Hagley Hall, Stourbridge, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest. 

A mid-18th century landscape park, with circuit including several notable buildings, associated with a country house by Sanderson Miller.

LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING

Hagley lies in the lee of the Clent Hills, some ten miles south-west of the centre of Birmingham and six miles north-east of Kidderminster. The site was well favoured for the development of landscape scenery, having wooded valleys, streams and to the north of the Hall rising ground giving fine views of the Malvern Hills, Wychbury Hill (which forms the northern extremity of the park) and the Black Mountains of Wales.

To the west the park is bounded by Hall Lane and Bromsgrove Road and by later 20th-century housing (School Lane and others) on the edge of Hagley, which north of the walled kitchen garden has encroached onto former parkland. To the south the park boundary follows Gallows Brook before passing along the bottom of the Clent Hills, turning to run west and north around the fields of Hagleyhill farm. The northern part of the park, separated from the rest of the Hagley demesne by the A456 Birmingham Road (a dual carriageway), takes in the southern slope of Wychbury Hill, which is crowned by Wychbury Ring, an Iron Age hillfort.

The registered parkland extends to around 180 hectares.

REFERENCES Used by English Heritage

The Victoria History of the County of Worcester 3, (1913), pp 130-4

Country Life, 38 (16 October 1915), pp 520-8;

Country Life, 122 (19 September 1957), pp 546-9; (26 September 1957), pp 608-11

E Malins, English Landscaping and Literature (1966), pp 56-65

G Jackson-Stops, Hagley Hall (1979)

R Sidwell, West Midland Gardens (1981), pp 57-8

G Jellicoe et al, The Oxford Companion to Gardens (1986), pp 240-1

The Follies and Other Features of Hagley Park, Hagley Historical and Field Society, Occasional Paper 2 (1994)
 

Maps

OS 6" to 1 mile: Worcestershire sheet 9 NW, 1st edition published 1884

Worcestershire sheet 9 NE, 1st edition published 1884

OS 25" to 1 mile: Worcestershire sheet 9.7, 1st edition published 1883

Archival items

Plan of Public Carriage and Foot Roads in the Parishes of Hagley and Clent, 1826 [location of original unknown]