Cradley Links

CRADLEY is a parish and extensive and populous district on the borders of Staffordshire, the river Stour separating it from Cradley Heath in that county; it has a station on the Birmingham and Stourbridge section of the Great Western railway, 2 1/2 miles east from Stourbridge, 4 south from Dudley and 9 1/2 south-west from Birmingham, in the Norther... n Division of the county, hundred of Lower Halfshire, Stourbridge petty sessional division, union and county court district, rural deanery of Dudley and archdeaconry and diocese of Worcester. The town itself lies a little off the main road and forms part of a populous mercantile and manufacturing neighbourhood, in which the iron trade is carried on in all its branches; water is supplied by the South Staffordshire Waterworks Company and gas by the Cradley Heath Gas Company. The ecclesiastical parish was formed in 1799 from the civil parish of Halesowen. The church of St. Peter, erected in 1789, and until its consecration in 1798 a chapel belonging to Lady Huntingdon's Connection, is an edifice of brick, repaired in 1874-5, at a cost of about £4,500, and consists of chancel, nave, east porch and a brick tower added in 1876 and containing 8 bells, shown in the Vienna exhibition of 1873 : a new font was provided in 1867 and an organ built at a cost of £400 : there are 750 sittings, 350 being free. The register of baptisms and burials dates from 1785; marriages, 1802. The living is a vicarage, net yearly value £250, in the gift of the rector of Halesowen, and held since 1892 by the Rev. Robert Henry Edmondson of Brasenose College, Oxford, and B.A. of Trinity College, Dublin. The great tithes are held by the lay impropriator, Mr Jeston Homfray. A vicarage house was built in 1899 by the parishioners, at a cost of £2,550. In 1852 a grant of land was made by the sons of the late Rev. George Biggs (a former rector of Halesowen) for the enlargement of the burial grounds of this parish, and a second enlargement of one acre was made in 1874. Here is a Unitarian chapel, built in ...Read More