Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Nowadays the name Four Oaks can be applied to anywhere in the north of Sutton, and most of the north of Sutton lies in the Four Oaks Ward of the City. But in 1800 Four Oaks was a tiny settlement of only twenty houses, scattered around a village gr...

If you lived in Sutton in the 1840s you might feel glad that the town was not disfigured by factory chimneys and that it was still a charming rural backwater. On the other hand, you might envy the Birmingham folk who benefitted from the modern con...

Travellers coming to Sutton from the south used to have a fine view of the town from Birmingham Road near the Cup Inn, a view preserved for us in the drawing by Miss Bracken and in early photographs. Photographs show a single-storey building with ...

In 1824, after a long legal wrangle, the old Sutton Corporation made provision for elementary education for all the children in the town. As well as new schools in the town centre and at Walmley, a school was built to serve the populous district t...

John Ireland was paying the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield an annual rent of 6d. (2½p) forhis cottage and garden in Maney. This was in 1780, and the rent was due to the Warden and Societybecause the cottage had been built on a piece...

Not much remains of the old Little Sutton today - there are the relics of the old village green along Little Sutton Road at the corners of Grange Lane and Marlpit Lane, and the names of some of the roads and pubs are reminders of the past.Although...

Longmoor Pool was made in 1734. The dam has been strengthened since it was first made - you can still see the quarry at the east end of the dam where the material for the original earth dam was extracted. Permission to make the dam had to be given...

The Sutton Coldfield Court of March 28th 1552 ordered Ralph Gibbons to place himself in a convent, and told him he would be punished if he was caught wandering or molesting the brothers or anyone else - an early example of how society dealt with i...

After the battle of Worcester in 1651 and the final victory of the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War, some men who had supported the royalist cause refused to submit to the Parliament’s terms. They were known as “Delinquents” (those ac...

When planning permission for the demolition of Barn Farm was granted, the developer was required to commission a detailed record of the buildings and the site, and a copy of the report can be seen in Sutton Library. During the archaeological surve...