The walk to campus from Cliveland Street

Four universities, four very different journeys. Here is what each one actually involves — which streets you take, which crossings slow you down, and where a tram or a train does the work for you. Three of the four are on foot from the front door of Globe Works, and the fourth has a station on campus.

Aston University — 12 minutes

Aston's campus is the Aston Triangle, B4 7ET, and it is the reason most people look at rooms in the Gun Quarter in the first place.

The route is short and almost entirely flat. Come out onto Cliveland Street, turn down Lower Loveday Street, then Princip Street, and pick up Lancaster Street — signed as the B4114 — heading east. Lancaster Street runs straight into Lancaster Circus, where the ring road meets the Aston Expressway. Cross there and the campus starts on the far side.

What you meet first is the north-west corner, which is the useful corner. The Sir Doug Ellis Woodcock Sports Centre and its pool are on Woodcock Street, B7 4BL. Aston Students' Union — the Adrian Cadbury Building — is at 8 Coleshill Street, B4 7BX, a minute further in. Aston Library and the Main Building sit in the middle of the site, and the campus map shows the whole thing hemmed in by the A38 Aston Expressway to the north, Jennens Road to the south and Dartmouth Middleway to the east. That matters more than it sounds: once you are on the Triangle, you are not crossing traffic again. Gosta Green and the Sacks of Potatoes sit right on the edge of it.

One honest note on that number. Twelve minutes is the figure the operator publishes, and the one used everywhere else on this site: door to the main buildings. You are at the edge of the campus in about seven. Aston's site is roughly 60 acres, so which end you are heading for decides the rest — and add a couple more if you are queuing at the Costa in the Main Building.

Birmingham City University — 19 minutes to Curzon

BCU's City Centre campus is built around the Curzon Building, 4 Cardigan Street, B4 7BD, with Parkside at number 5, Joseph Priestley at number 6, Millennium Point on Curzon Street (B4 7XG) and STEAMhouse on Belmont Row.

The first half of this walk is the Aston walk: Lower Loveday Street, Princip Street, Lancaster Street, Lancaster Circus. Then you keep going. Cut straight through the Aston Triangle to its southern edge on Jennens Road, cross, and you are on Cardigan Street. Aston's own campus map lists Cardigan Street among its framing streets, which tells you how close the two universities sit — you can be standing between an Aston lecture theatre and a BCU one and not be sure which side you are on.

Eastside is also now on the tram. The Metro extension to Millennium Point opened on Easter Sunday, 5 April 2026, adding two stops — Albert Street and Millennium Point — on the first branch off the Birmingham to Wolverhampton line. Trams run every 15 minutes on it to begin with. St Chad's is 7 minutes' walk from Cliveland Street, so on a dry day walking the whole way is usually quicker than walking to the tram and waiting for it. In February it is a different calculation.

University College Birmingham — 18 minutes to Summer Row

UCB's main building is on Summer Row, B3 1JB, with The Link at 65–77 Summer Row, McIntyre House at 2 Holland Street, Moss House at 3 Holland Street, Camden House East on Parade (B1 3PY) and Baskerville House on Centenary Square.

This is the only one of the four that goes south-west rather than east, and it is the prettiest walk of the set. Lower Loveday Street again, then Shadwell Street past St Chad's Cathedral, over the ring road at St Chad's Circus, then Old Snow Hill. From there you can cut through St Paul's Square — the oldest square in the city, and worth the thirty seconds it costs you — and down Ludgate Hill to Great Charles Street Queensway. Cross that and you are on Summer Row.

Worth knowing about that last crossing: at Ludgate Hill the A38 is underneath you in the Queensway Tunnel, and the road you actually cross on the surface is the A4400. It looks intimidating on a map and is a straightforward signalled crossing in practice. Camden House East, over on Parade, is another two or three minutes past the main building.

University of Birmingham — a train straight to campus

The University of Birmingham is in Edgbaston, B15 2TT, so this is the one journey of the four that is not a walk. It is, though, the one with its own railway station — and that changes the sum entirely.

University station sits on the edge of the Edgbaston campus on the Cross City Line, and it is New Street you want, not Snow Hill; Snow Hill's lines run west and south rather than through Edgbaston. The university reckons four trains an hour from New Street, about ten minutes on the train, and a five-minute walk from the station to the centre of campus. West Midlands Railway puts the train itself nearer eight minutes, and the station — 51 Vincent Drive, B15 2AG — is step-free to all platforms. Four an hour means you do not plan around a timetable: you turn up and go.

From Cliveland Street the first leg is New Street, nineteen minutes on foot or a few minutes on the tram from St Chads, seven minutes from the door. Then eight to ten minutes on the train and five at the far end. It is a sit-down commute with a seat and a signal, not a bus crawl through traffic, and it runs the same way in February as it does in September.

What you get in exchange is the half of student life that is not lectures. Living here you are ten minutes from Snow Hill, seven from the tram, three from a Tesco Express, five from the canal towpath and inside twenty minutes of the Bull Ring, St Paul's Square and the whole of the city centre on foot. Plenty of Birmingham students choose the centre for exactly that reason: you go out to campus for teaching and come home to a city rather than to a student-only suburb. Globe Works adds the things you would otherwise leave the building for — a gym, a study space, a cinema lounge, a games hub and a courtyard — with all bills and Wi-Fi included, which takes the sting out of a commuting day.

Crossing the A38

Everything that heads south from Cliveland Street crosses the ring road at some point, and every crossing costs you two to three minutes over what a straight-line estimate suggests. For Aston and BCU it is Lancaster Circus. For the city centre and UCB it is St Chad's Circus, and then Great Charles Street.

The whole arrangement is a hangover from the 1960s Inner Ring Road, which was designed to keep people and cars on separate levels: traffic on the surface, pedestrians in subways underneath. Most of that ring road was dismantled in the early 2000s, but the northern stretch survives, complete with the St Chad's underpass that carries the A38 below you. Some of the pedestrian subways are still there, and mapping apps will occasionally route you through one. They are quicker in daylight. They are also the bit of the journey most people skip after dark.

After dark

The Gun Quarter's back streets — Bath Street, Loveday Street, Princip Street, Shadwell Street — are workshops, yards and small industrial units. That means they are busy at 8am and empty by 7pm. Nothing sinister, but quiet in the way that a working district always is once the work stops.

At 11pm most people walk a different line from the one they walk at 11am. Lancaster Street and Corporation Street are proper main roads: traffic, street lighting, buses, other people. The Aston campus itself is lit and has its own security presence, so once you are on the Triangle it feels like a campus rather than a shortcut. Coming back from town, the tram to St Chad's leaves you seven minutes from the door and drops you on a lit main road rather than in the middle of the quarter. Globe Works itself has CCTV and on-site security, which mainly matters for the last thirty seconds of the walk.

The route to avoid at night is the one your phone will offer you: the shortest one, threading through unlit side streets and subways. Take the longer, brighter version. It costs three minutes.

The four side by side