Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Park Road was made in 1826, leading to Sutton Park via Town Gate and Meadow Platt - before 1826 Meadow Platt had been farmland. This new road was said to be a great boon, previously the only access to the park was along Lichfield Road and Blackroo...

The branch of the Midland Railway Company from Walsall to Water Orton was opened in 1879, with stations at Sutton Park and Midland Drive. The route had been surveyed in detail in 1871, and the survey shows the properties that would be affected by ...

When Sutton was a feudal manor, all the people had some farmland for which they had to render services to the Lord of the Manor; they were not free, but bondsmen of the manorial lord. This was how a feudal manor was supposed to work, but in practi...

In 1824 Joseph Webster was the owner of Penns Mill and forty acres of land. The next thirty years saw the steady expansion of the Penns estate, until a schedule of 1856 shows that 574 acres of land in Sutton then belonged to the Websters. Some of ...

The River Tame still forms the boundary between Sutton and Water Orton, as it did in 1824 when Mr. Harris the Commissioner made his survey. It is probable that early Anglo-Saxon settlers, using the rivers to penetrate to the heart of England, es...

The earliest surviving sculpture in Sutton, and probably the most spectacular, is the effigy of Bishop Vesey on his tomb monument in the Parish Church. It is the only monumental effigy of a bishop in Warwickshire, and was probably sculpted from li...

Sutton Coldfield became a self-governing town in 1528 by virtue of a Charter granted by King Henry VIII. The area of the town was about 13,000 acres (20 square miles), of which less than 4,000 acres was farmland, and the population in 1528 was bel...

Sutton in 1811 was a quiet market town with a scattered rural population, but there was enough development going on to keep Solomon Smith the builder busy - indeed, to enable him to become a wealthy man. He had his business at Four Oaks, at a hou...