Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Mere Green five hundred years ago was a triangle of waste ground surrounded by farmland. The poor drainage meant that the Green was unsuitable for farming, and there was a large pool, called Mare Pool, in the centre of it. The main Lichfield Road ...

“All views in Sutton Park are beautiful, but there is one which can only be described as grand”, wrote William Midgley in his 1904 History of the Town and Chase of Sutton Coldfield. He referred to the view to be had after coming up through Hollyhu...

An analysis of the Sutton Parish Registers made in 1762 showed that in the twenty years to 1761 there were 747 baptisms and 694 burials, suggesting a small increase in population. However in 1774 the Rector, Richard Bisse Riland, took a census of ...

The early population history of Sutton Coldfield (from about 3,000 BC) is a story of gradual growth to a figure of about 1,500 followed by a sudden decline. Although Sutton Coldfield as an administrative area did not exist in Roman Britain, the ar...

A great storm on July 24 1668 caused a flood which broke the dams of Bracebridge Pool and Wyndley Pool, and the Parish Clerk noted in the baptisms section of the parish register “the Flood of water was so great here at Sutton Pool that it flowed o...

Demolition of Hill Hook Mill and the adjoining miller’s house took place in 1970. For some years the site of the buildings and the nearby mill pool were left derelict and neglected, but in 1986 the pool was reinstated with a new dam, and the...

Until the development of steam power late in the eighteenth century, most machinery was driven by water power. Watermills, like any mechanical device, needed to be serviced and repaired to keep them in working order, and this was the miller’s resp...

When first built, the mill pond at New Hall Mill was fed by water from a leat which carried the whole flow of the E brook. The next mill down the valley, at Penns, built at about the same time in the 1580s, almost certainly used the same method, d...

Mill Street has seen a great deal of redevelopment over the years. Three hundred years ago the grammar school founded by Bishop Vesey and some almshouses used to stand near Church Hill. However, on 6th March 1737 the Warden and Society resolved &l...

Mill Street was very steep and narrow in the early 1800s. Near the top of the hill, beside the workhouse, on the corner of Church Hill, was the town pump, where people used to go with their pails and gossip “as they do at fountains abroad&rd...