Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The hamlet of Maney was an ancient settlement of a few houses clustered round what is now Bodington Gardens. It was a rural community with an open field system of farming, the fields extending to the south and east as far as Wylde Green Road. The ...

There was a water mill where Penns Hall Hotel now stands for nearly three hundred years. For many years it was a wire mill, owned by the Webster family - Joseph Webster I came in the 1740s, Joseph Webster II died in 1788, leaving his widow Phoebe ...

In 1764 there was a public house in Mill Street called the Bulls Head. It was part of the Sutton Coldfield estate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1594, when the college purchased the estate, it was listed as a private house. According to a surv...

The prehistoric inhabitants of England needed various products for their survival, one of which was salt. Packhorses carried salt from the production areas to places all over the country, following tracks that are now referred to as salt ways. The...

Lord of the Manor of Sutton in 1127 was the Earl of Warwick, Roger of Newburgh. He was well-travelled, making several pilgrimages to the Holy Land; his son Earl William died in Jerusalem in 1184. In the 1400s a later Earl of Warwick, Richard Beauc...

The Branch line to Sutton Coldfield opened for passenger traffic on June 2nd 1862, and the owner of the line, the London and North Western Railway Company, had to produce the locomotives and rolling stock which would operate the service. At the en...

The Hearth Tax was introduced shortly after the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 to raise money for the many debts and expenses of the new administration. It was levied on every hearth (also known as the chimney tax) as a fair means of ensur...

Moor Hall Farm, 29, Moor Hall Drive, a grade II* listed building, is reputed to be the birthplace of Sutton’s great benefactor, Bishop Vesey. Miss Bracken, writing in 1860, refers to it as the Moat House - “tradition fixes the Moat House as his bi...

A feature of Sutton Park, marked on the Ordnance Survey map as “earthwork”, has long been known as the Ancient Encampment. Did our prehistoric forebears fight off their attackers here, as imagined by some writers? The answer is to be f...

Hill and Little Sutton Quarter was one of the five districts of Sutton from ancient times until the nineteenth century. It contained a large area of common land, in a swathe from Four Oaks Common in the west, then Hill Hook Field, then across Lich...

Ralph Sponer lived at the stone house known as Moor Hall Farm in 1550. It was conveyed to him in that year by Bishop Vesey - Sponer had married Elizabeth, a relative of the Bishop. Sponer was not a farmer - hardly any land was conveyed with the ho...

Much more is known about the origins of Sutton Park now than forty years ago. Then historians were writing that it was a survival of an ancient forest and chase which once extended over a much wider area, and was left in its natural state when the...

Plantsbrook School occupies the site in Upper Holland Road where once stood Holland House. This was a big house whose ornamental grounds extended over the land now occupied by Town School and Holland House School, and was in its hey-day in 1900 wh...

Oughtons Mill in Sutton Coldfield closed down about 150 years ago when Mr. John Jerome transferred its gun-barrel making business to his main factory in Birmingham’s Gun Quarter. The gun barrel mill had been built nearly 300 years ago by Jos...

“Walmley and Beyond the Wood” was one of the five administrative “Quarters” of Sutton, and lay in the south-eastern corner of the town. Sometimes it was treated as two separate locations, Walmley including Pedimore to the s...

Many parts of Sutton Park have a natural landscape untouched by the shaping hand of man, but in other parts the results of exploitation of the Park by our ancestors is plain to see. Mike Hodder, in his new book The Archaeology of Sutton Park, note...

About half a mile north of the Asda supermarket at Minworth lies Peddimore Hall, surrounded by its moat. This is not the original building, as Sir William Dugdale observed in his Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656: “Here is now no...

The E Brook rises in Sutton Park and flows out of the Park near Town Gate. The late Dennis Hurley speculated that, say 5,000 years ago, the broad flat valley between Manor Hill and Mill Street was a marshy morass, the E Brook following a course pa...

On a hillside off Ox Leys Road, overlooking the Falcon Lodge Estate, stands a block of apartments, the former stables and outbuildings of Langley Hall. Langley Hall itself was demolished in the 1820s, leaving only part of a moat and some uneven gr...

The art of managing woodland so that it produced a regular supply of the right kind of timber and other products developed over thousands of years, and was well understood in Medieval Sutton Coldfield. You had to surround the wood with a ditch and...

