Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, alongside Kingsbury Road in the south-east corner of Sutton is the only canal which passes through Sutton Coldfield. This canal was opened in 1789, with a survey of the route being prepared in 1783 by the Birmingh...

Sutton in 1811 was a quiet market town with a scattered rural population, but there was enough development going on to keep Solomon Smith the builder busy - indeed, to enable him to become a wealthy man. He had his business at Four Oaks, at a hou...

Ralph Sponer lived at the stone house known as Moor Hall Farm in 1550. This house, in Moor Hall Drive, is traditionally supposed to be the birthplace of Bishop Vesey, who built his mansion of Moor Hall nearby in 1525. The 1525 Moor Hall was built ...

Early maps of Warwickshire, such as the sixteenth and seventeenth century ones by Saxton and Speed, are too small in scale and insufficiently accurate to tell us much about Sutton Coldfield. It is not until 1793, with the publication of William Ya...

The 1540s were a time of great upheaval in England. One result of the dissolution of the monasteries, the turmoil in the church, and increasing population, was an increase in vagrancy, with men who were unable to make a living in their home parish...

“The Birmingham Steeplechase Meeting” was the heading of an article in the Birmingham newspaper for Monday 12th February 1866. The article went on to say that the promoter, Mr. Sheldon, had arranged “an excellent bill of fare”; there were five eve...

Sutton Coldfield has a number of stone houses dating from the sixteenth century of a kind not found anywhere else in England. According to the great historian Sir William Dugdale, Bishop Vesey built fifty-one of these stone houses here, where prev...

Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1656, records that Bishop Vesey built fifty-one stone houses in Sutton, and John Leland in his Itinerary , c.1540, says that Vesey settled his poor kinsmen in them. One house still standing, the Stone House a...

In the fifteenth century most of the houses and cottages in the Sutton area were timber-framed buildings with thatched roofs; perhaps there were a few houses built of cob, known locally as mud houses, but bricks were unheard of. Many of the timber...

Stonehouse Road in Boldmere was named after Stonehouse Farm. Stonehouse farm was established shortly after 1528, when Sutton Coldfield was incorporated by Royal Charter. The corporation, entitled the Warden and Society, took responsibility for Sut...