Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Sutton Coldfield used to have a High Steward. The office of High Steward of Sutton Coldfield was created by King Henry VIII in the 1528 Charter of Incorporation of the town. In addition to the governing body, known as the Warden and Society, the t...

Sutton Coldfield High Street seems to have been planned as the main street of a small market town, probably laid out in the late twelfth century. The houses were set out in burgage plots on either side of the street, each plot with a frontage of a...

Canwell Priory had been a small religious house until it was abolished in 1524, when the property came into the possession of Bishop Vesey. Between Bishop Vesey’s mansion at Moor Hall (built c.1525) and his estate at Canwell lay the London t...

In the eighteenth century the main road through Sutton was not very satisfactory - Mill Street was “a crooked road leading down to Skinner’s Pools”, Birmingham Road “straggled by Wild Green to a narrow lane leading across t...

Two hundred years ago the road to Lichfield crossed Ley Hill Common to Mere Green and then followed the twisty lane which is now Hill Village Road. There were houses on either side of Hill Village Road, and lanes leading off to left and right. The...

In the twelfth century the Manor of Sutton consisted of a central small town or village called Great Sutton and a number of scattered hamlets separated from each other by swathes of countryside. These hamlets were Maney, Walmley Ash, Little Sutton...

Hill Village in 1824 had changed greatly since medieval times, when most of the inhabitants were farmers with land in the open fields. In 1824 only six of the fifty-four householders in Hill Village Road were farmers, mostly with small holdings of...

Hill and Little Sutton Quarter was one of the five districts of Sutton from ancient times until the nineteenth century. It contained a large area of common land, in a swathe from Four Oaks Common in the west, then Hill Hook Field, then across Lich...

The little medieval settlement of Hill Hook did not amount to much - a few cottages, a farmhouse and some fields surrounded on all sides by open common land. The origin of the name is obscure, although Hill Village was not far away, on the other s...

In 1824, after a long legal wrangle, the old Sutton Corporation made provision for elementary education for all the children in the town. As well as new schools in the town centre and at Walmley, a school was built to serve the populous district t...