Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

West of a line drawn north to south through the centre of Sutton, most of the land is sandy and pebbly, while to the east there are beds of sandstone and clay. For a long time the land to the west was known as the Coldfield because it was so infer...

In 1650 the Civil War was over, Oliver Cromwell was in power and puritans held sway. Births, marriages and deaths still occurred, however, still celebrated in church by the vicar and recorded in the parish register by the clerk - not good enough f...

An account of the property and tithes belonging to the Rectory of Sutton Coldfield was handed in to the Bishop’s Court at Lichfield on the twenty-second day of August 1801. First came the “Parsonage House” with its “two gar...

Travellers coming to Sutton from the south used to have a fine view of the town from Birmingham Road near the Cup Inn, a view preserved for us in the drawing by Miss Bracken and in early photographs. Photographs show a single-storey building with ...

Sutton Rectory stood in Rectory Park beside Rectory Road. It was surrounded by the glebe land belonging to the rectory, including the present Rectory Park and some fields on the opposite side of Rectory Road. The graveyard at Sutton church was nea...

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...

When ownership of Sutton Park passed to the corporation of the newly created royal town of Sutton Coldfield in 1528 the value of the grazing there was assessed at eleven pounds a year. After the town’s benefactor, Bishop Vesey, improved the park i...

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...

A plan of the proposed route for the railway line to Sutton from Aston was produced in 1858. The line passed mostly through fields, and no houses would need to be demolished when the line was built, but even so there were some awkward spots. The l...

John Snape, born in 1737, son of a schoolmaster on the Moxhull estate in Wishaw, was employed as a young man by Andrew Hacket III at Moxhull Hall, where he learnt to be a surveyor. He made beautifully produced surveys for local landowners in 1761,...