Distance: 3.1 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: medium

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

Walk from central Birmingham to the University of Birmingham in Edgbaston, mostly along the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. Walk goes to the Barber Institute.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Barber Institute of Fine Art

Situated almost at the exact point on the Bourn Brook where Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire once met, the University of Birmingham is in its essence the platonic idea of a red brick university.

It is set apart from and towers over the city whose industries it grew from. Visitors to the university’s ridge top parkland campus approach from historically affluent Edgbaston down long boulevards as if arriving at a stately home. While those approaching from Bournbrook, historically not an affluent area, have to negotiate a steep, terraced slope as if fortified. One capped by the cliff-like base of the Aston Webb Building, the oldest part of the university (apart from the heating plant) on the Edgbaston site, which looks like an absurd, garishly terracotta, Edwardian fantasy rendition of a Byzantine monastery.

Despite having grown enormously since its foundation in 1900, and the opening of the Edgbaston campus in 1910, the University of Birmingham remains dominated by Old Joe the institution’s one hundred and ten metre tall clock tower. This structure is purportedly the tallest freestanding clock tower in the world. Some claim that seeing its glowing clock face switched on while he was a teenager growing up in Hall Green, not too far from the university campus, lodged in the young JRR Tolkien’s mind, and reemerged decades later as the Eye of Sauron.

In truth, it is a monument to Joseph Chamberlain the university’s first Chancellor. Birmingham likes to remember Joe Chamberlain as an energetic young mayor in the 1870s, championing civic improvement, high quality council services and the social ownership of critical infrastructure. More often elided is his later career as a national politician who in furtherance of his own career aligned himself with the Conservative Party to oppose Irish autonomy, and more daming, his enthusiasm for aggressive British imperialism, which was both implicitly and explicitly highly racist. To be fair to the University of Birmingham the city as a whole has not really seriously grappled with the dark later political career of a man who is still often painted as a civic founding father. However, as one of the city’s foremost and most significant institutions the University of Birmingham, whose most prominent landmark is a memorial to Joe Chamberlain, could play a key part in changing this narrative if it wished to.

This noted, the university does broadly make its ground available for Birmingham citizens and others to visit. Some of the city’s most spectacular and important surviving modernist architecture like the Muirhead Tower, the second tallest building on campus after Old Joe, and the Ashley Building, are on the campus. Likewise, located just off the main site Winterbourne House, once owned by the Nettlefolds (who with the Guests and the Keens went into business as GKN, still a major mechanical engineering company with close ties to the West Midlands) who were cousins of Joe Chamberlain, is open as a small museum and university botanical gardens.

Likewise, the university, home to numerous works of sculptural art, cared for the Research and Cultural Collections team. Key pieces in the sculpture collection are by Barbara Hepworth, one of the great sculptors of the mid-Twentieth Century, and key to defining the visual look of the post-1945 welfare state. Alongside key works by another great Twentieth Century sculptor and visual artist, Eduardo Paolozzi, who had a long relationship with the University of Birmingham.

The University of Birmingham’s campus is also home to a significant art gallery and museum, which also hosts library facilities and concerts: the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Henry Barber was one of the big time speculative builders and landlords who hastily plastered redbrick terraced houses across the Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire countryside in the years between the 1870s and the First World War causing booming Birmingham to swell to something akin to its contemporary geographical extent.

After Henry Barber’s death in 1927, not too long after he had been made a baron “for service to political life in Birmingham”, his wife Hattie Barber who was very wealthy in her own right, decided to endow and establish a cultural institution, in Birmingham, the source of his property fortune. To this day alongside other investments the trust which partially funds the Barber Institute holds property in the Birmingham area.

The Barber Institute was formally established in 1932. It’s grand art deco building, which some critics have argued is amongst the UK’s best examples of the style, was designed by Robert Atkinson, a significant figure in architecture at the time. By the time he was commissioned to design the Barber Institute he had been the architect on one of the UK’s first modernist cinemas, a 3,000 seat picture palace in Brighton and interiors of the rightly famous Daily Express Building in London. The building opened in 1939 just before the outbreak of the Second World War.

At the outset the funders stipulated that the art works collected by the gallery should be ‘of that standard of quality as required by the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection‘. The institution continues to collect works to this day, as well as hosting temporary exhibitions, both of loaned works and new artistic initiatives initiated by the gallery itself. In addition to paintings and sculpture the Barber Institute also plays host to an array of items from material culture in particular coins from ancient Europe and Middle East.

The Walk

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

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This walk from central Birmingham to the University of Birmingham, primarily along the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, begins from New Street Station’s Stephenson Street exit opposite the West Midlands Metro stop.

