Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Having followed the boundary of Sutton to the ninth milestone on the turnpike road from Coleshill to Lichfield (near the junction of Camp Road and London Road), Mr. Harris turned southwards down the centre of the road past Canwell Gate House on hi...

Sutton’s common lands are remembered today in names such as Hillwood Common, Reddicap Heath and Wylde Green. But go back to Tudor times, and they formed half the area of Sutton - about ten square miles. The commons were the uncultivated land where...

Two hundred years ago Sutton still had extensive commons. The area of Sutton was approximately 13,000 acres; of these, 7,300 acres belonged to private owners, Sutton Park accounted for 2,400 acres, the remaining 3,300 being open commons, uncultiva...

The art of managing woodland so that it produced a regular supply of the right kind of timber and other products developed over thousands of years, and was well understood in Medieval Sutton Coldfield. You had to surround the wood with a ditch and...

Sarah Holbeche, a Sutton lady, started to keep a journal in the 1850s, beginning with her memories of significant happenings in her earlier life. She noted “June 14 1814; Peace - great rejoicings - ox roasted at Ley Hill (then all open common) - b...

When the Sutton Town Council decided to celebrate the coronation of King George V in 1911, a splendid programme of festivities was planned. On Coronation Day, Thursday 22nd June, a commemoration service in the parish church was followed by a proce...

Edward and Thomas Willoughby, father and son, were prominent Suttonians in the seventeenth century. Edward, whose brother was Sir Percival Willoughby of Middleton, was Warden in 1622 and built the stone house at no. 1 High Street; Thomas lived at ...

On the corner of Birmingham Road and Duke Street stands Sutton Coldfield Cottage Hospital. It was opened on the seventh of July 1908 by Dr. Alfred Evans (later knighted for services to Sutton Coldfield) who said “some ten or eleven years ago when ...

Vagrancy was rife in sixteenth century England. A law was made making it an offence to give shelter to vagrants, enforced locally in the Sutton Coldfield Court Leet in 1554 - “And that no inhabitant receive any vagrants in their houses, and ...

Bakers of bread in Sutton Coldfield in the fourteenth century used flour that was a mixture of wheat and rye. A medieval oven recently unearthed in Coleshill Street contained grains of rye, and the corn provided by the Manor for the Head Palesman ...