The splendid Shropshire town where the Olympics was reborn
You cannot see the Temple of Hera, the Parthenon or the Eiffel Tower from the top of Much Wenlock’s High Street.
This does not come as a surprise. I am, after all, standing in a small Shropshire market town; one which sits midway between the county seat of Shrewsbury and its pretty local sibling Bridgnorth – where the River Severn makes a soft turn on its journey towards the Bristol Channel.
This is not bucolic Greece, nor the fallen pillars of Ancient Olympia. Nor – even if you squint – does it resemble Athens, or Paris.
And yet, the link between this genteel corner of England and the archaeological site where the Olympic flame is kindled every four years (every two, including the Winter Olympics) is not so ludicrous.
Nor is it wild fantasy to make a comparison with the host cities behind, respectively, the first modern Olympic Games and the latest edition. Much Wenlock has as great a claim to being part of the Olympic story as these more vaunted locations. In the case of Athens and Paris, you might even claim that its claim is greater.
Such a statement would surely please the man responsible for this grand – if seemingly unlikely – connection. Not that he is still listening. William Penny Brookes was so tied to Much Wenlock that he was born, lived and died within the town, working as a doctor, a magistrate and a botanist during a long and varied career – ultimately passing away, pretty much on the spot where he had arrived, during the winter of 1895, at the age of 86.
But he left his mark beyond the surgery and the bench. A classic Victorian gentleman of noble intentions and the means to put them into action, Brookes was a firm believer in the power of physical exercise to improve the human lot.
In 1850, he founded an “Olympian Class” (soon to become the Wenlock Olympian Society), in the hope that it would introduce young men from the mines and forges in the likes of nearby Ironbridge to the benefits of sporting competition.
The first Wenlock Olympian Games, staged that autumn (October 22-23), were not an elite event. They were a decidedly local affair, which included quoits (throwing a metal hoop onto a spike), penny-farthing and blind-folded wheelbarrow races, as well as football, cricket and track sprints. But a tradition was born.
The games have been held, on and off, ever since, and on an annual basis since 1977. Sunday (July 14) will witness the 2024 version’s red-letter date, its athletics day – just under two weeks before the “real thing” begins in the French capital (July 26-August 11).
It is no giant leap of hyperbole to say that the latter could not be taking place without the former. Credit for the rejuvenation of the ancient Olympics, and their return to focus in Athens in 1896, generally goes to the Parisian aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin.
But the Frenchman took direct inspiration from Much Wenlock, visiting the town in 1890 to learn from its example. He did more than learn, too, taking part in that October’s Olympian Games. Though of different generations – by that autumn, Brookes was 81; Coubertin was 27 – the two men were kindred spirits, both believing that better fitness meant a better life in general.
By 1894, Coubertin – along with Greek businessman Demetrios Vikelas – had founded the International Olympic Committee (IOC). A phoenix had risen.
Much Wenlock Museum offers much of this tale, displaying medals and artefacts from 174 years of energy and endeavour – including the “Roll of the Victors”, a leather-bound tome of records, kept by Brookes (and written in his own hand), which lists all medalists between 1850 and 1894.
The exhibition recalls Coubertin’s visit, quoting a report in the Shrewsbury News about the decision to hold the 1890 games “chiefly to enlighten Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French gentleman who desires to introduce athletics more largely among his own countrymen”.
And it includes a section on key alumni: William Snook, a middle-distance runner, who competed in 1879, but is chiefly remembered for a tendency to cheat which saw his name enter the English lexicon as a byword for showing contempt (to cock a snook).
The triple-jumper Harold Langley is saluted for more positive reasons, having become the first man to follow an appearance in Much Wenlock (in 1923) with selection for the Olympic Games (in Paris, in 1924).
They are both eclipsed by Alison Williamson, who, age 10, claimed the silver in the Much Wenlock archery tournament in 1981, and competed in six Olympic Games as an adult, taking bronze in Athens in 2004.
The town is understandably proud of this legacy, and of the man behind it. I meet Chris Cannon, one of the vice-presidents of the Wenlock Olympian Society (and its archivist since 2007) at the Fox Inn – an old-fashioned but comfortably refurbished pub with rooms, at the top end of the High Street.
