Discover the Shrewsbury of Wilfred Owen and his family on a short 2.5 miles circular walk over the English Bridge, along the banks of the River Severn and back through Underdale and Cherry Orchard.
Key points along the route
The Technical School before the bridge is where Wilfred Owen studied from 1907 and graduated in 1911 at the age of 18.
Tom Owen (Wilfred’s father) was the Assistant Superintendent of the Joint Railway in Shrewsbury.
Wilfred Owen exercised a poet’s licence with the buttercups from these meadows. In ‘Spring Offensive’ written in 1918 he transplants them to the Western Front. On their way home from Uffington Church, Wilfred had commented how the petals from the buttercups had blessed his young brother’s boots with gold.
Hawthorn Villas (Nos 28 and 26) Cleveland Street – Tom’s parents lived in the right hand of the two houses. In December 1884 Tom started work as a clerk with the L&NW and GW Joint Railways on a salary of £65. Until his marriage, Tom seems to have lived here. In the 1891 census he appears as “railway accountant.”
In 1907 when the family moved from Birkenhead on Tom Owen’s promotion, they initially lived here again. Wilfred was 14 years old. In the same year that the boys discovered Uffington Ferry, the church and the buttercup meadow.
The large building with polychrome bricks on the far corner was Cleveland Place (now no 18).
The Owen family lived behind the left hand of the two doors giving on to Underdale Road. Wilfred and Harold shared the unheated room on the top floor. There was no electricity; a boy who lived opposite would see Wilfred reading every night by candlelight.
Look out for number 69, Mahim, Monkmoor Road (Maheem). The house was named by Tom Owen as a reminder of his four years in Bombay with the Indian railways. Wilfred wrote the early poems in his attic bedroom. Before the houses opposite were built, he had a view of the old race course (1730 to 1887). It was in this house the family learned of his death whilst outside the bells rang to mark the Armistice.
From 1897 to 1900, the Owen family lived at the far end of Canon Street, No 54. Harold was born here on the 5th September 1897. Wilmot House recalls the Lost Eden of Plas Wilmot, Oswestry.
In Whitehall Street the red sandstone gatehouse formed the entrance to the Tudor mansion built by Richard Prynce, a lawyer, using stone from Shrewsbury Abbey after the Dissolution.
In the Abbey churchyard, the memorial to Wilfred Owen SYMMETRY 1993 lies straight ahead. It was unveiled in 1993 to mark the centenary of his birth. Two smooth slabs of Dartmoor granite act as benches supported by two sharp-edged structures based upon the duckboards laid over the mud in the trenches. It also speaks of the pontoon across the Oise-Sambre Canal which Owen’s unit was constructing when he was killed on 4th November 1914.