Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The opening 0f the Sutton Coldfield Branch line of railway in 1862 marked a great change in the town’s history. Looking back, it seemed to later Victorians that it was the end of ‘old Sutton’, a rural market town idyll suddenly broken into by the ...

Samuel Beale was an ironmaster, an Alderman of Birmingham (of which he had been Mayor in 1841), and Chairman of the Midland Railway Company. In the summer of 1853, just after his fiftieth birthday, he turned his attention to a question which had b...

The opening of the Sutton Coldfield Branch line of railway in 1862 marked a great change in the town’s history. Looking back, it seemed to later Victorians that it was the end of ‘old Sutton’, a rural market town idyll suddenly b...

The construction of the three railways in Sutton, the London and North-Western Railway Sutton Branch in 1862, the Midland Railway of 1879, and the Lichfield Extension line of 1884 each made an impact on High Street. At first the effect was indirec...

One of the biggest farms in Sutton in 1820 was Wylde Green Farm, with over 190 acres. The farmhouse (now demolished) stood on the south side of Wylde Green Road, and the ancient farmland lay to the south of the farm, extending as far as Walmley Go...

Railway mania raged in England in the 1840s, with hundreds of new lines of railway being proposed. Many of the great pioneer railway engineers were called on to survey the country and determine the best routes. One of them, John R. McLean, was app...

On Wednesday June 4th 1862 the new branch line of railway to Sutton Coldfield was declared open and the first passenger trains ran. Sutton was a terminus station, so the train arrived and departed from the same platform. To get to the trains you h...

Only a few early thirteenth century deeds relating to Sutton survive, the earliest, issued by Waleran the fourth Earl of Warwick in about 1200, concerns land at Ashfurlong, the exact location of which is uncertain. Two surviving deeds or charters ...

The old town hall (or moot hall) of Sutton Coldfield, built by Bishop Vesey in 1529, stood at the junction of Mill Street, High Street and Coleshill Street. It was declared unsafe and demolished in 1854, when Sarah Holbeche commented in her diary,...

The old Rectory stands in Coleshill Street, across Trinity Hill from the Churchyard. On the opposite side of the road, nos. 1,3 and 5, is another former rectory, but it stopped being a Rectory three hundred years ago. In 1689 John Riland was prese...