It lies 15 minutes by bus from the centre of Birmingham and comprises 63 acres (25 hectares) of landscaped grass slopes, including a large boating lake and a smaller pond fed by the Farcroft and Grove Brooks, flower beds, mature trees and shrubs with a diversity of wildlife, adjoining St. Mary's Church, Handsworth to the north, containing the graves of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt, Matthew Boulton and William Murdoch, and the founders of Aston Villa Football Club and the Victoria Jubilee Allotments site to the south opened on 12 June 2010.

As the Civic Gospel of municipal improvement spread from centre of Birmingham into the growing suburban estates of Handsworth, its local government leaders saw a public park as a benefit for the district.

Following the setting up of an education board and a free library, the adoption and proper kerbing of roads, street lighting, tramways and the construction of sewers, influential voices in the district began to speak of the need for a 'lung' in the city.

Such self-interest was present – used unashamedly to strengthen their case among the practically minded citizens of Handsworth – but opposition to the Park from that quarter was at times so intense that calculative motives alone would not have carried the project through.

At a public meeting in the council offices off Soho Road on 11 January 1887, the Rector of St. Mary's Church, Handsworth Dr. Randall, who could be seen as the voice of receding rural Staffordshire against the spreading metropolis of Birmingham, rose amid the uproar to make what the Handsworth News reporter, with irony, called the speech of the evening: "Allow me to say that from my heart I am the last man in the parish to stand between any object which is for the welfare of the people of the parish.

The completed park contains a cricket ground, pavilion, leisure centre – built on the remains of Grove House whose estate was bought to create the original park – a children's play-area, a small distinctive building previously used by the 'Sons of Rest' movement founded by Lister Muff in 1927, small monuments and a bandstand built at the Lion Foundry of Kirkintilloch, near Glasgow.

The site of the garden was previously an irregular hollow, but the executed design carries on the axial line of the park entrance and featured as its centrepiece a bronze sculpture of a child holding a lamb atop a Portland stone plinth.

Consultant for Birmingham City Council, Dr Hilary Taylor, observed: There is no doubt that Handsworth Park is a successful design, one where everything from the basic landform to the elements of planting and ornament were the outcome of careful consideration, both of the site and the requirements of the local community.

There is a melancholy quality, conveyed particularly by the dark tree cover, the poor maintenance and lack of care, and—less easy to resolve—the modern intrusions of leisure centre and car parks.