Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

If you stand on the Vesey Memorial looking across Vesey Gardens to High Street, you see a wide triangle of space enclosed by Mill Street and Coleshill Street. If you were standing here 800 years ago, you would be looking at the Earl of Warwick’s n...

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 ...

Church repairs Sutton Parish Church consisted of a chancel, a nave and a tower until Bishop Vesey added to its beauty and seating capacity by building two handsome aisles. The original north and south walls were replaced by a series of large Roma...

Over a thousand years ago an embankment or causeway was made to carry the road from Maney to Sutton across the marshy valley, and 600 years ago this embankment, - now the Parade and Lower Parade - which formed the dam for the mill pool, was reinfo...

Clifton Street is one of several roads in Sutton to have been obliterated by redevelopment; for example, the Gracechurch Centre now stands on what used to be Avenue Road, and Newhall Street is somewhere underneath Newhall Walk. Clifton Street ran ...

An unpublished manuscript known as the Holbeche Diary was in circulation in Sutton in the 1890s.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...

Richard Holbeche was born in 1850 in a large house, no.1 Coleshill Street. Over forty years later, on his return from abroad, he found Sutton Coldfield much changed. It was no longer the quiet market town of his youth, so he wrote a memoir of his ...

Known until recently as Church House, 15 Coleshill Street was described by Richard Holbeche as “the ugly red house opposite the Church Yard”. Holbeche was recollecting the Coleshill Street of his childhood in the 1850s, when the three-...

I’ve received lots of compliments about the “History Spot” articles, particularly since I had to miss a few weeks recently, so thank you. In writing the articles I depend heavily on the local history collections at Sutton Library. For example, in...

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. Mildmay was a Puritan, and intended Emmanuel to be a college of training for Protestant preachers; other wealthy Puritans, such as ...