Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Four Oaks Hall was demolished in 1895. It had been built by Simon Luttrell early in the eighteenth century, and he had secured an Act of Parliament enabling him to add 46 acres of Sutton Park to his Four Oaks Park, and a later owner, Sir William H...

The first brick building in Sutton was Moor Hall, built in the 1520s for Bishop Vesey. Brick was a very high-status building material at the time, and expensive. Elsewhere in Sutton it was widely used over the next hundred years for chimneys - pre...

The first bus services in Sutton were provided by horse-drawn omnibuses, as Miss Bracken, writing in 1860, noted, ““Other modes of breaking the silence have been discovered in omnibuses oscillating between Birmingham and Sutton, with multitudes im...

“On Sunday afternoon last the Birmingham Battalion of Rifle Volunteers marched back again, after a week spent under canvas in Sutton Park” reported the Sutton Coldfield and Erdington News on July 3rd 1889. The Birmingham Battalion, founded in 187...

Charles Chadwick of Mavesyn Ridware in Staffordshire inherited the New Hall estate in Sutton Coldfield in 1793, and found that the leases on the various farms were due to expire in 1795.The Farmer at the largest farm, of 138 acres, with its farmho...

The Sutton Byway, a seven mile route through Sutton’s Green Belt, was set out in 1986 by Birmingham City Council in conjunction with Sutton Coldfield Civic Society. The byway footpath passes through the fields from Hillwood Road to Worcester Lane,...

On the 81 acres of land owned by Sir Robert Lawley in the north-east corner of Sutton Coldfield in 1824 stood two farmhouses and fifteen cottages. This property lay near Canwell Gate, separated from the rest of Sutton by the commons at Roughley an...

The first road atlas of England was published in 1675. It was called The Travellers Guide by John Ogilby, and showed the main trunk roads in a series of strip maps. The only one of Ogilby’s trunk roads to pass through Sutton Coldfield in 167...

Saint Modwen lived in the eighth century as an anchoress on an island in the River Trent at Burton, according to legend, and worked a miracle cure of king Ethelwolf’s son. She founded Polesworth Abbey for the king’s daughter Editha, and the water ...

Miss Bracken’s History of the Forest and Chase of Sutton Coldfield was published in 1860, when old place-names forgotten today were still in use, and Miss Bracken speculated as to their origin. Near Tower Road in Hill Village was a field called “T...