Distance: 2.4 miles

Difficulty of the terrain: easy

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

Walk from central Birmingham to the historic, much visited, Birmingham Botanical Gardens mostly along the Worcester and Birmingham Canal.

The Story

The Walk

Getting Back

Bournville’s Two Timber Framed Houses

Founded almost 200 years ago in 1829, the Birmingham Botanical Gardens lying just south of the city centre on the Calthorpe Estate in Edgbaston, are a Grade II* park and gardens.

Relatively compact in size, totaling 18 acres (15 of them planted), the gardens look much as they did in their Victorian heyday, when the great tropical and subtropical greenhouses were built. Having been constructed between 1852 and 1884. These alone house 30,000 individual plants. The rest of the grounds consist of lawn, and tree and shrubbery planting, on what is a strikingly steep site. Halfway down the slope lies the Botanical Gardens bandstand which was

There are 7,000 species of plant in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Unsurprisingly given their 19th Century origins, and ongoing development during the 20th Century, their history is implacably bound up with Britain’s imperial past and colonial legacy. Joseph Chamberlain, Mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s, and an infamous champion of imperial expansion and jingoism during his later political career, donated many specimens. As did his son, Neville, another politician controversial for other reasons.

While it is very much an institution that grew out of the 19th Century the Birmingham Botanical Gardens were extensively redeveloped in the 1980s and 1990s, with a new ticket hall and entrance, in a plasticky cod Victorian glasshouse style which now looks quite dated, being the centrepiece. Though other developments on the site from the time which have typically aged better, included new planting, including gardens through time, an education centre, and a tea room, as well as the UK’s National Bonsai Collection which opened at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in 1993.

In 2025 the Botanical Gardens managed to raise £19,400,000, a large chunk of which was granted by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which will enable them to restore their glasshouses which in many cases are over 150 years old. A year earlier in 2024 the Botanical Gardens shut their aviary which had been built in the 1990s and was the final remainder of an early 20th Century attempt, initiated in 1910, to grow the Botanical Gardens membership and day visitor numbers through introducing a zoological component. Initially there were animals including alligators, bears, monkeys and seals. However, birds aside, unlike some other comparable collections, the notion of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens as a zoo never caught on. Instead it remains a popular day out for the city’s families to walk around looking at the plants, trees and garden features.

The Walk

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

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Walk from central Birmingham to the historic, much visited, Birmingham Botanical Gardens mostly 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 beneath a footbridge and approach 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.

Before reaching the winding hole turn right and ascend the ramp up onto the footbridge to cross the canal.

On the far side of the canal head straight uphill along an access road for the Vale past the halls of residence.

At the top of the hill you reach a main road and turn left until you reach the traffic island where St. George’s Anglican church stands.

Turn left again here and walk straight ahead past Birmingham City University’s Edgbaston campus.

Just past the campus you pass Edgbaston High School, and then come to the entrance to Birmingham Botanical Gardens.

Getting Back

There is a bus stop served by the very frequent (every day of the week) bus 23 and bus 24 which run north towards Birmingham city centre and south towards Harbourne and Birmingham’s south western suburbs. The Botanical Gardens are also not too far from the Hagley Road and its buses and trams as well as Five Ways Railway Station on the north to south Cross City Line which runs through New Street Station in Birmingham city centre.