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This section contains an archive of the late Roger Lea's History Spot articles, first published in the Sutton Observer local newspaper.
Click the column headings to change the order of these articles.
Page 42 of 50
At the age of 26 John Lilly was working as a shopman at a firm of tailors in Liverpool. This was in 1851, but the next year he moved to Birmingham and set up his own business in Bull Street. The business prospered, and a few years later he married...
Where the Mall shopping centre in Sutton now stands there used to be a large pool, which was the reservoir for the town watermill. It extended beyond Brassington Avenue, and the water was held back by a dam from Manor Road to the bottom of Mill St...
Hugh Lewis moved in to Woodfield House in 1889. Apartments now occupy the site of Woodfield House, but the curious garden wall, fourteen feet high in places, which runs alongside the footpath which separated Woodfield House from no. 174 Hill Vil...
Looking for Thomas Clifton’s house Thomas Clifton of Coleshill married Elizabeth Curson of Sutton Coldfield in 1646, and came to live with her in her house in Sutton High Street. He was in the cloth trade, being referred to as a Dyer and Shearman...
Thomas Clifton - a ghost from the past. Writing in Scenes from Sutton’s Past, Jim May described Thomas Clifton as “a decent, sober, hard-working man”. This opinion was based solely on Clifton’s probate records - his will and testament, and the va...
William Gibbons of Little Sutton married Agnes Harman. This was in or about 1490, when Agnes’s brother John Harman’s career was just beginning - by 1519 when Harman became Bishop of Exeter he was a rich and powerful man, and had changed his name t...
Richard Holbeche, writing in the 1890s about his childhood memories, remembered a building on the Parade - “a little white house just beyond the bridge - a wire covering to the window looking up the hill towards the Cup suggested that a dair...
Giving evidence to a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1859, Henry Columbus Hurry the railway surveyor said “I am speaking about the Three Tuns Inn, which I take to be the centre of the town.” The Three Tuns has long been a familiar land...
“The Rectory of Sutton is worth a clear £400 per annum” - so wrote “Agricola” in “A History of Sutton Coldfield by an Impartial Hand” in 1762. This annual income came mostly from the tithes which the Recto...
Travel on the roads in the nineteenth century was not free - every so often you would come to a toll gate and have to pay a fee to go through. There was a toll gate in Sutton, in Lichfield Road next to the junction with Tamworth Road. The toll hou...