GREAT BARR HALL HISTORY
Great Barr Hall was the traditional family seat of the Scott family – who gave their name to the nearby Scott Arms district that sits on the border of Walsall, West Bromwich and Birmingham.

Richard Scott acquired the house, then known as Nether Hall, in the mid 1700s.

The original building was replaced by the two-storey Gothic mansion in 1777, complete with outbuildings and a chapel.

Financial problems led the Scott Family to lease out the hall from about 1788 to Samuel Galton, and for some years, it became a venue for meetings of the illustrious Lunar Society – a dinner club and informal group of prominent figures in the Midlands including industrialists, natural philosophers and intellectuals.

A memorial to the society, called the Moonstones, has been erected at a supermarket.

Sir Francis Scott inherited the manor of Great Barr from his maternal uncle Thomas Hoo in 1791 and was able to return to live in the house on the expiry of the lease.

But in 1911, the estate was purchased by a local hospital board and, in 1918, became St Margaret’s Mental Hospital.

Many detached hospital buildings were erected around the hall, but the mansion was abandoned in 1978. The hospital itself was used as an institution for patients with learning difficulties until the final patients left in the 1990s.

Bovis Homes purchased part of the estate in 2006 and erected Nether Hall Park, a residential development of hundreds of luxury homes.