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This link takes you to a central point in the landscape

The land that is now Warley Woods was agricultural land until the 1790s when it was bought by industrialist Samuel Galton Junior with the intention of creating a pleasure ground around a country house.  He engaged Humphry Repton, the most eminent landscape gardener of the day, to provide a design for the landscape.  Repton visited in 1794 and presented his design proposals in 1795.

Repton produced his proposed design in the form of a Red Book including watercolours showing before and after views of the suggested transformation.  These were shown by tabbed overlays which you peeled back to see the before and after.  His plans included significant tree planting into the farm land which led to the creation of our current woods, parkland, a carriage way, a Doric temple and, of course, a house.  He specialised in making the most of views, and disguising aspects of the landscape which he thought distracted from the views – such as farm buildings.  

The Red Book of Warley can be seen in Smethwick Library and the watercolour images suggest that many of Repton’s plans were executed.  His design for the house was not followed and it was much later, around 1820, when the Warley landscape finally became parkland around a home.  The house, Warley Hall/Abbey, was designed by Robert Lugar in fashionable Gothic style for Samuel Galton’s son Hubert.

You can see the bones of the landscape we have today in his drawings and the Community Trust ensures the preservation of key elements, such as his “hanging groups” of trees.  It is the remaining elements of his design that has led to the park receiving a listing on the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England held by Historic England as a grade 2 site.  external link to listing

You can read more about Humphry Repton here.

The Community Trust took part in a number of activities to celebrate the work of Humphry Repton on the bicentenary of his death in 2018 and created a leaflet about him and Samuel Galton Junior.  The Community Trust holds a facsimile of the Repton Red Book created in the 1970s.

Would you like to read about somewhere else on the history trail?  Go back to the main listing page.