HALESOWEN  , a

market town in the Oldbury parliamentary division of Worcestershire, England, on a branch line of the Great Western and Midland railways, 62 m . W.S.W. of Birmingham . Pop . (Igo I), 4057 . It lies in a pleasant country among the eastern foothills of the Lickey Hills . There are extensive iron and steel manufactures . The church of SS Mary and John the Baptist has rude Norman portions; and the poet William Shenstone, buried in 1763 in the churchyard, has a memorial in the church . His delight in landscape gardening is exemplified in the neighbouring estate of the Leasowes, which was his property . There is a grammar school founded in 1652, and in the neighbourhood is the Methodist foundation of Bourne College (1883) . Close to the town, on the river Stour, which rises in the vicinity, are slight ruins of a Premonstratensian abbey of Early English date . Within the parish and 2 m . N.W. of Halesowen is Cradley, with iron and steel works, fire-clay works and a large nail and chain industry .