Upper Landywood Methodist Church

Upper Landywood Methodist Church is a small, distinctive nineteenth-century chapel in the Landywood district of Great Wyrley, South Staffordshire, locally listed at grade B with the touching official note that it was "built by volunteers". Together with Great Wyrley Methodist Church of 1925, it forms part of the Cannock Chase Methodist Circuit, and it preserves, in miniature, the chapel-building world of the Staffordshire coalfield.

Landywood and Great Wyrley grew out of an ancient but long-empty landscape. The Domesday Book of 1086 records Wereleia, its name from the Old English for "bog myrtle" and "woodland clearing", among the scattered and abandoned holdings of the Church of St Chad in Lichfield. The modern community was created by coal and iron: the Great Wyrley Colliery, the nail, implement and horseshoe trades of the outlying hamlets, and the Wyrley and Essington Canal drew working families to the district through the nineteenth century, and it was for such families, in the southern hamlet of Upper Landywood, that local volunteers raised this little chapel with their own hands, a classic expression of the self-help Methodism that flourished in the mining Midlands while the established church built St Mark's in the village centre in 1845.

The chapel's village witnessed one of the strangest episodes in English legal history. From 1876 the Vicar of Great Wyrley was Shapurji Edalji, a Parsi convert from Bombay and possibly the first South Asian incumbent of an English parish, whose family suffered years of anonymous persecution; in 1903 the Great Wyrley Outrages, a series of night-time slashings of horses, cattle and sheep, were blamed on the vicar's son George Edalji, a solicitor, who was convicted on flimsy evidence and sentenced to seven years' hard labour. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously took up the case in 1906, proving Edalji's innocence after eight months of detective work, a miscarriage of justice that contributed to the founding of the Court of Criminal Appeal and was retold a century later in Julian Barnes's novel Arthur and George. The poison-pen letters of the so-called "Wyrley Gang" troubled the district for decades more, until their author was finally convicted in 1934.

The mining world that built the chapel has gone: Great Wyrley, with about 11,000 people, is now largely a commuter village between the M6 and M6 Toll, its Landywood railway station carrying residents to Birmingham on the Chase Line, and new housing spreading over the old green belt. Through it all the volunteers' chapel at Upper Landywood has continued its quiet Methodist witness, a remnant of the colliery hamlets within the Cannock Chase Circuit, valued enough by its community to be locally listed and lovingly described, in the planners' own words, as small, distinctive, and built by the people themselves.