Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

A Medieval ploughman working all day in his fields is said to have been sustained by drinking a gallon (nearly five litres) of ale. The ale consumed in this way was small beer, of low alcohol content, only half the strength of that served up in th...

George Eliot, the famous novelist, was born in 1819, daughter of Robert Evans and his second wife, and christened Mary Ann. By his first wife Robert Evans had a son, Robert, born in 1802; this Robert eventually married Jane, and they had several c...

There were enough elementary schools in Sutton to accommodate all the children in 1900, but only a privileged few went on to secondary education. For boys this meant Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, with a roll of nearly 200 pupils. The boardi...

Sutton Coldfield became a self-governing town in 1528 by virtue of a charter granted by King Henry VIII. One of the duties of the new corporation was to provide almshouses for the aged poor - prior to 1528, when Sutton was a feudal manor, alms w...

Anchorage Road is so named because it was laid out in the grounds of a big house called The Anchorage, which stood in Lichfield Road where the Fire Station is now. The Anchorage was probably built for John Riland, 1690-1765, son of the Rector of S...

A feature of Sutton Park, marked on the Ordnance Survey map as “earthwork”, has long been known as the Ancient Encampment. Did our prehistoric forebears fight off their attackers here, as imagined by some writers? The answer is to be f...

William Dutton took on the lease of Longmoor Mill in Sutton Park in 1825, paying his rent to the Warden and Society of Sutton. The mill, once known as the button mill because buttons were polished there for the Birmingham trade, had been converted...

In Sutton in the 1630s religion was a hot topic - wars of religion had been rumbling on in Europe for thirty years, and there was a widespread sense that protestantism was under threat from the Roman Catholic church. The King James Bible of 1611 g...

“What pictures of wild battle do these overgrown dykes suggest! What skin-clad barbarians fighting with strange weapons in peaceful-looking Sutton!”. William Midgley was inspired to write these stirring lines in his 1904 History of the Town and Ch...

About half a mile north of the Asda supermarket at Minworth lies Peddimore Hall, surrounded by its moat. This is not the original building, as Sir William Dugdale observed in his Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656: “Here is now no...