Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

On the corner of Birmingham Road and Duke Street stands Sutton Coldfield Cottage Hospital. It was opened on the seventh of July 1908 by Dr. Alfred Evans (later knighted for services to Sutton Coldfield) who said “some ten or eleven years ago when ...

The town of Sutton was incorporated in 1528, and one of the assets of the new Corporation was Sutton Park. Much needed to be done in the park to make it productive, so Bishop Vesey provided the capital - it cost him over £100 to fence in the...

“Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in 1658, false if you look round old churchyards today, where many stones from the nineteenth century are perfectly legible, but true in the sense that the lettering w...

The enclosure of common land is sometimes quoted as a major cause of rural depopulation, but although Sutton Coldfield was still a rural place in the 1820s, when the extensive commons were enclosed, the population continued to increase. Four Oaks ...

There was a fence all round Sutton Park in 1779, and the Warden and Society of Sutton regulated the Park so that only the inhabitants of Sutton were allowed to make use of its resources. From Banners Gate to Streetly Lane the fence separated the P...

The present Council offices in King Edwards Square were originally built as “The Royal Hotel”. With the arrival of the railway in Sutton in 1862 a group of businessmen who had promoted the railway set up the Royal Hotel Company, speculating that S...

On the afternoon Tuesday the fifteenth of April 1740 two men set out on horseback from the house of John Dodd in High Street Sutton Coldfield, heading for Birmingham. One was Humphrey Greswold Esquire, of Malvern Hall, Solihull, the other was a cl...

In the sixteenth century there were several families named Bull living in Sutton. Nicholas Bull had a large farm in Bulls Lane, once called Bulls Farm but now Fairview Farm, and Josiah Bull owned land next to Sutton Park. A much poorer family came...

Sutton Coldfield Rectors of medieval times lived in a huge rambling timber-framed building of twenty-two bays, situated in what is now Rectory Park. This ancient Rectory House was not to the taste of the incumbent in 1701; he had a fine new buildi...

The authorities in Elizabethan England in the 1560s were concerned about the number of displaced people and vagrants as the population grew rapidly. One vagrant who had been at the fair at Sutton Coldfield and managed to avoid the constable set of...