Redditch Travel Guide

Take a visit to the Forge Mill Museum and Bordesley Abbey. They show an example of how life used to be in Redditch and its famous needle making history. It is also set in some lovely countryside and is nice for a walk about on a nice day.

I took the bus from Evesham to Redditch which takes roughly a hour although it`s only a 20 minute journey by car. It cost £4.60 for a Day Tourist ticket which entitles you to catch any buses you want during the day.

Well it is actually a huge shopping centre. It has just had a massive revamp and now includes some of the biggest name shops. There are also a few eating places, an internet cafe and a few bars just outside it.

What to buy: There are so many different shops that you could buy literally anything that you wanted.

It`s not really a tourist trap but the King Fisher Shopping Centre can be a bit of a nightmare to negotiate especially as the site map needs updating. The last time that I went there seemed to be so many empty shops and the ones that were there didn`t correspond with the map so I found it easy to get lost there.

Unique Suggestions: Have plenty of time to find your way around, you`ll probably need it.

Favorite thing: The roads out - they should all have a sign saying 'thank you for visiting Redditch, now please wipe your feet!'

Redditch was a great town with character until the powers that be saw fit to turn the town centre in one huge theme pub. Lost it's old cinema (criminal to turn and art deco cinema into a Chicago Rock), lost it's soul, gained the biggest surge towards a drink culture imaginable!

For goodness sake... if anyone with any clout, balls or indeed integrity in the council/development corporation reads this... stop turning what was once a vibrantly cultural place into a litter and vomit-strewn chav-town.

How corrupt must the powers-that-be be, to tear down some of the best schools the town had and build more generic boxes for people to live in? Where in god's name do you expect the children of these new homes to be schooled? I guess if the right palms are greased eh...?

One redeeming feature of the Town Centre is the Palace Theatre. The other redeeming feature of the town as a whole is that there are still decent people there who want their town to be the wonderful, multi-cultural icon of a place-to-live that it deserves to be! You have fantastic citizens... give them some credit that they want more than yet another place to buy cheap alco-pops!

Fondest memory: Leaving for good - that's about it