A bicentenary party is planned at St Chad and All Saints Roman Catholic Church in High Holborn, Sedgley, on Sunday, 20th August.

St Chad’s is one of the oldest churches in the Archdiocese of Birmingham, being a Gothic design of the 1820s, in turn replacing a chapel of 1789. The vaulted sanctuary was considerably enriched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the painted decoration is now lost or covered. The building was remodelled and extended at the (ritual) west end by G. B Cox in 1923-4. With the contemporary (but altered) presbytery, former school buildings and large burial ground, the church belongs to a significant group of Catholic structures reflecting the growth of the mission and parish over a century.

Mass was said in Sedgley in the late eighteenth century at private houses by the Rev. John Perry, a junior priest from Wolverhampton. About 1786 he purchased a piece of land in what is now Sandyfields Road and erected a small chapel dedicated to St George, which was dedicated on St George’s Day, 1789. A house was built adjoining the chapel shortly afterwards.

The Rev. Thomas Tysan arrived to assist Fr Perry in 1812 and in 1821 he purchased an acre of land near Sedgley village for an ‘elegant and commodious church’, dedicated to All Saints and seating 400, which opened on 24th August 1823. Father Tysan was known affectionately by his congregation as the ‘Apostle of Sedgley’, largely because of the efforts and sacrifices that he personally made and the problems he endured to get the church built.

The old church was demolished, and the bones of Fr Perry reinterred in the burial ground of the new church. The stones from the old church were reused for the construction of the presbytery at the new site. The identity of the architect for the new church, which was in the then-fashionable thin Commissioners’ Gothic style, is not known. This was said to be the first Catholic church on a main road since the Reformation to be built with a tower, and was intended from the outset to house a peal of bells, in contravention of the provisions of the first Catholic Relief Act (although no bells were in fact installed).

In 1837 a two-storey voluntary school was built by Fr Tysan as an adjunct to the church at the (ritual) east end (this was converted to two cottages in 1900). The mission had no formal connection with the nearby Sedgley Park School, although financial and pastoral support was offered by the latter in the 1840s. A new school building was added in 1876. New school buildings were built on an adjacent site from 1956.