Adventures around Birminghamwith PlusBus
Whether you're a fan of beautiful gardens, industrial heritage, shopping, museum-hopping, or the period gangster TV show Peaky Blinders, a Birmingham PlusBus ticket will help you explore hundreds of fabulous visitor attractions around the West Midlands. Here area just three of the many adventures you could have. Ask for PlusBus when you buy your train ticket or at the station when you arrive for unlimited bus travel across a very wide area all day long.
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1. Visit Winterbourne House and Garden
Birmingham’s 19th-century industries made it the “workshop of the world” and generated enough wealth to build some beautiful houses. The Nettlefold family started building Winterbourne in 1903. It was later given to the University of Birmingham and became a student hall of residence before opening to the public in 2010. Now restored and refurbished, Edwardian Winterbourne has a maze of varied gardens around an arts-and-crafts-style house and tea room.
- Print off this voucher beforehand and show your train ticket to Birmingham to buy two tickets for the price of one!
- How do I get to Winterbourne House by bus? Head out of Birmingham’s New Street station and cross the big open square onto Queensway. Cross the road and turn a few steps left to Stop NS3 outside Boots. Catch bus X21 or bus X22. Between them these buses run every ten minutes and take about fifteen minutes to reach Westmere. The bus goes through leafy Edgbaston Park.
- Get off at Westmere near the University of Birmingham and walk a minute or so along the road in the direction the bus was going. You will soon see the sign for Winterbourne on your left. You can find more directions on the Good Journey website.
- Exploring the gardens, don’t miss the jungle-green stream-side walks and Japanese bridge, the tunnels through nut trees, vines and wisteria, the lovely woodland areas and the little path that leads to views across Edgbaston Pool.
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2. Explore the Black Country Living Museum
Your PlusBus ticket can take you right across the West Midlands so why not ride all the way to Dudley for this outdoor museum, which brings history to life and has been used as a Peaky Blinders film location. You can get in for half the price as a reward for arriving by public transport. Print off this voucher, show your train ticket to Birmingham, and get two-for-one entry!
- The 26 characterful acres of the Black Country Living Museum recreate the sights sounds, smells and even the tastes of one of Britain’s earliest industrialised landscapes. Shops and houses, schools, pubs and collieries from across the Black Country have all been lovingly reconstructed with historically-accurate furniture and household items.
- In one corner you might see a flowering cottage garden, a string of onions hanging over the flour caddies and pudding bowls, or a horse gazing peacefully by the old village street. Meanwhile, in a building round the corner, you can learn how steam power was originally harnessed to drive the Industrial Revolution with Dudley as its busy heart. Thomas Newcomen built the world’s first steam engine less than a mile from the museum and you can see a working replica in a tall brick shed.
- How do I get the Black Country Living Museum by bus? Bus 11/11A runs frequently from Dudley bus station and takes just a couple of minutes to reach the museum gates. To get to Dudley from Birmingham New Street, you can take bus X8 from the Art Gallery (Stop ES1), which takes about 45 minutes to get there. See Good Journey’s directions for more details on how to get there.
- The Black Country Living Museum is opening new sections exploring the fascinating histories of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. See the shops that many of us might remember from childhood or impressive buildings that once fast-changing high streets nearby. there’s always something new to discover as you delve into the living past.
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3. Take a boat trip through the Dudley Caverns
Hundreds of millions of years of history are hiding underground in Dudley, just near to the Black CountryLiving Museum. A canal boat will take you through a tunnel and out through curtains of ivy (jokingly known as the “hanging gardens of Dudley”).
- Beyond this, tunnels lead into the past: there are walls encrusted with rippling limestone, dramatic sound and light shows and moving dioramas of the miners who worked here for so many years. There are even traces of the plants and animals that lived in the area when it was covered in warm tropical seas, leaving fossils and layers of coal.
- How do I get to the Dudley Canal and Caverns? Bus 11/11A from Dudley bus station stops at Tipton crossroads. Walk a few steps back from the bus stop, turn right onto Birmingham New Road, over the canal and you’ll soon see the sign on your left.
- If you’re already at the Black Country Living Museum, head for the Bottle and Glass pub and you’ll find a bridge over the canal nearby to the Dudley Canal and Caverns visitor centre.
- There are more ideas for car-free adventures in this area in our guide to Stourbridge.
