St Cyprian's Church, Hay Mills

James Horsfall was a wire drawer from Digbeth who invented high tensile steel wire. He moved to Hay Mill, a disused blade and sword factory at a water mill on the River Cole, rebuilding it as a steam-driven mill. The mill originally belonged to Hay Hall in Tyseley. In 1855 his company merged with Joseph Webster's of Penn Mill, Sutton Coldfield. He was a major manufacturer and exporter of the piano wire to Europe in 1824. In 1853 Horsfall had patented a heat treatment process which strengthened the wire. This led to improved piano wire (giving a near monopoly), wire for making needles in Redditch, fishhooks, and umbrella frames. The firm made the armoured wire for first successful…

The church, in the Gothic style, is of red brick with a minimum use of black brick and stone dressings; it has a tile roof. It consists of a Nave, with a hammer beam roof, large plate tracery, clerestory windows and low, narrow aisles to North and South, whose bays are demarcated each by buttresses with a single lancet window, a chancel, with a barrelled roof, at the West end, vestries with a gallery above. In the South West corner there is a porch tower with a slated broach spire with 2 tiers of lucarnes In the South East corner is the Horsfall mortuary chapel, added in 1877 in memory of his daughter, Elizabeth Horsfall and now the resting place of James Horsfall and his family. This is in…