WARLEY WOODS, WEST MIDLANDS
Radio and television presenter, author and keen walker Stuart Maconie strolls with wife Eleanor and their four-year-old grandson Noah in Warley Woods, Smethwick
Until they designate a national park in my spare bedroom, my local walk couldn’t really get any more local. Warley Woods lies about 10 paces from my front door in Bearwood, Birmingham and there are very few days when I don’t go there for a stroll, a bit of fresh air and birdsong, a spot of geocaching, a glimpse of dappled light through ancient mixed foliage, or a bacon butty.
It was originally the private estate of Samuel Galton Jnr, who commissioned it from Humphry Repton, the last of the great English landscape architects. Galton was an interesting man, an arms manufacturer who was also a Quaker and a member of Birmingham’s esoteric scientific club The Lunar Society. Now it’s a community woodland that’s enjoyed a little brush with fame of late; I recorded an edition of my 6 Music show the Freak Zone in the woods for the shortest night and Dame Julie Walters (like me, a patron) visited it for Radio 4’s Open Country this month.
It opened as a public park in 1906. Thousands attended the opening ceremony by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, where Alexander Macombe Chance, the owner of Chance’s glassworks who negotiated a deal to buy the land, said: “I want it to be known as the People’s Park, for never was there a park in the Midlands before that was paid for directly by the money of the people.” Since then generations have loved it, this great bowl of open grassland bounded by lovely mixed woodland that now holds a golf course, a café, an inviting “wilderness” full of wild flowers and wildlife, sculpture, playground and dens and fairy doors that are the handiwork of local children.
These are much enjoyed by my grandson Noah and, I hope in time, by his two little brothers. It may not be Striding Edge or Crib Goch. But to sit with him on a warm carpet of green, after a long sunlit mooch through old oaks and tall herb grass, and lick at a rapidly melting ice cream has been one of the joys of this weird spring.
Warley Woods car park: B67 5ED