Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Sarah Holbeche, a Sutton lady, started to keep a journal in the 1850s, beginning with her memories of significant happenings in her earlier life. She noted “June 14 1814; Peace - great rejoicings - ox roasted at Ley Hill (then all open common) - b...

Street lighting by gas lamps began in Sutton Coldfield in 1853, when the Sutton Coldfield Gas Light and Coke Co. began producing gas at their works on the corner of Riland Road and Coleshill Road. It was not until 1901 that electric lighting was i...

Falcon Lodge Estate was almost complete in 1959, when it was described as “a fine model estate comprising of some 1539 houses attractively laid out”. Work had started on the estate eleven years before, after the Ministry of Works had approved the ...

A person travelling to Sutton in 1800 from the Walsall direction would pass through the hamlet of Little Aston and then begin to ascend the long hill across the bleak waste of the Coldfield . Crossing Blake Street, the boundary of Sutton Coldfield...

“Before the palatial place as seen today”, wrote H. Langley in the December 1947 edition of the Hill Parish Magazine, the Fox and Dogs “was originally a plain double-fronted building with a large club room on one side and a bar on the other side”....

The late eighteenth century was a time of improvement; in 1778 some local landowners put forward a scheme for enclosing the Sutton commons. The commons extended over nearly 4000 acres of Sutton were open common land and the scheme also included th...

“In 1869 a weekly newspaper entitled the Sutton Coldfield and Erdington News was started by a few gentlemen who thought that a local organ of public opinion would be useful.” So wrote W.K.Riland Bedford, neglecting to mention that he himself was o...

The Birmingham and Watford Gap turnpike road crossed the valley of the E brook on an embankment or causeway known as The Dam. The land on the west side of The Dam was part of the Somerville Estate, and in 1869, to encourage development, it became ...

William Armes described Penns Mill as it was in the 1850s “It was of three stories, with the heavy production on the ground floor, needle, fish hook and music wire was drawn on the middle floor, and fine wire above”. The waterwheel was the only so...

Samuel Beale was an ironmaster, an Alderman of Birmingham (of which he had been Mayor in 1841), and Chairman of the Midland Railway Company. In the summer of 1853, just after his fiftieth birthday, he turned his attention to a question which had b...