Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

In 1721 the prosperous town of Sutton Coldfield was made up of 244 houses and 116 cottages, the cottages housing the labouring poor and their elderly relatives. About forty of these cottages were situated on the commons which stretched for miles r...

When the boundary of Sutton Coldfield was surveyed by the Enclosure Commissioner in 1824, he found that it passed from “the centre of the door of the Cock public house occupied by John Sandon and thence through the kitchen and house in an ob...

The River Tame still forms the boundary between Sutton and Water Orton, as it did in 1824 when Mr. Harris the Commissioner made his survey. It is probable that early Anglo-Saxon settlers, using the rivers to penetrate to the heart of England, es...

In 1416 the Head Forester of the Earl of Warwick’s Chase of Sutton Coldfield reported to the Court Leet at Sutton that some men had let their pigs loose in the lord’s park without permission, to the destruction of the vegetation there....

Sir Wolstan Dixie, a London merchant, gave Emmanuel College, Cambridge, £600 in 1594. The College, which had been founded ten years earlier by Dixie’s friend Sir Walter Mildmay, used this money to buy property which yielded an annual i...

Moot Halls Sutton Coldfield became a self-governing town in 1528 by virtue of a Charter granted by King Henry VIII. The Charter stipulates that the Town Council comprise twenty-five men, to be known as the Warden and Society. Every man in Sutton ...

Sutton in 1811 was a quiet market town with a scattered rural population, but there was enough development going on to keep Solomon Smith the builder busy - indeed, to enable him to become a wealthy man. He had his business at Four Oaks, at a hou...

There is some evidence that Great Sutton (the part of Sutton centred on High Street) was a farming community in 1150 with two or three large open fields divided up into strips of land. Each farmer had ten or more half-acre strips in each field, pa...

Joseph Duncomb was elected Warden (Mayor) of Sutton Coldfield in 1760 and again in 1761. While he was Warden he took a share in the newly-made Blackroot Pool in Sutton Park, and he gave himself planning permission to construct a leather mill there...

Over a thousand years ago an embankment or causeway was made to carry the road from Maney to Sutton across the marshy valley, and 600 years ago this embankment, - now the Parade and Lower Parade - which formed the dam for the mill pool, was reinfo...

The branch of the Midland Railway Company from Walsall to Water Orton was opened in 1879, with stations at Sutton Park and Midland Drive. The route had been surveyed in detail in 1871, and the survey shows the properties that would be affected by ...

Sutton Coldfield became a self-governing town in 1528 by virtue of a Charter granted by King Henry VIII. The area of the town was about 13,000 acres (20 square miles), of which less than 4,000 acres was farmland, and the population in 1528 was bel...

In 1935 the old Kings Arms public house was demolished and a new pub was built in its place. The old Kings Arms was a brick building with mock-Tudor decoration, possibly built in the eighteenth century. The earliest record of it is a map of 1763, ...

Karl Philipp Moritz, a German student, visited England in 1782 when he was 26 years old, and the next year his account of this visit, “Journeys of a German in England” was published. When he travelled from London to Castleton to see the famous Pea...

Mr. Harris, making his tour of the parish boundary of Sutton Coldfield in 1824, arrived at the point where it turned away from the River Tame near Minworth Mill. He noted that the other side of the river lay in Aston Parish while land further alon...

The old boundary of Sutton, as recorded by the Enclosure Commissioner in 1824, followed Hurst Brook from the canal to Wishaw Lane.Hurst Brook rises at the moat of Peddimore Hall - it is now a ditch cutting a straight line across a flat prairie, bu...

Bakers of bread in Sutton Coldfield in the fourteenth century used flour that was a mixture of wheat and rye. A medieval oven recently unearthed in Coleshill Street contained grains of rye, and the corn provided by the Manor for the Head Palesman ...

Sutton Coldfield became a self-governing town in 1528 thanks to a Royal Charter granted by King Henry VIII. Instead of a mayor and corporation the charter specified a warden and society - the first wardens were all relatives of Bishop Vesey. On th...

