Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Some of the most notable furnishings in Holy Trinity Parish Church were brought in from elsewhere in Victorian times. Previously Anglican churches had been relatively free of ornament, but with the rise of the Victorian Gothic style of architectur...

The chain of footpaths proposed in the 1960s continues from Hill Hook along Hill Hook Road for the next three-quarters of a mile. Hill Hook Road was laid out when the commons were enclosed, passing over the part of the commons called Lower Hook Fi...

In the 1960s it was possible to follow a chain of footpaths from the north of Sutton through the Sutton countryside for ten miles, ending near Minworth. However, by 1985, when this route was being enhanced and designated as the Sutton Byway, the a...

In 1563 Hugh Sherratt was fined twenty pence by the Sutton Court Leet for failing to maintain stiles on the public footpath which crossed his land. For almost everybody at that time walking was the only means of getting from A to B, and there were...

If the letter from Cromwell to Captain Eyre, of Wolverhampton, - preserved in the Salt collection - be genuine, Cromwell himself was in the town of Sutton on the 27th August 1643” wrote Riland Bedford in his “History of Sutton Coldfield”, 1891. W....

Nowadays the name Four Oaks can be applied to anywhere in the north of Sutton, and most of the north of Sutton lies in the Four Oaks Ward of the City. But in 1800 Four Oaks was a tiny settlement of only twenty houses, scattered around a village gr...

The place known as Four Oaks, as shown on a plan in the Corporation Survey of 1811, consisted of a number of dwellings near what is now the Four Oaks Gate to Sutton Park. There had been a settlement here for several centuries, long before the buil...

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...

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 ...

After the closure of the racecourse at Four Oaks Park in 1889, Four Oaks Hall and its park were purchased by Lord Clanricarde. The purchase of Four Oaks Hall was a purely business transaction, done with a view to making a profit, and his agents so...