Hagley

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This article is about village and civil parish in Worcestershire. For the hamlet of the same name in Herefordshire, see Lugwardine. For the town in Tasmania, Australia, see Hagley, Tasmania.
Hagley
The Lyttelton Arms
Population4,283 
Civil parish
  • Hagley
District
Shire county
Region
CountryEngland
Sovereign stateUnited Kingdom
Post townSTOURBRIDGE
Postcode districtDY8/9
Dialling code01562
PoliceWest Mercia
FireHereford and Worcester
AmbulanceWest Midlands
UK Parliament
List of places
UK
England
Worcestershire

Hagley is a village and civil parish in Worcestershire, England. It is on the boundary of the West Midlands and Worcestershire counties between the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley and Kidderminster. The parish had a population of 4,283 in 2001,[1] but the whole village had a population of perhaps 5,600, including the part in Clent parish.[citation needed] It is in Bromsgrove District.

Heritage

The parish of Hagley used to consist of Hagley, West Hagley and Blakedown. The main focus of the village was Hagley where Hagley Hall and the parish church of St John the Baptist (with its origins in Anglo-Saxon times[2]) reside. In 1868 the Earl of Dudley defrayed one third of the cost of the tower and spire by George Edmund Street added to the church.[3]

Lower Hagley started to expand with the arrival of the railway in 1852 and the building of a proper station and its iconic GWR footbridge (completed in 1884).[4] [5] The expansion of Lower Hagley (now known as West Hagley) initiated a shift in the focus of the village.[5] This was recognised in 1906 with the building of a subsidiary parish church in Lower Hagley dedicated to St Saviour.[2] and today West Hagley contains the shopping area and the schools. The precise dividing line between the two areas is undefined and is therefore debatable. Nevertheless, both settlements lie within the parish of Hagley.

The parish register of Hagley is the oldest in England. It dates from 1 December 1538, being the year in which registers were ordered to be kept in all parishes.[6]

Present

Hagley is part of the West Midlands Urban Area as defined by the Office for National Statistics,[7] and is joined to Stourbridge and the Black Country by the A491 and B4187; The village lies at the foot of the Clent Hills, and is served by its own railway station on the Kidderminster to Birmingham line.

It is situated on the A456 Birmingham to Kidderminster road, which is known as the Hagley Road in Birmingham, because it was once administered by a turnpike trust,[8] whose responsibilities ended at the former boundary of the parish (now in Blakedown).

Despite having a population larger than some market towns (such as Tenbury Wells) and once having its own cattle market, Hagley lacks the essential characteristics of a market town.[a][9] While it has a shopping street and many local services, it is a fundamentally unbalanced community economically, in that there is little local employment (other than in local services). However, unemployment is low,[10] because of the ease of commuting to work. Accordingly, Hagley is essentially a dormitory village for Birmingham or the adjacent Black Country.

Landmarks

File:St John the Baptist Church, Hagley Worcestershire – geograph.org.uk – 1291066.jpg
St John the Baptist Church, Hagley

Hagley is known for

  • Hagley Hall, the home for several centuries of the Lyttelton family, whose head is Viscount Cobham
  • Hagley Park, which immediately surrounds Hagley Hall and mainly consists of 350 acres (1.4 km2) of landscaped deer park. Other parts of the park, like the parish church of St John the Baptist and Wychbury Hill, although part of the Estate, are kept open to public.
  • The Castle in Hagley Park, a Grade II*listed folly and the largest building in Hagley Park
  • Wychbury Hill with its "monument", an obelisk. The body of "Bella" was believed to have been found in a wood near the hill, sparking the murder mystery "Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?", about which a play was written by the local drama society. However, contrary to the local myth, the body was found in Hagley Wood, off a lane on the side of nearby Clent Hill.[citation needed]
  • St Saviour's Church, a stone-built church near the centre of West Hagley, dedicated in 1908 and consecrated in 1957. It consists of a nave and chancel without a tower.[2] It has a series of windows by Francis Skeat.[11]
Hagley Monument after its restoration in 2010

The parish register of Hagley is the oldest in England. It dates from 1 December 1538, being the year in which registers were ordered to be kept in all parishes.[6]

Notable residents

See also

Notes

  1. ^ According to the definition in West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy, policy RR3.
  1. ^ Census 2001
  2. ^ a b c Smith 2006.
  3. ^ Folkes, J. Homery The Victorian Architect and George Edmund Street Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaelogical Society. Third Series Vol 4 1974 p9
  4. ^ English Heritage 2013.
  5. ^ a b Pritchard 1999, pp. 10, 14 (PDF 12, 16).
  6. ^ a b Valentine 1891, pp. 265–266.
  7. ^ "Census 2001: Key Statistics for urban areas in the Midlands" (PDF). Office for National Statistics. ISBN 0-11-621745-6. Retrieved 20 May 2012.
  8. ^ Local Statute, 26 Geo. II, c.47
  9. ^ HHFS staff 2013.
  10. ^ 2.6% of the population were unemployed at the time of the 2001 census: Hagley census profile
  11. ^ "West Window". St. Saviour's, Hagley. flickr. Retrieved 1 January 2011.
  12. ^ The Journal of Emily Pepys, intr. Gillian Avery (London: Prospect, 1984).
  13. ^ Lundy 2011, p. 1084 § 10838.

References


External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hagley.
Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Hagley.
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