Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Several of the old houses in High Street were given a face-lift in the eighteenth century. Looking at no. 1 High Street you can see clearly where the brick façade fronting the street has been joined onto the stone side wall. It would be int...

Back in 2005 planning permission was given for the demolition of Barn Farm in Lindridge Road - the annexe to St. Giles Hospice which was built on the site opened in 2007. Barn Farm was a Grade II listed building, so special permission was required...

King Henry the First was keen on hunting, riding through the many forests created in England by his grandfather, William the Conqueror. His favourite food was venison, the meat of the fallow deer. Hunting in the vast forests did not always produce...

Chester Road crosses the boundary into the old Borough of Sutton Coldfield near the railway bridge, and continues within old Sutton as far as the Beggar’s Bush. From there to Queslet Road it marked the boundary between Sutton and Perry Barr. In th...

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...

Visitors to Sutton in 1900 would flock to Sutton’s Crystal Palace - it had a zoo in its grounds where they could see monkeys, lions, camels and kangaroos. Our Crystal Palace was opened in 1879, but twenty-six years previously a more ambitious plan...

The Warden of Sutton Coldfield in 1621 was Edward Willughby, responsible for a total annual budget of £90. Although not a native of Sutton, he had settled here and established himself over the previous thirty years - he was also Warden in 16...

The Parliamentary Constituency of Sutton Coldfield came into being in 1945. In previous centuries Sutton had been represented in the House of Commons by the four Knights of the Shire - the four Warwickshire MPs. The only Sutton Coldfield man to be...

When their new house on the Four Oaks Park Estate was being planned, George and Emma Barton specified that it should include a dark room. Emma had already begun taking pictures when they lived at The Grove, Wishaw, and by the time they moved in to...

“If you wanted to see real pomp, you should have seen the fair proclaimed” wrote Richard Holbeche in 1892, recalling the Sutton fairs of his childhood -the fair was a big event. Sutton’s town charter, granted in 1528, provided for two annual fair...

Nowadays the name Four Oaks can be applied to anywhere in the north of Sutton, and most of the north of Sutton lies in the Four Oaks Ward of the City. But in 1800 Four Oaks was a tiny settlement of only twenty houses, scattered around a village gr...

If you lived in Sutton in the 1840s you might feel glad that the town was not disfigured by factory chimneys and that it was still a charming rural backwater. On the other hand, you might envy the Birmingham folk who benefitted from the modern con...

Travellers coming to Sutton from the south used to have a fine view of the town from Birmingham Road near the Cup Inn, a view preserved for us in the drawing by Miss Bracken and in early photographs. Photographs show a single-storey building with ...

In 1824, after a long legal wrangle, the old Sutton Corporation made provision for elementary education for all the children in the town. As well as new schools in the town centre and at Walmley, a school was built to serve the populous district t...

John Ireland was paying the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield an annual rent of 6d. (2½p) forhis cottage and garden in Maney. This was in 1780, and the rent was due to the Warden and Societybecause the cottage had been built on a piece...

Not much remains of the old Little Sutton today - there are the relics of the old village green along Little Sutton Road at the corners of Grange Lane and Marlpit Lane, and the names of some of the roads and pubs are reminders of the past.Although...

Longmoor Pool was made in 1734. The dam has been strengthened since it was first made - you can still see the quarry at the east end of the dam where the material for the original earth dam was extracted. Permission to make the dam had to be given...

The Sutton Coldfield Court of March 28th 1552 ordered Ralph Gibbons to place himself in a convent, and told him he would be punished if he was caught wandering or molesting the brothers or anyone else - an early example of how society dealt with i...

After the battle of Worcester in 1651 and the final victory of the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War, some men who had supported the royalist cause refused to submit to the Parliament’s terms. They were known as “Delinquents” (those ac...

When planning permission for the demolition of Barn Farm was granted, the developer was required to commission a detailed record of the buildings and the site, and a copy of the report can be seen in Sutton Library. During the archaeological surve...

