The path less travelled - Beauty is where you look for it on Telford's weird urban walking trails
It's always been squarely at odds with its new town image, but Telford and its residents are surprisingly well blessed with leafy walking trails.
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But if you’ve done the T50, and walked the Silkin Way a dozen times, what else is there? At this point, I’d like to invite you to take a walk on the wild, or at least slightly wild side - on one of Telford’s many urban walking paths.
It’s true that Telford is predicated on car ownership, many of its towns and communities spread along the A442 like the proverbial pearls on the necklace envisaged by the original Dawley New Town planners in 1965.
But in among the Radburn estates and industrial parks of South Telford, those same planners also plumbed in a comprehensive network of walking routes, intended to get the town’s new residents from their houses to the new factories being built in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Many of them lie forgotten and underused, but some at least are now surely due a revival in the epoch of active travel schemes. For now, they remain a source of easy adventure points for the mildly curious traveller.
Halesfield industrial estate is criss-crossed by a network of such paths, constructed under an early phase of works in 1966, connecting it to the nearby housing estates via roads, fields and farms.
Take a walk up Kemberton Road from the bottom of Madeley High Street towards Halesfield and, just before Halesfield 7, you hit the first route towards Brookside and Stirchley.
