Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The enclosure of common land is sometimes quoted as a major cause of rural depopulation, but although Sutton Coldfield was still a rural place in the 1820s, when the extensive commons were enclosed, the population continued to increase. Four Oaks ...

The present Council offices in King Edwards Square were originally built as “The Royal Hotel”. With the arrival of the railway in Sutton in 1862 a group of businessmen who had promoted the railway set up the Royal Hotel Company, speculating that S...

Miss Bracken’s History of the Forest and Chase of Sutton Coldfield was published in 1860, when old place-names forgotten today were still in use, and Miss Bracken speculated as to their origin. Near Tower Road in Hill Village was a field called “T...

On the corner of Birmingham Road and Duke Street stands Sutton Coldfield Cottage Hospital. It was opened on the seventh of July 1908 by Dr. Alfred Evans (later knighted for services to Sutton Coldfield) who said “some ten or eleven years ago when ...

A survey of Sutton Park, made in 1779, shows that the boundary fence had nine gates. Only four of the gates lead into the park from Sutton, the other five give access from the neighbouring Staffordshire parishes of Perry Barr and Great Barr - op...

There was a fence all round Sutton Park in 1779, and the Warden and Society of Sutton regulated the Park so that only the inhabitants of Sutton were allowed to make use of its resources. From Banners Gate to Streetly Lane the fence separated the P...

“The greatest ornament and addition to the town of Sutton, is the house of William Jesson, Esq; most remarkable for its neatness of situation” - so wrote the anonymous “Agricola” in1762. The author is referring to Rookery H...

The town of Sutton was incorporated in 1528, and one of the assets of the new Corporation was Sutton Park. Much needed to be done in the park to make it productive, so Bishop Vesey provided the capital - it cost him over £100 to fence in the...

Langley Hall was an important place in the thirteenth century, home of the De Bereford family, statesmen who often had to travel. Bulls Lane and Ox Leys Road were their routes to Coleshill, Warwick, and London, while in the other direction their r...

The walls of New Hall in Sutton Coldfield are adorned with carved monograms, mottos and shields. One of these plaques has five sets of initials on it and the date 1796; all the initials end in C for Chadwick; some family history will help to expla...

Anchorage Road is so named because it was laid out in the grounds of a big house called The Anchorage, which stood in Lichfield Road where the Fire Station is now. The Anchorage was probably built for John Riland, 1690-1765, son of the Rector of S...

Stonehouse Road in Boldmere was named after Stonehouse Farm. Stonehouse farm was established shortly after 1528, when Sutton Coldfield was incorporated by Royal Charter. The corporation, entitled the Warden and Society, took responsibility for Sut...

There were enough elementary schools in Sutton to accommodate all the children in 1900, but only a privileged few went on to secondary education. For boys this meant Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, with a roll of nearly 200 pupils. The boardi...

Allerton College was the largest secondary school for girls in Sutton in 1900, most of the others being private houses adapted for use as schools. On the opposite side of Lichfield Road from Allerton College was Iona Cottage, now 69 Lichfield Road...

On the afternoon Tuesday the fifteenth of April 1740 two men set out on horseback from the house of John Dodd in High Street Sutton Coldfield, heading for Birmingham. One was Humphrey Greswold Esquire, of Malvern Hall, Solihull, the other was a cl...

Shortly after Charles Chadwick inherited the New Hall Estate a survey was taken. The property surveyed included three farms, some cottages, and New Hall Mill. This was in February 1795, when William Twamley held the lease of the mill, the third of...

Before the Norman Conquest the Manor of Sutton Coldfield belonged to Edwin Earl of Mercia. As Lord of the Manor, Edwin or his steward presided at the twice-yearly court, a court which continued to be held after 1066, when William the Conqueror was...

Discussing the influence of climate on the human mind, Robert Burton wrote “Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire (where I was once a grammar scholar), may be a sufficient witness, which stands, as Camden notes, loco ingrato et sterile (in a barr...

From time to time, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a landowner would be allowed to take in some common land and convert it to agriculture. This was done at the south end of Green Lanes, then a remote part of Sutton, when twenty-five a...

There is a memorial in Sutton Parish Church to Hugh Harman, who died in 1528. He was the brother of Bishop Vesey, and father of eight of the Bishop’s nieces and nephews. Hugh’s first wife was Ann, daughter of Humphrey Golson, a local g...

