Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

John Honeybourne had to stop what he was doing on Tuesday 19th November 1751 when the Constable ordered him to be on the jury at a Coroner’s Inquest that afternoon. He and eleven others were to attend “The Dwelling House of Samuel Smit...

Sutton Coldfield Manor House was pulled down in the 1520s. It had been more like a castle, with a curtain wall and a gatehouse, and the stone buildings included the Chapel of St. Blaise. In its hey-day in the twelfth century it would have been a g...

Mill Street was very steep and narrow in the early 1800s. Near the top of the hill, beside the workhouse, on the corner of Church Hill, was the town pump, where people used to go with their pails and gossip “as they do at fountains abroad&rd...

Sutton Coldfield covers twenty square miles, and some parts of it are remote from most residents. To the south, a short stretch of the boundary is formed by the river Tame – perhaps the first settlers arrived by water thousands of years ago,...

Jane Pudsey was a very wealthy widow in 1680 when she married the 40-year-old architect William Wilson. Wilson had been accustomed to earn his living from commissions for his work as a sculptor and stonemason, and is said to have spent time in Lon...

Jane Harman was engaged to be married to George Middlemore of Haselwell (near Stirchley on the other side of Birmingham). A marriage settlement document was drawn up on 14th December 1525. George’s father agreed to give the Haselwell estate to the...

Sutton Park was a popular destination for a day out in the 1850s. On the first of August 1853 Alderman Cutler told a meeting of Birmingham Town Council that at least fifty “Gypsying Parties” had left Birmingham the previous day, many of them headi...

The old Peddimore Hall, according to Sir William Dugdale in his Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656, was then nothing but a deserted ruin surrounded by a moat. It had been built as a prestigious house half-way between Wigginshill and Wal...

Town School’s attendance register for 1826 gives the names of the first children to go to school under the newly-approved scheme for regulating Sutton’s affairs. The register records the names and occupations of each child’s pare...

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...