Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

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 ...

By the 1860s railways had become the most successful carriers of goods traffic, and a wide network had come into existence. Most of the railways carrying the freight generated by the mines and factories of the industrial revolution belonged to a f...

Many Suttonians were very disappointed that their attempts to prevent a Bill for the building of a railway through Sutton Park being passed by Parliament had been in vain. The Wolverhampton, Walsall and Midland Junction Railway Act of Parliament, ...

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...

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...

When Thomas Ardern inherited Peddimore in Sutton Coldfield he went hunting in the surrounding countryside, oblivious of the fact that the Earl of Warwick had the sole rights to hunt in the Chase of Sutton Coldfield. Ardern was arrested in 1287 and...

The old Peddimore Hall, according to Sir William Dugdale in his Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656, was then nothing but a deserted ruin surrounded by a moat. It had been built as a prestigious house half-way between Wigginshill and Wal...

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 ...

Joseph Webster leased Penns Mill in 1751, and converted it to a wire mill. He already had two mills in Perry Barr, but the power generated by the water-wheel at Penns was greater than the two Perry Barr mills combined. The process of wire-making r...

William Armes described Penns Mill as it was in the 1850s “It was of three stories, with the heavy production on the ground floor, needle, fish hook and music wire was drawn on the middle floor, and fine wire above”. The waterwheel was the only so...