Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The heathland in Sutton Park sometimes catches fire after a dry spell of weather, the fire usually being confined to a small area. The hot dry summer of 1976 was exceptional, when heathland caught fire on August 21st and burned for a week, consumi...

The dam at Lindridge Pool was made in 1697 by permission of the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield, William Jesson paying an annual rent for the pool. His lease was for 1,000 years at three shillings per annum and a dish of fish and six bottle...

Viscount Weymouth of Drayton Manor ordered his gamekeeper Thomas Lane to despatch some game to London. In the evening of 11th November 1753 the gamekeeper went to “the house of John Farnell in the Parish of Drayton Bassett in the County of S...

Walter Peyton, a Londoner who made his fortune as a captain of East India Company ships, came to live at Marlpit Hall in Sutton in 1617. He had married into the Sutton aristocracy, his wife being related to the Pudseys of Langley Hall and the Gros...

On Wednesday June 4th 1862 the new branch line of railway to Sutton Coldfield was declared open and the first passenger trains ran. Sutton was a terminus station, so the train arrived and departed from the same platform. To get to the trains you h...

The Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield took advantage of the 1870 Education Act to review the provision of elementary education in the town. An inspector came and made a comparison between the number of school places available and the number o...

In the middle of the nineteenth century the town centre of Sutton was well supplied with public houses, some describing themselves as hotels serving the gentry, some of them lowly alehouses. One such alehouse, described by Richard Holbeche as “a l...

English Heritage, the Government’s statutory adviser on the historic environment, maintains the National Heritage List for England, a list of buildings of historic or architectural interest. There are over a hundred listed buildings in Sutto...

Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656, records that Bishop Vesey built fifty-one stone houses in Sutton, and John Leland in his Itinerary , c.1540, says that Vesey settled his poor kinsmen in them. One house still standing, the Stone House a...

There are sixty-four names under the heading “Sutton in Colefeld” in a list of taxpayers called the Lay Subsidy Roll of 1329. This was a time when surnames as we know them were coming into use, but half of the names were still descriptive. There w...