When Miss Bracken came to live in Sutton with her widowed mother and two sisters, Sutton was still very much an agricultural town with a very rural aspect. This was about 1820, and being well-off they were able to move into Vesey House, no. 5, Hig...

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when this picture was painted, some of the houses in High Street were still occupied by gentry families. To the left, the two-storey house with dormer windows and an archway is no. 38, and the three-storey ...

The barn at New Shipton Farm is a very old timber-framed structure. The main supports are crucks, giant A-frames made from the two halves of a single oak tree split down the middle. So far it is the only building in Sutton where the method of dat...

In the 1530s John Harman alias Vesey, Bishop of Exeter, bestowed many gifts on his native town, Sutton Coldfield. One of these gifts, the pair of organs he gave to the Parish Church, suggests that he had an ear for music, hardly surprising in view...

Simon Perrot Esquire was a substantial townsman of Sutton Coldfield, holding the post of Warden (equivalent to Mayor) in 1580 and 1590. He had mansion house in Maney which probably stood in Manor Hill by the railway bridge - it was knocked down ov...

By the 1860s railways had become the most successful carriers of goods traffic, and a wide network had come into existence. Most of the railways carrying the freight generated by the mines and factories of the industrial revolution belonged to a f...

Joseph Webster leased Penns Mill in 1751, and converted it to a wire mill. He already had two mills in Perry Barr, but the power generated by the water-wheel at Penns was greater than the two Perry Barr mills combined. The process of wire-making r...

The name Sutton Coldfield  seems to have a simple explanation – south town in a field where charcoal was made. But each element of the name – sut, ton (originally “tun”), cold and field – is a bit of a puzzle. T...

Sutton Park, granted to Sutton Coldfield in 1528 by Royal Charter, was soon under threat from another provision of the same Charter.  This permitted anyone wishing to establish a farm of up to sixty acres on the common lands to do so, paying ...

Rabbits are not native to this country, having been introduced in the twelfth century, but they had been bred on mainland Europe since Roman times. Rabbits did not roam freely over the countryside but lived in special areas set aside for them whic...

The opening 0f the Sutton Coldfield Branch line of railway in 1862 marked a great change in the town’s history. Looking back, it seemed to later Victorians that it was the end of ‘old Sutton’, a rural market town idyll suddenly broken into by the ...

The old Rectory stands in Coleshill Street, across Trinity Hill from the Churchyard. On the opposite side of the road, nos. 1,3 and 5, is another former rectory, but it stopped being a Rectory three hundred years ago. In 1689 John Riland was prese...

Sutton Coldfield officially became a town in 1528. For centuries before then it had been the Manor of Sutton Coldfield, and for most of the time it had been in the possession of the Earl of Warwick. The Earl had many manors, and one of his agents ...

Sutton Coldfield has a number of stone houses dating from the sixteenth century of a kind not found anywhere else in England. According to the great historian Sir William Dugdale, Bishop Vesey built fifty-one of these stone houses here, where prev...

The Parade in Sutton Coldfield was christened in 1880 - before that it was known as The Dam. For many centuries it was indeed a dam, forming a large reservoir extending beyond the present shopping centre and railway embankment, fed by the E Brook....

The old Walmley School was demolished in 2004, and two new houses were built on the site. It had long since been converted into a dwelling house and had a pleasant rural setting off Fox Hollies Road, only to be surrounded by new housing with the e...

The first Warden of the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield, named in the Royal Charter, was William Gibbons, who took up office on December 16th 1528. He was to assemble all the men of Sutton over 22 years of age in the newly-built Moot Hall to elect ...

“October 29th 1847. Mr. and Mrs. Grundy came to Mrs. Willoughby’s house” - so wrote Sarah Holbeche in her diary. This diary was recently rediscovered and transcribed by Janet Jordan, and a copy can be seen in Sutton Reference Lib...

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...

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...