As we sit in the bar, amid the light whoosh of pints being pulled by hand, he expresses stark bemusement that Brookes is not more widely appreciated. “Two great British men were born in Shropshire in 1809,” he states, tacitly acknowledging Charles Darwin, who breathed his first up the road in Shrewsbury, six months prior to Brookes. “One of them is in Westminster Abbey – the other is here.”
Cannon was instrumental in the creation of the Olympian Trail, a walking route of almost two miles which links 18 relevant Much Wenlock locations. He is happy to guide me along it, past the old Corn Exchange (where Brookes founded the Society; now the town council building) and the Guildhall (a wood-panelled Tudor delight, built in 1540, where Brookes held court as a Justice of the Peace).
All but opposite at 5 Wilmore Street, the Brookes House (a private property) oversaw most of its former owner’s achievements – and, in a way, still watches over him. Brookes’s grave is a few metres away in the grounds of Holy Trinity Church. It reveals a life of personal tragedy. The adjacent memorial stone shows that four of his five children were placed in the ground before him.
Beyond this, the trail showcases a town almost untouched by time – or, at least, in thrall to various eras, none of them modern. Its onetime police station, converted into a home on Shineton Street, is a feast of blue and yellow brickwork that Dixon of Dock Green might have paused to admire.
Barrow Street Cafe feels like a fixture in a rural radio soap opera, all hearty soups and first-name terms. And Holy Trinity is the epitome of Church of England gentility. When I wander past it on a Saturday morning, the strains of the organ, and of choir practice, seep through the porch door and into the street; a specific, reassuring sound in turbulent times. When Cannon tells me that the population of Much Wenlock in 2024 is the same as in Brookes’s day (nearly 3,000), I can quite believe him.
Inevitably, a town of such history has its ghosts. Its original acorn, the priory founded by King Merewald of Mercia in the seventh century, is the most obvious and romantic, its cloisters and chapterhouse consigned to dramatic ruin by Henry VIII and his dissolution of the monasteries in 1540.
Less self-evident, but no less intriguing, is the path of the train line constructed by Brookes between 1860 and 1862 – partly to help participants travel in for the games. It existed for a century, as the Much Wenlock and Severn Junction Railway, running between Buildwas (four miles to the north-east) and the market town of Craven Arms (17 miles to the south-west), before falling to the Beeching axe in 1965.
It lives on vaguely, the station (where Coubertin stepped onto the platform in 1890) lingering as another home conversion, the old route of the tracks preserved as a footpath, coursing, half-hidden, behind a line of linden trees planted by Brookes in 1869.
In doing so, the footpath flanks the heartbeat of it all. Much Wenlock’s sporting “arena” has had three names – “Windmill Field”, “Linden Field” and “Gaskell Field” – but all three titles refer to the same thing; the grassy area where the majority of the Olympian events take place.
It is another case-study in pastoral English beauty, sloping down towards the William Brookes School on its west side. At its north end, a pair of trunks make a leafy contribution to the narrative – the Coubertin Oak, planted by the visiting Parisian, and a similar though much smaller tree, dug in by the-then president of the IOC, Juan Antonio Samaranch, when he made his own pilgrimage to Much Wenlock, in 1994.
The playing field’s three names are easily explained. “Linden” refers, of course, to Brookes’s splendid arboreal addition to the picture; “Gaskell” to the local family who donated the land to the town in the 1930s. “Windmill”, meanwhile, tips its hat towards the hill that rears immediately to the north, and the broken structure which waits upon it.
The windmill checked out just as the Wenlock Olympian Games checked in – the victim of a lightning strike in 1850 from which it never recovered. An information board on the playing field captures it obliquely, in the background of a snapshot of the 1867 event; its paddles, just like today, no longer there. None of this smudges its forlorn, eerie grace, or the glory of the view on offer if you halt in front of it – the Shropshire countryside stretching out for miles around.
You cannot see the Temple of Hera, the Parthenon or the Eiffel Tower from here, either – but on a summer afternoon, no-one is likely to complain.
Staying there
Rooms at the Fox Inn (01952 743 449; thefoxmuchwenlock.square.site) start at ￡75
Visiting there
More on the Olympian Trail and Olympian Games at wenlock-olympian-society.org.uk. Further details on Much Wenlock Museum via shropshiremuseums.org.uk. Wenlock Priory is an English Heritage site (english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/wenlock-priory).
Further information
visitmuchwenlock.co.uk; visitshropshire.co.uk; visitengland.com
