Sedgley, Staffordshire

Historical Description

Sedgley, a town, the head of a petty sessional division, and a parish in Staffordshire. The town stands on high ground, 1½ mile W by S of Deepfields and Coseley station on the Birmingham and Wolverhampton section of the L. & N.W.R., and 3 NW of Dudley. It has a post, money order, and telegraph office under Dudley. A public hall was erected in 1882, and is used for public meetings, &c. The temperance hall, erected in 1871, includes reading-rooms and library and an assembly room. Petty sessions are held at the police court. All Saints' Church was erected in 1829 and was partially restored in 1883. There are Roman Catholic, Congregational, Primitive Methodist, and Wesleyan chapels. The parish contains also the villages of Brierley, Coseley, Cotwall End, Ettingshall, Lower Gornall, Upper Gornall, Gospel End, and Woodsetton. Acreage, 7591; population, 36,860. The surface is hilly; the substrata are rich in useful minerals, and the lower grounds are traversed by numerous rivulets and canals. A hill, called the Beacon, is crowned by a tower, and commands an extensive view. The manufacture of nails, rivets, chains, fire-irons, locks, iron safes, bellows, bricks, and malt is largely carried on. Upper Sedgley, comprising Sedgley, Upper and Lower Gornall, Gospel End, and Cotwall End, forms a district under the government of a district council, and the remainder of the parish is included in Coseley district. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lichfield; net value, £459 with residence. Patron, the Earl of Dudley. Population of the ecclesiastical parish, 4327. Upper and Lower Gornall form separate ecclesiastical parishes. See COSELEY and ETTINGSHALL.

Administration

The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.

Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.

Directories & Gazetteers

We have transcribed the entry for Sedgley from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Sedgley (All Saints))

Land and Property

A full transcript of the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Staffordshire is online.

Maps

Online maps of Sedgley are available from a number of sites:

• Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• Google Streetview.
• National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
• OpenStreetMap.
• old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
• Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)

Newspapers and Periodicals

The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Staffordshire newspapers online:

• Staffordshire Advertiser
• Tamworth Herald
• Lichfield Mercury
• Staffordshire Sentinel
• Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser

Villages, Hamlets, &c