Qualla: Aston Manor Road Transport Museum

Aston Manor Road Transport Museum: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martin Fisher, CC BY-SA 2.0. On 14 November 1988, Prince Charles celebrated his fortieth birthday in a Birmingham tram depot. The old Witton shed had once dispatched the trams that knit Birmingham's industrial sprawl together; that evening, with the future king inside cutting a ribbon, it became something stranger and more sentimental. The Aston Manor Road Transport Museum was open. For nearly a quarter of a century, the cavernous Edwardian building on Witton Lane would house buses and tramcars in roughly the same rooms where their working ancestors had been parked between shifts. Then, in 2011, the rent ran out, and the collection went looking for a new home.

Image: Martin Fisher | CC BY-SA 2.0

Aston Manor Road Transport Museum: A Depot Becomes a Memorial

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Bevan, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Witton Tram Depot was always going to make a good museum. Built for Birmingham Corporation Tramways at the turn of the twentieth century, it had the high ceilings and the long, parallel inspection pits a fleet of double-deckers required. When the trams disappeared from Birmin...

Image: Michael Bevan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aston Manor Road Transport Museum: Eviction and Exile

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Bevan, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2011, Birmingham City Council announced it would no longer fund the rent on the Witton depot. For a small charity, that was the end. The museum closed in October. Over the following weeks, volunteers convoyed buses up the A34 to Aldridge in Walsall, where the former Jack Allen...

Image: Michael Bevan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aston Manor Road Transport Museum: What Lives in the Sheds

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Bevan, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Aldridge collection is dominated by buses -- the lumbering double-deckers and stocky single-deckers that defined British public transport from the 1930s through to deregulation in the 1980s. Since the move, the trustees have leaned harder into commercial vehicles too: vans, t...

Image: Michael Bevan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aston Manor Road Transport Museum: The Free Bus Service

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Bevan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Several weekends a year, the museum runs free heritage buses from Walsall's Hatherton Street to Shenstone Drive and back, ferrying visitors the way the same buses once ferried shift workers and shoppers. Other event days send the fleet to the Chasewater Railway, to Lichfield, or ...

Image: Michael Bevan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aston Manor Road Transport Museum: Visiting

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit dean_dave, CC BY 2.0. The museum opens Tuesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 10:30 to 16:00 throughout the year, closing only over the Christmas holiday period. It sits on the edge of Aldridge, surrounded by the kind of low industrial estate that suits a workshop full of buses. The volunteers are happ...

Image: dean_dave | CC BY 2.0