Description:Glascote is situated to the south-east of Tamworth, bisected by Glascote Road and bounded on the north and the west by the Coventry Canal. It is adjacent to the county’s boundary with Warwickshire and until 1965 was part of Warwickshire. Originally a village which was distinctly separate from Tamworth, it is now very much a suburb of the town.
The place name is derived from the Old English word for glass and ‘cot’, meaning a hut. This suggests ‘a glass workshop’ since ‘cot’ is usually associated with some form of industrial process.
In the Middle Ages, the manor of Glascote was owned by the de Clintons and then the Marmion family. Later it passed into the ownership of the Ferrars family until it was acquired by the Corporation of Tamworth with Bole Hall in 1897.
Glascote’s main growth came in the 19th century with the discovery of a large seam of clay and the presence of coal. This led to the opening of a colliery and an adjacent manufacturing works, Gibbs and Canning in 1847. The company made glazed stoneware, such as pipes, and architectural terracotta. Gibbs and Canning were major employers in Glascote and their products came to be of national and international importance. In 1950 Gibbs and Canning’s claypit closed down. Over 46 years it had yielded some 350,000 tons of clay. The site of the manufactory has now been built over by housing development.
With the development of industry came a substantial growth in population. The combined population of Bolehall and Glascote rose from 208 in 1801 to 4,915 a hundred years later.
Glascote Road was originally a toll road. A railway was built between Glascote Colliery and Glascote Works to transport coal and manufactured materials to the Coventry Canal and the Derby-Birmingham railway.
Glascote parish church is dedicated to St George. It was built in 1880 of red brick at a cost of £3,000 and was designed by the architect, Basil Chamneys. It has a window designed by Burne Jones and produced by Morris and Company. The Reverend William MacGregor, vicar of Tamworth from 1878 to 1887, presented the bell. The church has recently been completely re-designed on the inside. The statue of St George outside the church is dedicated to the Reverend Maurice Berkeley Peel, an army chaplain who was awarded the Military Cross and killed in France while searching for wounded. He was a grandson of Sir Robert Peel. Chapels were also built in Glascote for the Methodists and Primitive Methodists.
Glascote and Bolehall had a joint school board which built a board school for boys at Glascote in 1892, now William MacGregor primary school, and one for girls in 1883.