Churches & Chapels

Our district had no church of any sort until 1704. As distant parishioners of Yardley, our ancestors had to go to St. Edburgha's Church, four or five difficult miles away. Although Pershore Abbey had been the owner of Yardley Manor from the C 10th, that great establishment had founded no chapelry in its far-off possession, nor had the Diocese of Worcester in which it lay. From the Church of Saints Peter and Paul in the large neighbouring Parish of Aston in Warwickshire was a small chapelry established in north Yardley early in the C 12th. It was then or later dedicated to Edburgha, sanctified grand-daughter of King Alfred. Long litigation followed as various religious houses and bodies claimed ownership of the chapelry and it was some two hundred years before Yardley was confirmed as an independent parish in the See of Worcester, co-extensive with the ancient manor.

Job Marston, noted for his benefactions, lived in Haw Green Hall until his death in 1701. His will provided land across the green from his house. œ 1000 for the erection thereon of a chapel-of-ease, and œ 1,2000 for its maintenance and that of a priest. Marston Chapel was consecrated in 1704, and the religious lot of Anglican parishioners in the Broomhall and Swanshurst Quarters of Yardley was much eased thereby.

Non-conformity had its meetings in private houses before it had any chapels hereabout : one of these was Gospel House (the farm on whose site the 'Gospel Oak' now stands) which took its name not from the boundary oak tree nearby where Anglican vicars held forth during perambulations but from its use for Dissenters' services.

Catholic priests from Solihull are said to have conducted mass in Hall Green during the 1840's, but there are no other references to Roman worship until this century. Despite the growth of population in the two southern quarters, Marston Chapel did not acquire a parish of its own. This was because in 1849, on the newly-enclosed Yardley Wood Common, Christ Church had been built and emparished. The railway suburb of Acocks had its parish, St. Mary's by 1867, but our chapel had to wait forty years more, becoming Hall Green Parish Church in 1907.

Methodists had a meeting-house on Stratford Road in 1883 : the Reddings Lane Church was opened in 1924, and that on Redstone Farm Road eleven years later. The Baptist community was using what is now Friends' Meeting House at Hamlet Road corner early this century : a temporary chapel of 1926 was replaced by the present church after ten years. Catholic churches were built at Sparkhill and Yardley Wood in 1923 and 1960.

A conventional district was established for the mission off Highfield Road in 1954 : this was St. Peter's Hall Green. To avoid confusion the old chapel thereupon became the Church of the Ascension, so that in the lifetime of its oldest members it has had three names. St. Peter's was enparished in '64.

The ecumenical movement had its first concrete achievement, which is actually in red brick, in the joint Anglican/Methodist Church opened a few years ago on the Redstone/Lakey Lane corner.