked through an area of factories, warehouses and small building maintenance and plant hire operators.

On my left hand side the 18th Century steeples and post-war office blocks of central Dudley were clearly visible.

It’s more or less impossible to get lost at this point, but I turned left onto Blackacre Road and then found my way across the ring road into the town centre up Flood Street.

Having had lunch I spent a short while looking around Dudley. If Wolverhampton is the undisputed capital of the Black Country when Dudley vies with Walsall be the second city. Whilst the overall population of Dudley Borough is well over 300,000 the town itself can claim around 100,000. This gives it the feel of a large market town, which in many ways it is.

In the centre around the marketplace especially, Dudley’s heroic period as a cradle of industry in the 18th and 19th Centuries, as well as it’s genuine affluence in the 20th Century prior to the 1970s is visible everywhere making for interesting sightseeing.

It also has a curiously seaside, or holiday resort feel for a town that is roughly 70 miles from the sea. There is the old fashioned sweetshop Teddy Gray’s whose products are manufactured in the town through processes which haven’t changed since prior to the Second World War. There’s also the impressively well preserved castle on it’s hilltop, accessed from the town centre by a ski lift and a zoo. The zoo possesses internationally renowned animal pens by the libertarian communist architect, and Soviet emigre, Berthold Lubetkin who built similar modernist structures in the late 1930s for London Zoo.

There’s also two grand former theatre and cinema buildings down the slope from the zoo and castle, on the way out of town, which I walked past once I’d had my lunch. Heading down Castle Street where the market takes place, out along Castle Hill where the two former venues are situated, I paused to look at them for the time. The art moderne cinema is now a meeting place for Jehova’s Witnesses, well tended but inaccessible. The smaller Hippodrome Theatre on the other side of the road lies abandoned, albeit in apparently relatively good shape considering it has been out of use for decades.

Like many other Black Country towns such as Bilston, Wednesbury and West Bromwich, Dudley suffered from the severing of it’s railway connections in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For nearly half a century the former railway cutting sat overgrown on the edge of the town running alongside the rocky outcrop where the Castle lies. Today it is a hive of building activity as new offices, research facilities and educational institutions are erected on it. Like Bilston, Wednesbury and West Bromwich in the late 1990s when the first West Midlands Metro Line opened, Dudley will soon be reconnected to railed transport, when a new tram line extending tho Brierley Hill opens in 2023.

At the bottom of Castle Hill I turned left at a roundabout onto Tipton Road.

I walked along Tipton Road for around ten minutes.

Heading past Dudley Archives and the Black Country Living History Museum on the way.

Shortly after passing the entrance to the Museum I arrived at a busy crossroads where the Tipton Road crosses the Birmingham New Road.

On the other side of the road begins the small Sandwell town of Tipton where the Dudley Canals meet the Birmingham Canal Navigations mainline, heralding the end of the walk.

Having crossed the Birmingham New Road, I saw the bank of the Dudley Canal, recently emerged from the Dudley Tunnels, whose northern portal is inside the Black Country Living History Museum, on my left. I headed down a narrow pathway and rejoined the towpath turning right.

The canal water in Tipton is famously clear, and the day I was there was no exception.

I walked a short way alongside the incredibly clear water to a junction in the canal. Here I turned left and walked a short way to a footbridge.

Once on the other side I had to double back on myself and walk back to the junction, which was a bit annoying, but only added a few minutes to the journey. Continuing in the direction I was already travelling in at the junction I headed towards the centre of Tipton.

The centre of Tipton is a pleasant canalside green space called Coronation Gardens. Upon reaching them the Fountain Inn where William Perry the “Tipton Slasher” had his “headquarters” in the late 1830s and 1840s is just across the high street. A painting of him is visible above the pub’s entrance on the town’s high street. In the centre of Coronation Gardens itself stands a statue of “the Slasher” on a tall brick plinth, which was erected in 1993.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

From the Fountains Inn you can either head back straight to Tipton Railway Station which offers trains back towards Birmingham or on towards Wolverhampton, as well as buses to West Bromwich and elsewhere, including back up to Dudley town centre.