John Leveson, son of a wealthy Wolverhampton family, married Amicia (Amy) Harman towards the end of the fifteenth century. Amy was living in Sutton Coldfield, at old Moor Hall, where her family consisted of her mother Joan, her brother Hugh and hi...

Four Oaks Hall was the only house in Victorian Sutton Coldfield to have a full complement of servants - butler, housekeeper, cook, valet, footman, postillion, groom, ladies maids, laundry maids, housemaids, stillroom maid, dairymaid, scullery maid...

A Select Committee of the House of Commons inquired into the merits of two proposed railway lines from the fourth to the seventh of July 1859. Witnesses from Sutton and Erdington came and testified, giving evidence in favour either the “Birmingham...

The authorities in Elizabethan England in the 1560s were concerned about the number of displaced people and vagrants as the population grew rapidly. One vagrant who had been at the fair at Sutton Coldfield and managed to avoid the constable set of...

Sutton Coldfield Rectors of medieval times lived in a huge rambling timber-framed building of twenty-two bays, situated in what is now Rectory Park. This ancient Rectory House was not to the taste of the incumbent in 1701; he had a fine new buildi...

Novels set in the reign of King Henry VIII have recently been published to great acclaim, but over fifty years ago a novel published by a Sutton lady set in 1528 had only limited success. “Wild Rose of the King’s Chase” by Hilda ...

In the sixteenth century there were several families named Bull living in Sutton. Nicholas Bull had a large farm in Bulls Lane, once called Bulls Farm but now Fairview Farm, and Josiah Bull owned land next to Sutton Park. A much poorer family came...

Two roads lead eastwards out of Sutton, Coleshill Road leading towards Coleshill and Rectory Road leading towards Middleton. Both climb out of the valley up a steep hill, Coleshill Road becomes Reddicap Hill, and Rectory Road, according to Victori...

Sutton Coldfield was still a rural place in 1800 with a population of 2,800. This was almost double the estimated figure for the year 1700, but not enough to change the rural character of the town - the population of the nearby industrial towns wa...

A case was laid before the Court of Chancery in 1788 by William Twamley and others, asking the Court to make the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield manage their affairs better. The case was not resolved until 1824, and during these thirty-six ...

For most people wishing to go from Sutton to Birmingham in 1814 the choice was either to walk or to ride in someone’s cart. Sarah Holbeche noted “1814 the carter’s cart became a caravan (i.e. a covered wagon) - the only conveyanc...

A notable Suttonian is the subject of a new biography by local author Andrew MacFarlane. Dr. George Bodington (1799-1882) is internationally famous for his innovations in medicine, but the new biography shows that he was also active in Sutton affa...

When first built, the mill pond at New Hall Mill was fed by water from a leat which carried the whole flow of the E brook. The next mill down the valley, at Penns, built at about the same time in the 1580s, almost certainly used the same method, d...

“Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in 1658, false if you look round old churchyards today, where many stones from the nineteenth century are perfectly legible, but true in the sense that the lettering w...

Chalford House lies hidden behind a belt of trees in Belwell Lane, known to only a few Suttonians until there was an auction of the contents of the House in June 2008. Such a large old house, surrounded as it is by later residential development, i...

Primary schools capable of accommodating all the children in the Parish of Sutton Coldfield opened their doors in 1826. However, there was no provision for secondary education, except a sort of ad hoc school run by Mr. Percy. The Warden and Societ...

The old town hall (or moot hall) of Sutton Coldfield, built by Bishop Vesey in 1529, stood at the junction of Mill Street, High Street and Coleshill Street. It was declared unsafe and demolished in 1854, when Sarah Holbeche commented in her diary,...

Charles Chadwick of Mavesyn Ridware in Staffordshire inherited the New Hall estate in Sutton Coldfield in 1793, and found that the leases on the various farms were due to expire in 1795.The Farmer at the largest farm, of 138 acres, with its farmho...

The Corporation (Warden and Society) of Sutton Coldfield held its monthly meetings in the Moot Hall. By the 1850s the ancient structure was showing signs of collapse, and the Warden’s Minutes for 1854 show increasing concern; in April it was...

George Bidlake of Wolverhampton was the architect of Sutton Coldfield Town Hall, which opened in 1859. A clock tower originally completed the exuberant Italian Gothic building with its polychrome decoration (now the Masonic Hall) in Mill Street; t...