Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Karl Philipp Moritz, a German student, visited England in 1782 when he was 26 years old, and the next year his account of this visit, “Journeys of a German in England” was published. When he travelled from London to Castleton to see the famous Pea...

The square tower of Sutton Church is a landmark that can be seen for miles, even now that there are so many other tall buildings in Sutton. It was built in the fifteenth century by one of the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick, partly to demonstrate his p...

The E Brook rises in Sutton Park and flows out of the Park near Town Gate. The late Dennis Hurley speculated that, say 5,000 years ago, the broad flat valley between Manor Hill and Mill Street was a marshy morass, the E Brook following a course pa...

Early in the nineteenth century, the conduct of Sutton Coldfield Corporation was under review by the Court of Chancery, as a result of a complaint made to the Lord Chancellor in 1788. Suttonians expected that one result of this review would be tha...

In 1920 many train journeys to Birmingham from Sutton were made on the Midland Railway. This line ran from Walsall through Sutton Park and Walmley to join the Midland main line at Castle Bromwich; there were three stations in Sutton, Sutton Park, ...

Lord of the Manor of Sutton in 1127 was the Earl of Warwick, Roger of Newburgh. He was well-travelled, making several pilgrimages to the Holy Land; his son Earl William died in Jerusalem in 1184. In the 1400s a later Earl of Warwick, Richard Beauc...

In July 1850 the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield appointed Mr. Charles Cooper to be the Corporation Surveyor. At an Inquiry held at Sutton in 1855, Cooper gave evidence, answering questions from the lawyers. Yes, he did have the management ...

The railway came to Sutton in 1862 with a 5-mile-long line from Aston with a terminus at Sutton Coldfield Station. The line was owned by the London and North-Western Railway, and it was always intended to extend the railway to Lichfield where the ...

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...

The farmhouse at New Shipton, near Walmley, was built soon after Ralph and Katherine Floyer inherited the estate in 1715, and the Floyers continued in ownership until 1855. The new house, a three-storey double fronted Georgian brick farmhouse, was...