Load Street is far too wide for the traffic it carries, which is the first thing you notice walking up from the river. It was once the market place, and the width is a leftover from that: a broad street with Georgian character, running from the Severn up to St Anne's Church, which sits at the top and closes the view. The name comes from "lode," an old word for a ferry, from the days before there was a bridge.
There is a bridge now, and it is a good one. Thomas Telford built it in 1798 after the great flood of 1795 swept away the medieval one — five pointed stone arches that had stood in some form since 1447. Telford's replacement is three spans of masonry, the central one sixty feet across, and it carries the town over the water to Wribbenhall on the east bank. It is Grade I listed, and it has held for over two centuries, which is more than the last one managed.
The Mug House Inn stands on Severn Side North, its front terrace directly on the riverfront. It does Sunday roasts with a "Trio of Meats" option — three roasted cuts with roast potatoes, seasonal vegetables and the trimmings — and Wednesday smash burgers on a buy-one-get-one basis, alongside a pizza menu and a children's menu. Real ales, real food, fine wines. If you want the water in view while you eat, this is where to sit.
Up in the old butchers' Shambles on Load Street is the town museum, which keeps the Wyre Forest trades that used to make a living here: charcoal burning, brass founding, ropemaking, tanning, coopering. The crafts are gone from the town but preserved in the building where the butchers once worked.
The Wyre Forest is close by, reached directly from the town. It is one of the largest surviving ancient woodlands in Britain, oak straddling the Worcestershire and Shropshire border, with hawfinch, wood warblers and spotted flycatchers among the trees. Beavers were reintroduced to a tributary of Dowles Brook in 2024. The brook runs through the heart of the forest and once powered around nine mills; the eighteenth-century Knowles Mill, National Trust and still holding its original machinery, sits along it.
From Bewdley Station the Severn Valley Railway runs steam trains to Bridgnorth, on the sixteen-mile heritage line between Kidderminster and Bridgnorth. The line opened in 1862, closed to regular passengers in 1970, and reopened as a preserved railway in 1974; it has since stood in for period settings in *Howards End* and the BBC's *The Box of Delights*. The nearest mainline station is Kidderminster, about three and a half miles east.
Bewdley took its name in the fourteenth century from the French "Beau lieu" — beautiful place — and the antiquary John Leland, passing through in the sixteenth century, decided "a man cannot wish to see a towne better." Stanley Baldwin, three times Prime Minister, was born here in 1867 and took his earldom from the town.
Robert Plant, who lives nearby, is a member of the tennis and rowing club by the river.