“On Sunday afternoon last the Birmingham Battalion of Rifle Volunteers marched back again, after a week spent under canvas in Sutton Park” reported the Sutton Coldfield and Erdington News on July 3rd 1889. The Birmingham Battalion, founded in 187...

In 1800 Lichfield Road was still “a tortuous and narrow road which led up to Mere Pool”, but it was much improved when it was taken over by a Turnpike Trust in 1807. Tamworth Road was even worse, and Little Sutton Lane led down the hil...

The Enclosure Commissioner for Sutton Coldfield followed the boundary of Sutton in 1824 along Hurst Green Lane “across a lane called Dog Lane leading to Minworth” (now Summer Lane) to the triangular green at Hurst Green. This green was...

Sarah Holbeche was a snob, and looked down on wealthy factory owners. In 1866 she wrote in her diary “The Lloyd brothers made their appearance as occupants of Moor Hall and pew (reserved seat in the Parish Church), specimens of Black Country gentr...

John Harris was the surveyor appointed to be the Commissioner for the Enclosure of the commons of Sutton Coldfield by Act of Parliament dated 1824. One of his first duties was to define the boundaries of Sutton, and he did this by making a perambu...

Sarah Holbeche noted in her diary “1826. New road to the Park, a great boon, before which the only access was at Doe Bank”. The new road was built as part of an agreement with Sir Edmund Hartopp of Four Oaks Hall known as the Hartopp Exchange, whe...

In 1824 Joseph Webster was the owner of Penns Mill and forty acres of land. The next thirty years saw the steady expansion of the Penns estate, until a schedule of 1856 shows that 574 acres of land in Sutton then belonged to the Websters. Some of ...

The Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 for William the Conqueror, is a survey of all the manors in England. Sutton Coldfield is included, one of over 350 manors in Warwickshire, and details of its size and assets are given. The survey does not mentio...

Sir William Dugdale, writing in 1656, says that Bishop Vesey built “51 Stone houses” and “began to set up a trade of clothing” in Sutton, while a more contemporary writer, Leland, who visited Sutton in about 1540, reported ...

Park Road was made in 1826, leading to Sutton Park via Town Gate and Meadow Platt - before 1826 Meadow Platt had been farmland. This new road was said to be a great boon, previously the only access to the park was along Lichfield Road and Blackroo...

West of a line drawn north to south through the centre of Sutton, most of the land is sandy and pebbly, while to the east there are beds of sandstone and clay. For a long time the land to the west was known as the Coldfield because it was so infer...

The new secondary school in Upper Holland Road remained unfinished and empty at the beginning of World War II, earmarked for possible military use. America entered the war at the end of 1941, and the build-up of American forces in Britain began. T...

Miss Bracken, writing in 1860, could say of Sutton, “Here the cottager, rambling in search of his depastured cattle, feels the pleasure of possessing rights, not the less acceptable that he shares them with his richest and his poorest neighbour.” ...

William Frederick Woodington died in 1893 aged 87. He was an artist and sculptor of note, and among his papers was a short account of his life, mostly concerned with his Sutton Coldfield childhood. In 1898 this memoir was published in a local maga...

The earliest surviving sculpture in Sutton, and probably the most spectacular, is the effigy of Bishop Vesey on his tomb monument in the Parish Church. It is the only monumental effigy of a bishop in Warwickshire, and was probably sculpted from li...

Although the name Wylde Green sounds as if made up by an estate agent, it is in fact very old. Records of the local court from the sixteenth century give “Maney and the Wylde” as one of five districts in Sutton, with its own tithingmen. The tithin...

When Sutton was a feudal manor, all the people had some farmland for which they had to render services to the Lord of the Manor; they were not free, but bondsmen of the manorial lord. This was how a feudal manor was supposed to work, but in practi...

Sutton Coldfield did not escape the Europe-wide catastrophes of the fourteenth century - the great famine of 1322 with widespread starvation, the epidemic known as the Black Death of 1348-9 which killed half the population, and the so-called child...