Olton United Reformed Church

Image: © Tiger Taken: 10 Aug 2012

Known as "The Church among the Trees", this was built as a Congregational church on the corner of Kineton Green and Brookvale Roads. The architect was John Osborne (an earlier design by W.H. Bidlake having been rejected as too costly) and the builder was Thomas Turton. The building was opened on the first day of the twentieth century, 1 January 1901. The nonconformist Holden family worshipped here from 1905-1911 when they lived opposite at Image Congregationalists had been active in Olton since 1820, when the Revd Thomas Hood preached in Kineton Green and probably at the Image (not the present public house, but its eponymous tree at the meeting of the bounds of Bickenhill, Solihull and Yardley parishes and on the county march between Warwickshire and Worcestershire, where a station with a Gospel reading would traditionally have been made during the annual Rogationtide processions). From 1879 they had worshipped in the old chapel converted from a butcher's shop and blacksmith's premises, which later became the workshop of the organ builder Tom Sheffield and subsequently Image I am indebted to the researches of Margaret Jordan published in "Olton Heritage" (1986) for much of this history.

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