Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Sir William Dugdale, writing in 1656, says that Bishop Vesey built “51 Stone houses” and “began to set up a trade of clothing” in Sutton, while a more contemporary writer, Leland, who visited Sutton in about 1540, reported ...

Commenting on the number of pools, ponds, moats and other water features in Sutton Coldfield, the archaeologist Mike Hodder wrote in a recent article “In some cases groups of pools, sometimes accompanying moats surrounding buildings, may have been...

New Hall Mill in Wylde Green Road, Sutton’s only surviving watermill, is run by the volunteer group “The Friends of New Hall Mill”. As well as maintaining and working the historic mill, the Friends look after the Miller’s g...

Weighbridge as 204 22.6.12Richard Holbeche, recollecting the Sutton of his youth, wrote about the family living opposite his house in Coleshill Street - “Neale and his wife were quiet, chapel-going people. Neale was a boot-maker, and attende...

The Warden and Society of Sutton fenced off some fields at Echelhurst in 1733. William Smith was paid £2. 8s. 8d for getting the stakes from Sutton Park, Machin and Whitman supplied sixteen loads of thorns at nine shillings a load, and Georg...

In a letter dated 2nd August 1786 the Rector of Sutton, Richard Bisse Riland, wrote to his wife of his safe arrival at Sheffield “The coach stood at the Ton’s (i.e. the Three Tuns) door at Sutton, and in getting into it we found three of Mr. Westl...

H.L.Edlin, writing in 1953, remarked that the only coppice crop profitable at that time was sweet chestnut, usually with standard oak trees. When creating their new woodland in Sutton Park in the 1771, the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield re...

Peers’ 1870 Guide to Sutton Coldfield includes a history of the town in which he describes a cottage “with a large yew tree before the door on the north side of the Birmingham Road; which is the oldest the house or the tree, cannot be told, but bo...

The building at no. 1 High Street, now occupied by N Legal, has hardly changed in appearance for nearly three hundred years; however, just over three hundred years ago, in 1710, it would have looked very different, a large stone house with mullio...

The town of Sutton Coldfield covered approximately 13,000 acres in 1820 - Sutton Park accounted for 2,300 acres of this, another 3,500 acres was open common land, with 7,200 acres of farmland. Parts of the commons were named; New Shipton Field was...