Birmingham is not necessarily the first place you’d think of to be the inspiration for an archetypal English village. In fact, when people discovered I was spending a week there, they would ask “why?” in a bewildered tone. I was on the trail of one of our greatest fantasy authors, who spent his childhood in the midlands industrial conurbation. The locations he invented for the Lord of the Rings are based on real life villages and towns throughout the West Midlands.

JRR Tolkien was actually born in South Africa, where his father was a bank clerk. When the old man died, the family moved to England. JRR was 4 years old. Birmingham at the end of the 19th Century was a grimly industrial landscape. Home of coal-powered factories, canals and railways. The town had become a byword for cheap, mass-produced consumer goods, but it was set in the midst of beautiful, rolling countryside. This landscape has survived to some extent, though it’s difficult to imagine now, when driving through the endless suburban sprawl, that this was once open country. But this dichotomy between urban and rural settled into young Ronald’s mind.

The Tolkiens (JRR, his mother and his young brother), settled in the suburb of Moseley. Here young Ronald could play happily in the vast areas of countryside beside rivers and streams. There was an old water mill there too, adding to the bucolic appeal of the country. In nearby Moseley Bog, he found dark forests with criss-crossing paths beneath characterful old trees, these became the forests of Middle Earth. Both can be visited today. The mill as a lovely old building, where you can get tea and find out about its industrial past. They have a Tolkien exhibition too and, in the woods by the lake, there is a woodland walk, where the kiddies can find the homes of elves and fairies among the trees. It is part of the Shire country park, named in JRR’s honour: a strip of public parkland alongside the River Cole.

Moseley Bog is also public open space and residents have fought to keep it rural, against wave after wave of development. Walking through the woods now, it is possible to imagine oneself in a dark forest in a magical realm. The criss-crossing pathways and bridges through bogland are well used by local people, dog walkers and children. It is so important to keep land like this public, particularly in an urban environment, and I hope people continue to be willing to fight for it.

In 1904, when Tolkien was 12 years old, his mother died. As well as having a devastating effect on the boy and his younger brother, it meant that they were now wards of the church (his mother having converted to Catholicism before her death). Their guardianship was placed in the care of Francis Xavier Morgan, who ensured that both of the boys were raised as good catholics. They were taken from their happy country home and moved into the city. Tolkien was placed into King Edward’s School, where he excelled at languages, and served at the Birmingham Oratory.

If you stand outside the oratory church, with its magnificent green dome, and look down the hill towards Edgbaston reservoir, you will see two towers beside the road that descends the hillside in front of you. The towers of Perrrot’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks, it has been speculated, were the inspiration for the towers of Barad Dur and Minas Tirith. They would certainly have made an impression on such a imaginative young man. They certainly make an impressive sight today. If you’re ever travelling along the A456 through Edgbaston, take a detour to see them.

At the age of 16, after living in a number of homes in the area, JRR moved into a boarding house in Duchess Street (sadly long since demolished and replaced with an office block). It was here that he met another young resident named Edith Bratt. She was slightly older than him and, worse, a Protestant. They were forbidden from seeing each other. Five years later, on the eve of his 21st birthday, he wrote to her again, professing that he was still in love with her. Edith had become engaged in the meantime, but, if life teaches us anything, it’s that love is stronger than convenient familial arrangements and the two of them got together again. This time it would last throughout the rest of their lives. By now, Edith was living in Warwick. They married at St. Mary Immaculate, an ornate Catholic Church in Warwick, and returned to Edgbaston for their wedding night, at the Plough and Harrow hotel.

Mrs. P and I stayed at the Plough and Harrow and liked it very much. It is a very old building with wood panelling and heavy wooden doors. The room was pleasant and comfortable and the food was good. I spent the evening wandering around the area, from one Tolkien house to another: Westfield Road, Stirling Road, Highfield Road and Duchess Place. After this not insubstantial walk, I repaired to the hotel bar for dinner and one or two drinks. The restaurant isn’t open outside of breakfast times but the bar is open and you can order food from the many, varied and ethnically diverse restaurants in the surrounding area. The curry we had was superb. The Duchess street guest house is no longer there. the office building that now occupies the site once bore a plaque to mark its historic location but this too has now gone. You can get some idea of what the building must have looked like from the other houses in the street.

The following morning we walked into Birmingham City Centre, quite a long but pleasant walk through Brindley Place and the Symphony Hall. There are many sites of literary interest there, including the City Museum, where they celebrate the city’s literary past and the multicultural population which has helped to enrich it. People they celebrate include Benjamin Zephaniah, who was brought up in Handsworth in the 1960s. The striking colonnaded town hall is opposite where Charles Dickens gave readings, including one of A Christmas Carol in 1853.

We walked back past the Library: one of the most striking buildings in the town centre. It holds the most extensive collection of Tolkien manuscripts, letters and documents. It was built near to the site of the home of another local figure who must have influenced Tolkien. A Birmingham doctor who developed a cotton wool surgical dressing. His name, commemorated by a plaque on the side of the Birmingham Playhouse, was Sam Gamgee.

Tolkien’s life is one that is marked by contrasts: South Africa and England; Rural and Urban. As he grew older, his life journey, which started in rural peace and moved into the dark, threatening, sometimes hellish environment of the killing fields of France and Belgium. Little wonder that he came to see Birmingham as the ideal bucolic Shire, opposed to the Mordor he encountered during the War.