Orchard Meadow Walk, Royal-sutton-coldfield

The Walk's name preserves a pre-estate field-name mapped alongside Brook Piece, the field through which Plants Brook once trickled. The land belonged to Berwood, a medieval sub-manor of Erdington, and became an airfield where over 11,000 Spitfires flew some 37,000 test flights.

The 1995 Master Plan identified the estate's maze of ill-lit alleyways as making escape after crime easy. By 1998 the response included ValeWatch intelligence meetings with West Midlands Police, eviction of the Green Box Gang, and a traffic-calming scheme of speed bumps and mini-roundabouts.

Early-1960s plans packed 22,000 people into 5,000 dwellings, almost half in 34 tower blocks. The 1995 Master Plan then recommended demolishing 1,416 of those homes, including 17 of the 34 high-rise blocks.

Plants Brook runs culverted beneath the entire estate, from north of the A38 to the southern boundary where it emerges into the River Tame. In 2013 green hay from two SSSIs seeded 4.8 hectares of meadow on the estate's edge, where over 400 green-winged orchids were counted a decade later.

Between 1971 and 1972, Steve Kirkham of No. 36 wrote to Record Mirror three times, praising Decca for the Rolling Stones, attacking Greatest Hits compilations, and urging David Bowie to abandon his new image. On the A452 roundabout nearby, Tim Tolkien's Spitfire-inspired sculpture Sentinel marks the airfield past.