Weoley Castle Square

Hmmmm, the Castle Square… how can I put it… politely!
I grew up in Weoley Castle and the Square was smack bang in the middle of my walk to school so I had to pass through there every day, and I still sometimes go over there to visit old friends. It is a GIANT traffic island surrounded by shops, the shops are all cheap places ranging from car parts to grocery stores. It’s not the prettiest of places but it’s a good one-​stop place if you live locally.
Now, Weoley Castle has kind of a bad reputation and it is fairly well deserved if slightly exaggerated. It’s not exactly the ‘don’t go out after dark’ kind of place but I have had more than my fair share of trouble there. This might be because I was a youngster or because I was out there every day and night, but it’s definitely not the place I would take a visitor to or that I would choose to go to if I wasn’t visiting people I know.
I have a soft spot for the Square purely out of nostalgia but it’s not the sort of place I would recommend to anyone who wasn’t a local.

Weoley Castle Square (or simply ‘the square’ if you live near here) is according to reliable sources the worlds biggest traffic island. Yep, you read that right the worlds BIGGEST traffic island — isn’t that amazing? So it isn’t really a square — it’s more of an oblong and it sits in the middle of a load of shops, the library and a couple of social clubs and churches. It also near to the Weoley Castle estate — which consists of nearly 3,000 homes some of which are looked after by Bournville Village Trust. Interesting fact — in 1935 the 10,000^th council house in Birmingham was officially opened in Hopstone Road by the then Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. This made Birmingham the first local authority in Britain to build 10,000 council properties — isn’t that also pretty amazing? Weoley Castle has a bit of a dodgy reputation which I think is unfair. There are some surprisingly green places on the estate and whilst the shops here aren’t ever going to sell artisan cheeses or 100s of varieties of avocado but they’re cheap and mostly run by friendly staff and they sell useful things.