Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

English Heritage, the Government’s statutory adviser on the historic environment, maintains the National Heritage List for England, a list of buildings of historic or architectural interest. There are over a hundred listed buildings in Sutto...

Richard Lee paid the Lord of the Manor of Sutton eight pounds for “the herbage of the Park” in 1480. This was for the grazing rights in Sutton Park, and a previous bailiff’s account, for 1433, records income from Matthew Smallwoo...

The forest laws which had applied to Sutton for centuries were revoked by Bishop Vesey in 1528 when Sutton received its Borough Charter. Now Sutton farmers could leave their sheep to graze freely on the extensive common lands, and they were quick ...

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...

“Hunting and shooting are the principal diversions here” - so wrote an anonymous author of a history of Sutton Coldfield in 1762. He comments on the large number of foxes, hares and partridges, and on the wild ducks and teal to be foun...

The population of Sutton was growing in the 1860s, and so the demand for services was on the increase. There were shops, scattered along High Street and Mill Street, but it was not until 1870, with the first purpose-built shops on the Parade, that...

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...

The first mention of Simon Parratt in the Sutton Coldfield archives is in the record of the Court Leet of September 30th 1579, when the servant of “Simon Perott Esquire” was fined 10d for brawling. At that time the honorific “Esquire” denoted the ...

Sutton Coldfield became a self-governing town in 1528 by virtue of a Charter granted by King Henry VIII. The area of the town was about 13,000 acres (20 square miles), of which less than 4,000 acres was farmland, and the population in 1528 was bel...

Set in the attractive Bodington Gardens on Birmingham Road, The Smithy is one of Sutton’s oldest buildings. It now houses the Driffold Gallery, and was the Borough Museum of Sutton Coldfield until 1974. The small museum opened in 1962, and i...