aston hall: a lovely jacobean mansion
Birmingham City Council, although the owners of the place, granted permission for the A38M to cut its
concrete swathe through the estate of Aston Hall. (Photoof the hall by candlelight reproduced with kind permission of Steve Tomkins.)
It still has some 52 acres of parkland as well as the Hall itself. The friendly and high-informative guides, however, will not mention the motorway or its proximity though they will tell you about what happened to the Hall during the Civil War. Roundhead troops did damage the place in 1643; guides will point out the evidence of attack - the hole in the staircase where a cannonball went through a window, an open door and into a banister.
This lovely Jacobean mansion is sited the 'wrong' side of town to have escaped the corporate vandalism of the mid-20th century and earlier industrialisation. It is sited, now improbably, opposite Villa Park, and visible from A38M on your right if you drive into the city from Spaghetti Junction.
The Holte family lived there until 1817 (their name remembered in the ‘Holte End’ of Villa Park) when it was bought by James Watt Jnr, son of the famous Lunarman. He sold it on to the Aston Hall and Park Company Ltd for use as a public park and museum. They ran into financial difficulties, so Birmingham Corporation bought it in 1864; it was the first historic “country” house to be owned by a municipal authority.
In 1927, the Birmingham Civic Society designed formal gardens which were created by the city with through the efforts of a workforce recruited from the unemployed and paid for by government grants. The scheme included fountains, terracing and stone urns and a statue of Pan which the Civic Society paid for itself. In 1934 the finished work was presented to the City Parks Committee.
It’s now a community museum of the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery (BMAG). Closed for a £10M renovation in 2008 and much of 2009, entry is free of charge.