School holiday boredom buster: Birmingham

The boys and I love to spend school holidays and annual leave days by heading into Birmingham and having a ‘boys day out’.  Since moving to Staffordshire, we are a bit further away from the city, and so trips to Brum are fewer and far between than they were when we lived a bit closer. 

It is often said that it’s quite hard to keep the kids entertained in the school holidays.  It’s often quite commonplace to hear the words ‘I’m bored’ hurtling towards you at speed after the novelty of not needing to be out of the house for school run time wears off.  As an ex-teacher, the thought of boredom in school holidays used to be a complete no-no, but as a dad, I quickly grew to realise that there needed to be a good plan in place so that the holidays didn’t become one long argument.

Additionally, the school holidays (especially the 6 weeks) can get mega expensive!  You can’t do everything, and even if you select relatively cheap activities, it only takes 3 or 4 of those and the costs soon mount up.  So, I was quite pleased to stumble across the West Midlands Police Museum as an idea for our next boy’s day.  Also, during this post, I’m going to give you some of my top tips for cost-effective family days out, especially with boys!

We headed into Birmingham early as we often do.  A ritual tradition for us is to head somewhere for breakfast so an early train ensures that we can eat a good-sized feast before tackling the rest of the day.

Top Tip Number 1 – Find a breakfast place that offers ‘kids eat free’ deals

If you do a quick bit of Googling, you can often find places that do free meals for kids with a full-paying adult.  Look especially for city centre Premier Inn’s; they often have a pub/restaurant attached, and when we last visited as a three, I paid full price for my full English buffet breakfast (£9.99) and both the boys were free.  The best bit?  They could also have unlimited breakfast, so we all stocked up on croissants, toast, fruit salad, sausages, bacon, and eggs.  A full breakfast really does set you up for the day and can often mean that you don’t have to worry about a big lunch either!

Our next move was then to plan our day around the visit to the museum.  I had pre-booked tickets for our visit (more on that later), and we were booked in for 2:00pm.  We therefore had a few hours to use whilst in and around the city.  Our next port of call after breakfast – back to the train station!

Top Tip Number 2 – Buy a one-day family off-peak travelcard

If you are visiting Birmingham and decide to see a few further away sights and places, I can highly recommend the purchase of a one-day family off-peak Daytripper travelcard.  For £13.60, this ticket allows unlimited bus, train and tram travel within the specified West Midlands area for up to 2 adults and 4 children.  It is valid after 9:30am weekdays and all day at weekends, so is great value for a busy day’s travelling about the county.  You can get as far as Wolverhampton, Coventry, Stourbridge and Sutton Coldfield with the ticket, as well as all parts of the city.  Makes it easy to hop on and off different forms of transportation!

Travelcard in hand, we then headed off to Birmingham Airport on the train to do one of our favourite pastimes; watching the planes land and take off.  As we are all transport mad, we love any sort of vehicle.  A visit to the airport (free) allows us to take the train, ride the air shuttle, see aeroplanes, oil tankers and other airside vehicles and take a bus (we often nip on the car park shuttle bus after walking to the end of the runway).  If we are lucky, we might get a friendly wave back from the pilots, and the boys love spotting the different airlines and looking at the app to see where each plane is going to or coming from.

Top Tip Number 3 – Visit the airport

It is such a great way to spend a couple of hours and costs virtually nothing.  Take the air-rail link tram from the station, have a wander through the terminal building, take a walk out to the runway end of the on-site car parks, and watch the planes taxiing to the end of the runway from the Viewing Area.  If little legs are tired after all the walking, head for the bus shelter in the car park and catch the shuttle back to the terminal building ready to either grab a coffee or head back to the train station!

After we had finished at the airport, we headed back on the train in to Birmingham and spent a little bit of time wandering around the shops.  Our time slot at the museum was coming up, so we decided to hop on a bus to transport us to the museum.  When we arrived, we were told that our time slot was the last one of the day, so we were quite pleased to find that it wasn’t busy at all.

An afternoon at the West Midlands Police Museum 

Location: The Lock-up, Steelhouse Lane, Birmingham, B4 6BJ  

The Police Museum is actually Birmingham’s very old cell block in Steelhouse Lane.  It was still operational until 2016 when it was closed, and facilities relocated to new facilities in Perry Barr and Oldbury.  The block once housed notorious prisoners, including members of the infamous ‘Peaky Blinders’ and also Fred West was temporarily held at the facility.  With the three of us all really interested in the police and history, it seemed a perfect place for us to explore!

We pre-booked our tickets for the museum in advance and selected our preferred entry time.  I booked family ticket B, which was £20.00 for 1 adult and up to 2 children.  There is also a family ticket A, which costs £28.00 for 2 adults and up to 3 children, so there are plenty of options for family visits.

When we arrived at the museum, we were greeted by some volunteer staff members who were extremely friendly and welcoming.  They saw that we had some bags with us (shopping and snacks!) and offered to look after them for us so we didn’t have to carry them around the museum – very grateful for that!

Self-guided experience 

A quick explanation about where to look and things to spot, and we were on our way.  The museum is a self-guided experience, but you can go pretty much anywhere; the only exception is the tunnel under the pavement that leads to the courthouse which is still in use! 

The museum is spread over several floors and contains many individual cell blocks.  We decided to start at the uppermost floor and work our way down, and we found several displays and interactive exhibits all about the history of West Midlands Police and policing in the UK.  There is quite a lot of walking and steps involved so be mindful of young children.  My then 5-year old coped perfectly fine but he was tired by the end of our visit!

The exhibitions and history were fascinating, and we even managed to find a family link to my wife’s genealogy, with a member of her relative’s family listed on the roll of honour for policing during the first world war.  The boys were also really interested to see what life was like for the prisoners held at the cell block and were shocked by the wooden pillows that were offered!

Dressing up as a police officer is fun 

Our favourite bit of the whole visit came next, as we made our way to the basement.  Here was our chance to play pretend for a bit, and we all took turns at dressing in police uniforms and staff were more than happy to take our photographs in the different outfits.  Olly and Freddie looked every inch the budding traffic cops, whereas I just looked like I’d won a ‘be a policeman for a day’ prize in a raffle.  We still had great fun and were all a bit disappointed when we had to hand the uniforms back.

We then had a quick cup of tea and snack, and the boys then did some activities that had been designed to keep the children busy.  They were solving some mystery crimes using clues, taking fingerprints, and learning how forensic evidence worked.  As our visit drew towards an end, we had just enough time to view some police vehicles and pose next to a police box (Doctor Who-style!) before we then made our way towards the exit.  No visit to a museum is complete without a visit to the shop, and after picking out a couple of keepsakes, it was time to head back to the station for our train home, with two weary boys having walked their legs off.

I would highly recommend a trip to the West Midlands Police Museum.  You can really feel the history of the place, there is plenty to see, read and do in your couple of hours at the museum, and the staff are very friendly and knowledgeable, and are able to give you all sorts of information and guidance.

Where will our next boy’s day out take us?!