A Little Garden with a Big History

It really is amazing how one thing can lead to another. A couple of years ago Bickenhill Parish Council was made aware of a problem with the small garden by the bus stop next to the Memorial Garden on Station Road. The garden was known locally as the Willow Garden.

This is how the Willow Garden used to look

The garden was so called because the central feature was a willow tree but unfortunately the tree was not in good condition and the Council was advised by a tree surgeon that it should be removed.

The Council decided to keep the area as a garden and in spring of 2011 the tree was removed, a raised bed was built and the wall adjoining Station Road was refurbished.

The new garden was ready to be planted but what should we call it now that the willow tree was no longer the central feature?
It was brought to the Council's attention that the Willow Garden was the original site of the Marston Green Chapel and it was decided to research this matter further.

In the early 1830s the Ebenezer Chapel Home Missionaries came out from Birmingham. The missionaries found the community to be in a deplorable state of ignorance and destitution and they hired a room locally for prayer meetings. This was so successful they decided to purchase a piece of land for the building of a Chapel in Marston Green and the congregation of Ebenezer Chapel, Birmingham, bore the expense of the construction.

This picture is taken from Home Missionary Chronicle 1839.

Information obtained from books by local authors suggests the building was a wooden structure for the first twenty years of its life, but the above picture seems to call that into doubt.  Either way, the Chapel started its life on the site of our new garden.  It was opened for worship on 11th September 1835 and dedicated by the Reverend Peter Sibree.
Some twenty years later, in the 1850’s, the Chapel became run down due to lack of funds and fell into disrepair.  It was then purchased by the Digby family who refurbished it and for many years used it as a private chapel which remained unconsecrated.  Villagers were invited to use the Chapel because it was a long walk to the Parish Church of St Peter in Bickenhill.  
For the next seventy years the Chapel remained in the hands of the Digby family and in 1920 Col. F J B Wingfield Digby gave the Chapel to Birmingham Diocesan Trustees.  The Chapel was renamed the Church of Saint Leonard when in 1928 Marston Green was separated from Bickenhill for ecclesiastical purposes and united with the parish of St Giles at Sheldon.

This was the Chapel eighty years later in 1920

1925 The Gravel Pit with Station Road on the left and overlooked
by the Chapel

This was how the Chapel looked in the summer of 1949 when the Garden of Remembrance was opened.
This is the view from Elmdon Road looking across the Memorial Garden to Station Road.

The new Parish Church of Saint Leonard was opened in 1938. Some relics from the original Chapel can still be seen in Saint Leonard’s church; these include a church bench just inside the entrance and a tablet on the wall dedicated to the memory of those parishioners lost in the 1914-18 First World War.  The bell from the Chapel was also used at Saint Leonard’s until it was replaced in 1959.

This tablet is on display in Saint Leonard’s Church		A final photograph of the chapel building just before it was demolished in the early 1960’s. It is interesting to note that part of the wall at the entrance to the Chapel still exists to this day.

The building continued to be used for meetings by various organisations in Marston Green and during the Second World War it was a First Aid station.  After the war the building was used for a while by the Scouts and Guides for meetings, as well as hosting many other functions.  In the fifties it became the Village Library until its demolition in 1961.
From 1835 until 1961, the site for the new garden was one of the central points of village life in Marston Green and it has over 180 years of local history.  
The Parish Council decided it should acknowledge the importance of this site with a sign placed in the garden telling the history of the Chapel and the part it played in village life. 
There could only be one name for the new garden:

The Chapel Garden

Footnote: Information for this document has been drawn from local publications, Internet, Public Libraries and local knowledge.