The E Brook flows in an artificial channel all the way from Upper Holland Road to Eachelhurst Road, where it crosses the old boundary of Sutton. In the Middle Ages, when the brook followed its natural course, there were no bridges over this stretc...

One of the five medieval Quarters of Sutton was named “Maney and the Wylde”. Most of the houses in this quarter were gathered in the hamlet of Maney, centred on a village green where the “Old Smithy” now stands, and extendi...

The valley between Springfield Road and Fox Hollies Road becomes shallower towards its head near Walmley. The Anglo-Saxon word for the upper end of this kind of valley was “Hale”, and this particular hale, being rather broad, was descr...

In the 1870s, when the population of the town grew from 5938 to 7737, the character of Sutton Coldfield was changing from rural to urban. This was also a decade of change for the Parish Church of the town, changes prompted partly by the desire to ...

Henry Curzon, a farmer of Hill Village Road, and Edward Adcock, a yeoman of Shenstone, took on a lease from the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield on the eighteenth of February 1782. This was a twenty-one year lease of “the Pond or Stew ...

Early maps of Warwickshire, such as the sixteenth and seventeenth century ones by Saxton and Speed, are too small in scale and insufficiently accurate to tell us much about Sutton Coldfield. It is not until 1793, with the publication of William Ya...

Some of the place-names in Sutton Coldfield originated a very long time ago. Working out the derivation of names, however, is partly guesswork, so Miss Bracken (History of the Forest and Chase of Sutton Coldfield, 1860) may be mistaken in giving a...

More and Ashfurlong Quarter, or More et Asshforlong as it appears in the 1416 Court Roll, is shaped like a lamb chop. Whereas the other four Quarters include ancient settlements with open fields dating back to Saxon times, the houses and fields of...

Two hundred years ago the network of roads and lanes connecting the various settlements and farms in and around Sutton Coldfield crossed through farmland and over the open commons. The routes through farmland were well-defined, bounded by hedges a...

Enclosure of the commons under the 1824 Act of Parliament transformed the landscape of Sutton Coldfield. In addition to the many miles of public roads set out across the commons with geometrical precision, there were also 29 private roads. Some of...

George Sacheverell Esquire of New Hall Sutton Coldfield made his last will and testament on May 5th 1715 at the age of 82. It is an unusual will, reflecting the strong views of this eccentric man. New Hall had been bought by George’s grandf...

In feudal times all the villagers were tenants of the lord of the manor, but the lord also retained some land and property for his own use, called the demesne. The extent of the demesne in Sutton Coldfield is given in the Domesday Book of 1086 as ...

The idea of being able to travel back in time is an attractive one to writers and film-makers, being the concept behind a number of best-sellers and award-winning films. Historians often use a different kind of time travel, using their imagination...

George Sacheverell Esquire of New Hall Sutton Coldfield had no children, so the will of this wealthy man, made in 1715 at the age of 82, disposes of his wealth and property mainly among the rest of his family. He leaves New Hall to “his lovi...

William Duke of Normandy led an army across the English Channel to invade England in 1066. William defeated King Harold’s English army at the Battle of Hastings - this English army was made up of numerous Anglo-Saxon lords and their follower...

A number of the stone houses built by Bishop Vesey in Sutton in the 1520s survive – there is one at Maney and another in Wylde Green Road. However, stone was not normally used for houses in Sutton Coldfield, most local buildings being timber...

At their meeting of 29th September 1943 the Corporation of Sutton decided on a rate for the next six months, and so that everyone would know that the notice was official it was resolved “that the Common Seal of the Council be affixed thereto...

In Sutton in the 1630s religion was a hot topic - wars of religion had been rumbling on in Europe for thirty years, and there was a widespread sense that protestantism was under threat from the Roman Catholic church. The King James Bible of 1611 g...

Sutton’s town charter, granted in 1528, provided for two annual fairs to be held there. The Trinity Fair was held “every feast eve and morrow” of Trinity Sunday (eight weeks after Easter), while the other fair was held for three days at the feast ...

An unpublished manuscript known as the Holbeche Diary was in circulation in Sutton in the 1890s. Written in 1892 by Richard Holbeche, it is not a diary at all, but his recollections of the Sutton Coldfield of his youth in the 1850s, “before Sutton...