Long Close Walk, Royal-sutton-coldfield

Long Close Walk preserves a pre-estate field name from the Berwood landscape, mapped alongside Round Moor and Brook Piece. Birmingham's Drainage Board bought 344 acres of that land in 1881, flattening ground that would become a Spitfire test airfield and then Castle Vale.

Castle Vale's crime rate stood significantly above the city average before the 1990s regeneration introduced perimeter layouts with no rear access to gardens. The Housing Action Trust then launched Valewatch with West Midlands Police, and a Community Warden Team followed in 2002.

The 1995 Castle Vale masterplan named 2-20 and 22-40 Long Close Walk among 24 maisonette blocks earmarked for demolition, and proposed Tangmere Drive as a boulevard with Midland Metro running down its centre. HS2's planned tunnel now marks an outer boundary of the estate.

Long Close Walk sits on what was Berwood farmland, north of the River Tame and east of Chester Road. Tangmere Drive still traces the old runway alignment, and the estate remains bounded by the M6, a railway and Minworth Sewage Treatment Works.

Castle Vale was named by a schoolgirl in a competition, and aviation memory runs through the estate's fabric: Tim Tolkien's Spitfire-inspired sculpture Sentinel stands at Spitfire Island, and the Centre Park opened in 2003 with a Spitfire-themed gateway. Berwood's RAF church, St Mary's, was dedicated in 1923 and burned down three years later.