CHURCH HISTORY

So when the people of neighbouring Bordesley had succeeded in their plea to the Pope for a chapel of their own (St. John's in Deritend), the Moseleians put up their own petition, referring to the danger of travel to Norton for the old and weak. A licence was duly granted, and work on St. Mary's Chapel began. Henry IV's queen was then Norton's lord of the manor, and she endowed the chapelry with 'certain waste (uncultivated) land'. It was perhaps in her honour that it was dedicated to a female saint. The tower was begun in 1496 but stayed long unfinished, and the first three bells were not hung until 1552.

By 1782 the soft sandstone fabric of the chapel was crumbling through decay and neglect : it was thereupon cased in brick. There were some enlargements in 1823. Thirty years later Moseley's population growth justified enparishment of the chapelry, four years after Kings Norton. In 1861 the old bells were replaced by eight steel ones. The nave was enlarged in 1870, a clerestory was added, and to give the squat tower added height, a pinnacled parapet was raised upon it - unfortunately in a stone which has blackened, so that it seems top-heavy. Only the worn tower remains of the C 15-16th chapel : three roof-lines can be traced on its interior wall. In 1909 the church was practically rebuilt, giving us the edifice we see today.

St. Paul's was built and enparished in 1853. Until recently, it stood on Moseley Road at St. Paul's Road. As the population of Balsall Heath continued to grow apace, the parishes of St. Thomas-in-the-Moors and St. Barnabas (1884, 1905) were formed. St. Anne's on Park Hill was consecrated in '74, a parish being carved for it out of St. Mary's. Rebecca Anderton of the long-resident Moseley family, met the cost of building St. Anne's. Development on Kings Heath and Wake Green brought about the All Saints and St. Agnes's chapelries, enparished in 1866 and 1914. The latter church, consecrated in 1884, enlarged in '93, serves part of two parishes.

St. Mary's and St. Edburgha's Yardley - whence 'Moseley in Yardley'. Colmore Crescent commemorates William Colmore, Vicar of Moseley for three decades, Canon and local councillor. St. Agnes' tower was not completed until 932 : the light, smooth stone of the latter work rises oddly above the rough course of the lower tower. The Baptist Church on Oxford Road was opened in 1888. Wesleyan Methodists' chapel of '87 on the Cambridge Road / School Road corner was replaced a decade later by the present building in the then fashionable terra-cotta and glazed brick. What is now the United Reformed Church of St. Columba on Chantry Road corner was built as a Presbyterian Church in '96.

A Jewish synagogue opened in a Park Hill villa 17 years ago. Catholicism returned to Moseley in 1971, after more than four centuries, with the establishment of the parish of St. Martin de Porres : until the church is built on the empty site at the Church Road / St. Alban's corner, its functions are performed in the community hall at the rear. We began with the foundation of Worcester Diocese in the seventh century : when in the nineteenth the Catholic hierarchy was re-established, Worcestershire was included in Birmingham Archbishopric. Since 1905 Moseley Parish has been included in the Anglican Diocese of Birmingham. All three of the Balsall Heath Anglican churches have been demolished, as have several chapels : but the oldest, the Wesleyan Chapel of 1839, still stands on Vincent Street.