Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 20/06/2026 18:27:00

Opened in 1899 to keep developers off the last of a great estate's gardens, Moseley Park and Pool is an eleven-acre gated green space in the Birmingham suburb of Moseley, a short walk west of the district centre. The land was once part of the grounds of Moseley Hall, laid out by the celebrated landscape gardener Humphry Repton, and survives as a quiet oasis of lawns, mature trees and a large lake known as the Pool. The park's survival is the result of late-Victorian foresight. As Moseley Hall's estate was broken up for housing in the 1890s, a group of local businessmen leased and later bought the land around the Great Pool, forming a company in 1898 to protect it from further building. The park was formally opened by the East Worcestershire MP Austen Chamberlain on 29 September 1899, with access limited to subscribers who held a key to the gates. For much of its life it has remained a private park run for its key-holding members, a model that continues today alongside regular public open days. In 2006 the private company was converted into a charitable trust, the Moseley Park and Pool Trust, whose terms ensure the land can never be sold, and which manages the site for the wider community through volunteer trustees. The park is best known beyond Moseley as a summer concert site. Since 2006 it has hosted the Moseley Folk and Arts Festival, which uses the natural amphitheatre formed by the slope down to the lake, and it also stages the Mostly Jazz, Funk and Soul festival, drawing thousands of music-goers into a setting more usually given over to wildlife and quiet recreation. Alongside the festivals, the trust runs a programme of family nature activities, craft workshops and open days, and the park is home to tennis, angling and yoga clubs. The combination of a protected historic landscape, a members' key-holder tradition and a busy festival calendar makes it an unusual green venue in the heart of the city.