Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Sarah Holbeche noted in her diary in September 1863 that remedying woodworm damage in the interior of the Parish Church had cost £723. The work had revealed that the church roof was unsafe, and so the church was closed while a new roof was b...

“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 Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield took advantage of the 1870 Education Act to review the provision of elementary education in the town. An inspector came and made a comparison between the number of school places available and the number o...

At 23 to 29 Penns Lane there was a curious building, known as the Round House - it was demolished in 1970. The Round House was built in the 1840s, on land owned by Stanley’s Charity, when the surrounding area was still open country. In plan ...

The Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield (that is, the Corporation) were involved in a long court case, finally resolved in 1825. The case, in the Court of Chancery, related to the way the funds of the Corporation were used, and at the end of th...

The house in High Street which was demolished to make way for the Midland railway line in the 1870s had been home to the five Holbeche sisters for over forty years. On the opposite side of the road is the Royal Hotel, but it was not a hotel in the...

In the middle of the nineteenth century the town centre of Sutton was well supplied with public houses, some describing themselves as hotels serving the gentry, some of them lowly alehouses. One such alehouse, described by Richard Holbeche as “a l...

Sir John William Cradock-Hartopp, Baronet, sold Four Oaks Hall and its 246-acre park and estate to a racecourse company in 1880. The Four Oaks Racecourse Company soon laid out the racecourse with its grandstands, paddocks and stables, and the firs...

Sutton Coldfield officially became a town in 1528. For centuries before then it had been the Manor of Sutton Coldfield, and for most of the time it had been in the possession of the Earl of Warwick. The Earl had many manors, and one of his agents ...

In the 1520s King Henry VIII held hundreds of manors, and more were to fall to him with the dissolution of the monasteries. Many of these manors were destined to fund university colleges and schools, and this was nearly the fate of Sutton Coldfiel...