20 Attractions to Explore Near StarCity

Aston Hall is a magnificent seventeenth century red-brick mansion situated in a picturesque public park on the north side of Birmingham. The house was completed in April 1635, and is now Grade I listed. It sits in a large park, part of which became Villa Park, the home ground of the Aston Villa football club.It is now a community museum managed by the Birmingham Museums Trust and, following a major renovation completed in 2009, is open to the public during the summer months.

Thinktank, Birmingham is a science museum in Birmingham, England. Opened in 2001, it is part of Birmingham Museums Trust and is located within the Millennium Point complex on Curzon Street, Digbeth. it has more than 200 hands-on exhibits over four floors and a state-of-the-art Planetarium. Thinktank also offers a huge programme of educational activities for children and families including workshops, classes, laboratory sessions and interactive science shows.

It was the first Roman Catholic cathedral built in England since the Reformation that features one of the finest decorated church ceilings in the Midlands. The cathedral is located in a public greenspace near St Chad's Queensway, in central Birmingham. The current archbishop is Bernard Longley, and the dean is Monsignor Timothy Menezes. It is one of only four minor basilicas in England.

Eastside Projects is an artist-run space in the Digbeth area of Birmingham, England. It is a free public space that is imagined and organised by artists, and includes galleries and studios. It commissions and presents experimental contemporary art exhibitions and proposes ways in which art may be useful to society. It is organised by Simon Bloor, Tom Bloor, Céline Condorelli, Ruth Claxton, James Langdon, and Gavin Wade, who first conceived and now runs the space. The gallery has a programme for

Custard Factory is a creative hub home to many independent shops, cafes, bars, restaurants and the Mockingbird Cinema. It has been at the centre of Birmingham’s history as an innovative, globally competitive city where great ideas take shape and where things are made that change the world.

St Philip's Cathedral in Birmingham is a Grade I-listed building and also the 3rd-smallest cathedral in England. Located in Colmore Row, this landmark is exceptional in terms of national, historical and architectural importance. Whether you're interested in history, religion or art, there's a lot to do and see here. The Cathedral contains four famous Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The popular churchyard, now beautifully restored, has a perimeter of cast

The Bull Ring is a major shopping centre in central Birmingham. When combined with Grand Central (to which it is connected via a link bridge) it is the United Kingdom's largest city centre based shopping centre and has been an important feature of Birmingham since the Middle Ages, when its market was first held. Two shopping centres have been built in the area; in the 1960s, and then in 2003; the latter is styled as one word, Bullring.

The Museum of the Jewellery Quarter is a museum at 75-79 Vyse Street in Hockley, Birmingham, England. It is one of the nine museums run by the Birmingham Museums Trust, the largest independent museums trust in the United Kingdom. It offers a unique insight into the working life and history of the renowned Jewellery Quarter. Explore this extraordinary time capsule on a lively guided tour. Watch live demonstrations at the jewellers' bench of the traditional skills of this fine trade, and discove

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BM&AG) is a museum and art gallery in Birmingham, England. It has a collection of international importance covering fine art, ceramics, metalwork, jewellery, natural history, archaeology, ethnography, local history and industrial history. Discover the fascinating story of the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, in its own dedicated gallery.

Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens are situated adjacent to the west side of Castle Bromwich Hall, a Jacobean Mansion. They are in the old centre of Castle Bromwich, a large village in the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull of the English West Midlands area. The gardens were designed as a formal arrangement of self-contained garden areas. Some of these were ornamental and some working. They were separated by walls, hedges or level-changes at terraces.

Victoria Square is a public square in the city of Birmingham and quite possibly the most beautiful of them all. The square is often considered to be the centre of Birmingham, and is the point from where local road sign distances are measured. Most of the major public events are held at the square which has fountains and magnificent artwork spread all around it.

A majestic Grade II-listed building on the edge of the Jewellery District, which tells the story of Birmingham's last coffin-furniture factory and the Newman Brothers firm. Visitors can truly experience how this old Jewellery Quarter firm once operated on a day-to-day basis, producing some of the world’s finest coffin furniture, including the fittings for the funerals of Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and the Queen Mother.

Grosvenor Casino is the UK’s largest multi-channel casino operator which offers a range of popular casino table games, including roulette, blackjack, baccarat, and poker as well as electronic roulette and slot machine games. The digital channel continues to gain scale and offers many popular games including its very popular live casino. One of the iconic locations in this area which offers a wide range of games and leisure things.

The Pen Museum is a museum about the history of making writing implements in the Hockley area of Birmingham in the West Midlands. Its three galleries contain exhibits showing the important part Birmingham had to play in the pen making industry, being the world leader for well over a 100 years. There are interactive exhibits where visitors can try using different writing implements, displays of writing equipment, factory machinery, demonstrations of pen making and a reconstruction of Victorian s

The Birmingham Back to Backs are the city's last surviving court of back-to-back houses. They are preserved as examples of the thousands of similar houses that were built around shared courtyards, for the rapidly increasing population of Britain's expanding industrial towns. They are a very particular sort of British terraced housing. This sort of housing was deemed unsatisfactory, and the passage of the Public Health Act 1875 meant that no more were built; instead byelaw terraced houses took th

Soho House was the elegant home of the industrialist and entrepreneur Matthew Boulton from 1766 to 1809. The house has been beautifully restored and reflects the fashions and tastes of the late Georgian period. There's also the chance to see some of the products of Boulton's nearby factory where buttons and buckles, clocks and vases, and silver and Sheffield plate tableware were made and where he developed the steam engine in partnership with James Watt.

The Library of Birmingham is a public library in Birmingham, England. It has been described as the largest public library in the United Kingdom, the largest public cultural space in Europe,and the largest regional library in Europe. 2,414,860 visitors came to the library in 2014 making it the 10th most popular visitor attraction in the UK.

Blakesley Hall is one of the oldest Tudor Halls converted into a museum located in Birmingham, England. More than 400 years later, beautiful Blakesley is still a haven; secluded from the avenues of modern houses that lie beyond its gates. Most parts of the Blakesley Hall Mansion were damaged in a bomb blast a few years after the museum was inaugurated. However, the building was reconstructed using ancient furnishings from the inventory to recreate a structure closest to the original building.

Gas Street Basin, right in the heart of Birmingham City Centre, is like an oasis, with brightly-coloured narrow-boats surrounded by listed buildings against a backdrop of modern high-rise offices. The area has been transformed into a centre for leisure and entertainment. In 1973, the basin featured prominently in the Cliff Richard film Take Me High. A canal-side cottage there was used as the home of a character in the long-running soap opera Crossroads.

Handsworth Park is a park in the Handsworth area of Birmingham, England. It lies 15 minutes by bus from the centre of Birmingham and comprises 63 acres of landscaped grass slopes, including a large boating lake and a smaller pond fed by the Farcroft and Grove Brooks, flower beds, mature trees and shrubs with a diversity of wildlife.