Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Sometimes people needed a loan long before there were banks ready to advance money. In those pre-banking days you could usually find a neighbour willing to lend, and the loan would be recorded at the local court. The minor court at Sutton was held...

William Rooker of Maney had a joined bedstead with a feather mattress on top of a chaff mattress, a bolster, a red rug and two blankets. The bed was a four-poster, with a canopy and red curtains, and after his death in 1673 the bed was valued at &...

Before 1824 the whole area now known as Boldmere was a featureless expanse of gorse, heather and grass, common land where countless sheep grazed. When Sutton commons were enclosed in 1825 and the land was parcelled out to private owners it was bad...

Although John James was only an agricultural labourer, by the time he was 40 years old he had been able to buy a piece of land and build himself a cottage. The 1861 census gives John James, 48, his wife Mary, 43 and daughter Celia, a 22-year-old d...

Four Oaks Hall was demolished in 1895. It had been built by Simon Luttrell early in the eighteenth century, and he had secured an Act of Parliament enabling him to add 46 acres of Sutton Park to his Four Oaks Park, and a later owner, Sir William H...

The first brick building in Sutton was Moor Hall, built in the 1520s for Bishop Vesey. Brick was a very high-status building material at the time, and expensive. Elsewhere in Sutton it was widely used over the next hundred years for chimneys - pre...

The first road atlas of England was published in 1675. It was called The Travellers Guide by John Ogilby, and showed the main trunk roads in a series of strip maps. The only one of Ogilby’s trunk roads to pass through Sutton Coldfield in 167...

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...

When the Sutton Town Council decided to celebrate the coronation of King George V in 1911, a splendid programme of festivities was planned. On Coronation Day, Thursday 22nd June, a commemoration service in the parish church was followed by a proce...

The Manor of Sutton Coldfield belonged to the Earls of Warwick in the Middle Ages. The manor, in common with all the other manors belonging to the earl, was managed by the earl’s officials, headed by his Receiver General, with the objective ...