Harborne: a guide

Harborne is about three miles south west of the city centre, B17, and it runs along one long High Street of shops, cafes and pubs, with an old church village at one end and a garden suburb at the other. It is leafy, affluent and very sure of itself, with the Queen Elizabeth Hospital just down the road. Come for a walk on an old railway line, the Moor Pool estate and a pub crawl that has its own name.

A short history

Harborne is in the Domesday Book of 1086, though the settlement is older, and the remains of a Roman fort lie near what is now the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Metchley Park. It sat in Staffordshire, was joined to Birmingham in the 1890s, and the civil parish was abolished in 1912. The oldest part, still called Harborne Village, is around St Peter's Church on Old Church Road, a church with Anglo Saxon origins. The ward had 23,001 residents at the 2011 census. Harborne Library opened on 12 November 1892 in a former Masonic Hall.

The High Street

Harborne High Street is the spine: a long run of independent shops, cafes, restaurants and pubs, with a few chains. It is the reason people move here, and it is busy every day of the week. The Harborne branch of Damascena is the coffee stop. Our Eat and Drink guides cover the restaurants; here we will stick to the pubs, because Harborne has a lot of them.

The Harborne Run

Harborne was not a Quaker area, unlike some parts of Birmingham, and so it was never short of pubs. The result is the Harborne Run, a local pub crawl that takes in somewhere between ten and fifteen of them along and around the High Street. We do not recommend all fifteen in one night. Two to know: The Plough, a busy pub with a kitchen doing everything from brunch to Sunday lunch, and, on the Edgbaston side at the bottom of the hill, The Physician on Harborne Road, B15. That one is in the old BMI Building, which once housed the Sampson Gamgee Library for the History of Medicine; now it has eight cask ales on a reclaimed wooden bar, around 50 wines and a flagstone terrace.

Moor Pool

Turn off the High Street and you find one of the city's best kept secrets in plain sight. The Moor Pool estate was founded in 1907 by John Sutton Nettlefold, of the Guest Keen Nettlefold family, as a garden suburb on about 22 hectares. It became a conservation area in 1970. Its heart is Moor Pool Hall, a Grade II listed community hall with a skittle alley and snooker tables, which the Moor Pool Heritage Trust bought, along with the other community facilities, for £325,000 in 2014. There are two tennis clubs, a bowling green, allotments, the pond itself and the Nettlefold Pocket Park, opened in 2017. Walk round it on a summer evening and you will understand why people who live here do not leave.

The Harborne Walkway

The Harborne branch railway opened in 1874 and lost its passenger trains in 1934, with the last coal trains running until 1963. Its trackbed is now the Harborne Walkway, about two miles of green path, starting from the Park Hill Road bridge. There were stations at Harborne, Hagley Road, Rotton Park Road and Icknield Port Road. Walk or cycle it for a green, traffic free stretch on the old line. It is the quiet way out of Harborne.

Getting there

• Bus: National Express West Midlands runs the buses, which is how most people get in and out.
• Train: since the branch line closed in 1934 the nearest station has been University.
• On foot or bike: the Harborne Walkway.

Living here

Harborne has four secondary schools and six primary schools, two golf courses, a cricket ground and Harborne Hockey Club, founded in 1903. The rebuilt swimming pool opened in 2012, the city's first new pool in more than twenty years. It is one of the city's more affluent areas, and you pay for the High Street on your doorstep, but you get a proper village with a pub crawl of its own.

Our advice

Start at St Peter's on Old Church Road, walk the High Street end to end, take a lap of Moor Pool, and finish with the Walkway if you still have legs. Then pick two pubs off the Harborne Run list. Two, not fifteen.