Having reached New Street’s Stephenson Street exit, turn left.

Walk along Stephenson Street heading for the A38 and the Mailbox shopping centre. This is near where Cadbury’s first city centre factory was prior to their move south to Bournville in 1879.

Upon reaching a raised section of the A38 keep walking straight ahead beneath the road.

On the far side of the road turn left walking towards the entrance of the Mailbox.

Climb the steps and enter the shopping centre.

Head of the Mailbox’s escalators, walking straight through the shopping centre.

At the back of the shopping centre you come out onto a terrace.

Here head left and follow the terrace around passing a series of bars and restaurants.

On the far side of the terrace beside the Cube tower block, turn right and head across a foot bridge spanning the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.

Upon reaching the base of the ramp of the bridge turn right, and double back upon yourself walking along the towpath to opposite the basin where the Cube and the back of the Mailbox stands.

The foundations and frame of what is now the Mailbox was constructed as Birmingham’s central Royal Mail sorting office in the early 1970s. The facility was operational for less than 30 years, shutting in 1998 to be transformed into the complex of flats, shops, restaurants, bars, hotels and offices which stands to this day. Prior to the Royal Mail sorting office being constructed the site was a railway goods station on the edge of the city centre which was intermodal, long before that was a term, with the canal network. Indeed – as Worcester Wharf – the depot had originally been constructed solely to serve the canal network. Canals ran deep into the city centre during the 19th Century. Today only the basin around which the back of the Mailbox sits is the sole remnant of this era of the site’s history.

Once opposite the Cube and the basin turn right. Begin walking along the canal towpath heading south towards Bournville. You stay on the canal pretty much all the way.

The stretch of the Worcester and Birmingham Canal heading south from Gas Street Basin in the city centre where the waterway begins and intersects with the Birmingham Canal Navigation heading north, was the first bit to be constructed in the 1790s.

You follow the waterway running close to the Cross-City Line south out through Five Ways. Then out into leafy Edgbaston.

Approaching the edge of the University of Birmingham’s extensive grounds which are bounded to the west by the canal you pass through the Edgbaston Tunnel which is pretty short, just 96 metres long.

Initial work to turn the towpath into a walking and cycling route linking south Birmingham with the city centre was conducted in the early 1990s around the time of the . The route was then steadily upgraded and eventually completely hard surfaced in the 2010s. It was then that the previously narrow, uneven footway through the tunnel was extensively widened.

A little way beyond the Edgbaston Tunnel you pass a canal winding hole just after a footbridge adjacent to the Vale site, where the majority of the University of Birmingham’s own student halls are located.

Now walking adjacent to the University’s Edgbaston campus you walk through a twisting wooded section of canal.

Before passing underneath a bridge on to a long straight section very close to the Cross-City Railway Line.

Beyond a further bridge you pass the campus of the University of Birmingham approaching the recently remodelled University Station which also serves the University Hospitals Birmingham complex on top of Metchley Ridge to your right.

At a bridge just beyond University Station you reach a flight of steps off the canal onto a road leading to campus. Upon reaching the steps off the canal turn right and climb up them.

This brings you out onto a bridge across the railway line and the canal onto the University campus. Here turn left and begin walking onto campus.

Keep on walking straight ahead past Eduardo Paolozzi’s late period sculpture of Faraday onto campus.

Continue downhill past the buildings where many of the university’s science departments are based.

Upon reaching the university ring road carry on straight ahead towards Staff House where the university’s staff bar and other facilities are situated.

Walk beneath Staff House and out onto the Green Heart of Campus. The Aston Webb Building and Old Joe clock tower are to the left here, while the library, Muirhead Tower and the main part of the Green Heart are tot the left.

Continue straight ahead along a wide path across the bottom of the Green Heart passing the Arts Building on your left.

Walk straight ahead under a bridge in the building where the School of Mathematics is situated 

On the other side continue walking straight towards the entrance to the campus where the Guild of Students’ (students’ union) is situated.

The entrance to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts is on your left.

This is where the walk ends.

Getting Back

Trains run from the University Station to destinations south along the Cross City Line (like Bournville, Kings Norton, Northfield, Redditch and Bromsgrove) as well as to the City Centre, north Birmingham and Lichfield. There are also longer distance services towards Worcester and Hereford as well as Cardiff to the south, and Derby and Nottingham to the north. Numerous buses run near the campus including the 61 and 63 along the Bristol Road both towards the city centre and south, as well as the X22 and X21 which also go into the city centre and south to Bartley Green, and services like the 76 which is less frequent but runs to Kings’ Heath and Moseley.