Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Most of the houses in Sutton up until 1500 were timber-framed single-storey buildings with a thatched roof - easily burned down. They were heated by an open fire in the centre of the main room or hall, and this was a wood-burning fire, the smoke e...

George Bidlake of Wolverhampton was the architect of Sutton Coldfield Town Hall, which opened in 1859. A clock tower originally completed the exuberant Italian Gothic building with its polychrome decoration (now the Masonic Hall) in Mill Street; t...

William Frederick Woodington died in 1893 aged 87. He was an artist and sculptor of note, and among his papers was a short account of his life, mostly concerned with his Sutton Coldfield childhood. In 1898 this memoir was published in a local maga...

At one time every building was made of timber and heated by wood-burning fires, farmers used wooden fences , blacksmiths used charcoal; wheels, wagons and tools were mostly wooden - in short, a good supply of all kinds of woodland products was ess...

Six thousand years ago woodland covered most of England, sometimes known as wildwood. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors made little impact on the wildwood, but when people began to settle down and practice agriculture, about 3,000 BC, swathes of wildw...

Richard Scott of Great Barr Hall purchased Little Aston Hall from the Ducies, who had held it since 1621. Scott rebuilt the hall in 1730, and it passed to William Tennant, who refurbished the Hall in the Palladian style and landscaped the grounds ...

Miss Bracken, writing in 1860, could say of Sutton, “Here the cottager, rambling in search of his depastured cattle, feels the pleasure of possessing rights, not the less acceptable that he shares them with his richest and his poorest neighbour.” ...

Sutton’s former workhouse in Mill Street is a reminder that there were many poor people living in Sutton in the past. In the Middle Ages the poor of Sutton were given alms by the officers of the Court Leet - these were the men chosen each ye...

The Workhouse Test Act of 1723 empowered officers in a parish to buy, rent or build premises in which the poor could be set to work - the term ‘workhouse’ was used to describe such places. A person who requested poor relief would be required to en...

Although the name Wylde Green sounds as if made up by an estate agent, it is in fact very old. Records of the local court from the sixteenth century give “Maney and the Wylde” as one of five districts in Sutton, with its own tithingmen. The tithin...