Gloucester

Why come through here

The station on Bruton Way is on the Bristol to Birmingham line and the Paddington line by Stroud and Kemble: about 1 hour 43 minutes from London and 40 to 55 minutes from Bristol Temple Meads, and the CrossCountry trains from Birmingham call too. The bus station is a few minutes' walk away. From it Stagecoach's 63 runs to Stroud and Nailsworth roughly hourly from Monday to Saturday and every two hours on Sundays. At Stroud the 66 goes on to Painswick in ten minutes, about hourly Monday to Saturday and every two hours on Sundays. The 882 reaches Cirencester, Kemble station and Tetbury about seven times a day on weekdays, fewer on Saturdays and none on Sundays, and not every journey goes on to Tetbury. There is no direct bus from the city centre to Painswick: the 66 only touches Gloucester's edge at Abbeydale and Brockworth on its way between Stroud and Cheltenham. Routes and times are on the buses page.

By car Gloucester is at junctions 11 and 12 of the M5, and the A46 from the city is the road up to Painswick and the Stroud valleys, with the A417 climbing Birdlip to Cirencester. The National Express 444 coach from London and Heathrow ends its run here after Cheltenham. For the Cotswold Way, Gloucester is the nearest big station to the trail's middle sections at Birdlip, Painswick and Haresfield. Painswick Beacon is on the Cotswold Way above Painswick, which has no station; the 66 bus links Painswick with Stroud station.

A day in the city

Start at the cathedral, which is open from 10am to 5pm on weekdays, to 4pm on Saturdays and from noon to 2.30pm and 4pm to 5pm on Sundays, with a suggested donation of £5. The nave is Norman. Gifts from visitors to Edward II's tomb, after his burial here in 1327, paid for remodelling the choir, and the cloisters have the fan vaulting that the cathedral says was invented here in the 1300s. The cloisters stood in for parts of Hogwarts in three of the Harry Potter films. Our film locations guide has the scenes. Walk out through College Green into Westgate Street, and down Southgate Street to the docks.

Gloucester Docks were the head of the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, and the tall brick warehouses round the basins, built from 1826 into the 1870s, are the reason an inland city looks like a port. The National Waterways Museum in Llanthony Warehouse (GL1 2EH) tells the 200-year story of the docks and the canal, open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm, adult £10 (2026). Its boat trips were suspended in 2026 while the trip boat is repaired. The Quays outlet is beside the museum. The rest of the city, from Blackfriars to the rugby ground at Kingsholm, is on Visit Gloucester (opens in a new tab).

Into the Cotswolds from here

Drive out on the A46 and the first turn for the hills is Cooper's Hill at Brockworth, where the cheese rolling happens by tradition on the spring bank holiday Monday (expected on 31 May in 2027, though no one announces it in advance): a slope of about 1 in 2, a Double Gloucester cheese and no official organiser, and the police and Tewkesbury Borough's safety advisory group have declared it unsafe. The rest of the year it is a quiet wooded hill on the Cotswold Way. Four miles on is Painswick, the grey-stone town whose churchyard yews, legend says, number 99, and above it Painswick Beacon, a 283m hill fort on common land shared with a golf course and the best view back over the vale to the Severn and the Malverns. The 5-mile loop from Painswick over the Beacon starts from the Stamages Lane car park, and the 66 bus from Stroud serves the town.

South of Painswick the escarpment runs on to Haresfield Beacon and Standish Wood, National Trust land with a 4.5-mile walk from the Shortwood car park, and then to Stroud and the Five Valleys. A day loop by car from Gloucester runs Painswick, Stroud, Minchinhampton Common, Nailsworth and back by the A46 and the M5. The longer one goes over Birdlip and Crickley Hill to Cirencester and home by the Golden Valley. Without a car it is the 63 to Stroud and the 66 to Painswick, or the train to Stroud and the hill from there.

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When to come

Gloucester fills for the Three Choirs Festival in the years it hosts it, which come round every third year: 25 July to 1 August in 2026, then Worcester in 2027 and Hereford in 2028. The Gloucester History Festival, centred on Blackfriars Priory in 2026, runs for over two weeks in September (4 to 19 September in 2027, with a spring weekend on 23 to 25 April), and the spring bank holiday brings thousands to Cooper's Hill for the cheese. Otherwise the cathedral is at its quietest on a weekday morning out of school holidays.