Bromsgrove Trail: A Walk Through Its Past and Present

Bromsgrove is a market town whose story stretches from Roman salt traders to the ironworkers who forged the gates of Buckingham Palace. On this walking tour, you'll trace how centuries of nail-making, button manufacture, and world-class craftsmanship shaped this Worcestershire town. You'll also hear how its residents – from eccentric industrialists to a board game inventor – left their mark far beyond its borders.

The tour starts at Sanders Park, named after Benjamin Sanders, a global adventurer who survived pirate attacks and the British bombardment of Copenhagen before patenting the mechanised button that made Bromsgrove the button capital of England. From here, you'll climb Adams Hill to St. John's Church, whose 198-foot spire – the tallest in Worcestershire – overlooks the ancient grove that gave the town its name. You'll then wind through the Old Cemetery, down The Strand, and along the High Street, passing Tudor timber frames and Victorian civic buildings.

You'll discover how the Bromsgrove Guild, founded in 1898, sent its craftwork to Liverpool's waterfront and the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, and how the Golden Cross Hotel once saw cavalry called in to quell a brawl between Conservative schoolboys and Liberal townsfolk. The tour ends back at the Sanders Park bandstand, a fitting finale in a park built on the site of the very cotton mill whose recycled bricks later became workers' homes.

On this 60-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Stand at the Railwaymen's Graves in St. John's churchyard, where a haunting poem marks a fatal 1840 locomotive explosion
• Find the grave of Anthony Pratt, the Bromsgrove man who invented Cluedo during wartime air raids
• See the Burma Star Memorial, the first of its kind in Britain, honouring soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia
• Visit the Norton Collection Museum, housing 60 years' worth of rescued nail-making and button-manufacturing artifacts
• Learn how the Hop Pole Inn was dismantled, auctioned, and rebuilt timber-by-timber on a different street
• Spot the bronze Dryad and Boar statue, a nod to the royal hunts once held in the ancient Forest of Feckenham

Bromsgrove rewards those who look closely, and this tour makes sure you know exactly where to look.