Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

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...