Great Barr is a large and loosely defined area to the north-west of Birmingham, in the county of the West Midlands, England. The area was historically in Staffordshire, and the parts now in Birmingham were once known as Perry Barr, which is still the name of an adjacent Birmingham district. Other parts still known as Great Barr are now in the Metropolitan Boroughs of Walsall and Sandwell.

"Barr" means "hill", and the name refers to nearby Barr Beacon. The name Barr Magna is used on some old maps. Others show it as "Gt. Barr".

Great Barr was historically a township and chapelry in the parish of Aldridge, in Staffordshire. The chapel, now the site of St. Margaret's Church, is known to have existed by 1552, and its burial ground was consecrated in 1732.

Samuel Taylor, an itinerant Methodist preacher, visited Great Barr in 1792 and remarked "preached at Barr, a village famous for nothing as having given birth to Francis Asbury of America and being the present residence of his parents, at whose house we preached".

Great Barr was largely rural until the early 20th century, though it was influenced by the early stages of the industrial revolution which affected the nearby towns of Birmingham and the Black Country. The Staffordshire parish of Barr straddled the route from Birmingham to Walsall. Birmingham's historian William Hutton was surprised to see so many nail-making workshops in the area. He noted that "in some of these workshops I observed one, or more, females, stripped of their upper garments, and not overcharged with the lower, wielding the hammer with all the grace of their sex".

At that time the area was on the main drovers' routes which saw trains of horses taking coal from Walsall and Wednesbury to the factories and furnaces of Birmingham. At the Scott Arms there was a weekly cattle market which attracted large crowds. The Scott Arms and the Malt Shovel public house in Newton, did a roaring trade with drunkenness, cockfighting, and gambling common. Francis Asbury referred to it as "a dark place called Great Barre"

The rural economy was dominated by four great landowning families, the Wryley Birches, Dartmouths, Scotts and Goughs. The parish was series of tiny hamlets: Howell's Row, Sneal's Green, Newton, Margaret's Lane, Queslett, the Common, Bourn Pool, Bourn Vale, the Tamworth Road, the Gough Arms Inn (later called the Beacon Inn) and around Barr Hall. In 1817 there were 120 houses occupied by 127 families, 78 of whom were engaged in agriculture and 30 in trade. These trades included a tailor, boarding house owner, a wheelwright, a butcher, a grocer, who doubled as a constable, a shoemaker, two brick makers, a maltster, gun lock maker, three blacksmiths, and four spectacle frame makers.

In 1866 Great Barr became a separate civil parish, which in 1894 became part of Walsall Rural District. The 1901 census recorded a population of 1,344 and by 1921 this had increased to 2,232. A 1919 report on health and sanitation in Walsall Rural District describes the parish of Great Barr as extensive, almost entirely rural and having a scattered population, with the exception of residential Streetley.