The answer differs depending on whether the path is yours, shared, or a public footway — so start there, because the third case brings a legal duty the other two do not.
If it is your own path
Then it is simply a question of cutting the face back, and the practical consideration is how far you can go.
On beech, hornbeam, yew, laurel, privet, hawthorn or holly you can cut right back to the framework and the hedge will regrow. On Leylandii and most other conifers you are limited to the depth of green on that face — cut past it and you get a permanently bare side facing your own path, which is the worst of both worlds.
If it overhangs a public pavement
This is the case with an actual legal duty attached, and it catches people out. If your hedge grows out over a public footway or road so as to obstruct or endanger people using it, the highway authority can serve notice requiring you to cut it back — and can do the work and bill you if you do not.
In Kidderminster the relevant authority for highways is Worcestershire County Council rather than Wyre Forest District Council, which is a distinction worth knowing if you are trying to report an overgrown hedge rather than deal with your own.
| Clearance usually expected | Over |
|---|---|
| About 2.3m | A footway or pavement |
| About 5.2m | A carriageway |
| Full width kept clear | Signs, streetlights and sightlines |
Those are the figures generally worked to. The practical version is simpler: a person with a pushchair or a wheelchair should be able to pass without stepping into the road, and nothing should be obscuring a sign or a sightline at a junction.
If it is a neighbour's hedge over a shared path
You may cut growth that crosses the boundary onto your side, back to the boundary line and no further. The cuttings technically belong to them and should be offered back.
On a shared access the sensible route is usually a conversation and a shared quote, because cutting only your side of a hedge on a narrow entry tends to produce a lopsided result that neither party is pleased with.
Where the hedge is genuinely too big for the space
Sometimes cutting the face back is treating the symptom. A hedge planted along a narrow path or entry that has grown to four feet through will need cutting hard every year forever, and even then it will be tight.
In that situation the honest options are a hard reduction to reset it, or replacement with something that suits the space — a narrow-growing hedge, or a fence with climbers where there is genuinely no room for a hedge at all.
Timing and nesting birds
Worth stating accurately because path clearance often needs doing when it needs doing, not in February.
It is not an offence to cut a hedge during the nesting season. The offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 is intentionally taking, damaging or destroying a nest while it is in use or being built. So the hedge gets checked properly before the machine starts, and any section with an active nest is left until the birds have finished.
The 1 March to 31 August ban that gets quoted at householders comes from the Management of Hedgerows (England) Regulations 2024, which apply to agricultural land and expressly exclude hedges within the curtilage of a dwelling house. It does not apply to a garden hedge over a path.
One thing to check first
A hedge itself cannot carry a Tree Preservation Order, but a tree grown up within one can, and an old hedge that has become a line of trees can be covered too. Kidderminster has several conservation areas — Blakebrook, Church Street, Green Street and Vicar Street — and a tree in a hedge in one of them needs six weeks' notice to Wyre Forest District Council above 75mm stem diameter measured 1.5m up. A TPO tree needs written consent at any size.
Got a hedge blocking a path?
Tell us where it is and whose it is. We'll tell you what can be done and what it costs.
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