Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Sarah Holbeche noted in her diary “1826. New road to the Park, a great boon, before which the only access was at Doe Bank”. The new road was built as part of an agreement with Sir Edmund Hartopp of Four Oaks Hall known as the Hartopp Exchange, whe...

An excellent example of a stone-age hand axe lay undiscovered in the centre of Sutton Coldfield for over fifty thousand years. It was unearthed in 2006, and has now been studied by archaeologists and reported in PAST, the newsletter of the Prehi...

Four Oaks Park in 1820 covered 46 acres, not big enough for the owner of Four Oaks Hall, Sir Edmund Hartopp. By taking 63 acres from the adjacent Sutton Park, he could enlarge his Four Oaks Park to a more respectable size, but the Court of Chancer...

“Verily there are snobs of every degree” - so wrote Richard Holbeche in 1892. He was remembering the 1860s, when the Hartopp family of Four Oaks Hall always arrived late at church, and made a great display of going to their seats with “ridiculous ...

Sutton was an agricultural town in the eighteenth century, and almost all the farms were engaged in mixed husbandry - growing crops and raising livestock on the same farm. To keep animals over winter required a good stock of hay, so most farms inc...

Starter Homes 1830 style.Thomas Hayward, who started out as a wheelwright, went into property development, and was Sutton’s first speculative builder. The population of Sutton was increasing rapidly in 1830, leading to a demand for new housing - s...

Supervised by the foresters and woodwards of Sutton Chase, the householders of medieval Sutton were allowed to take enough material from the woods to repair and maintain their hedges during lent. The most important hedges were the ones round the o...

Henry Curzon, a farmer of Hill Village Road, and Edward Adcock, a yeoman of Shenstone, took on a lease from the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield on the eighteenth of February 1782. This was a twenty-one year lease of “the Pond or Stew ...

Henry Hurst of Walmley was descended from a long line of Hursts, many of them named Henry, and was succeeded after his death in 1670 by his son, another Henry Hurst. Henry was a well-off yeoman farmer who inherited his farm and land intact from hi...

The Plantagenet kings of England were fanatical about hunting. William the Conqueror designated vast swathes of the country as forests, with laws to protect the game, and brought over from France his favorite beast of the chase, the fallow deer, w...