Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Wylde Green Shopping Centre used to be known as “The Yenton” or the “Tram Terminus”. The trams from Birmingham terminated there because that was the Sutton Coldfield boundary, and the body responsible for making the original tramline from Salford ...

Joseph Webster owned the thriving wire mill at Penns, and in 1842 he made his 24-year-old son his partner in the firm. The son, who bore the unusual Christian name “Baron”, had returned to Sutton from university three years previously ...

Thomas Bonell was not happy with the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield when they gave a lease to Mr. Dolphin and Mr. Homer a pool at Black Root in Sutton Park. In 1757 forty-eight acres of Sutton Park had been granted to Simon Luttrell of Fou...

The Victorian Rector of Sutton Coldfield, the Rev. W.K.Riland Bedford, was an antiquarian. His History of Sutton Coldfield is a standard work, but his other books, Blazon of Episcopy and The Woodmen of Arden are rarities. The Woodmen of Arden is a...

The Earl of Warwick granted a lease of Sutton Manor House and Park to Sir Ralph Bracebridge in 1419, possibly renewing an earlier lease. A bank and ditch earthwork in Sutton Park, believed to date from about 1400, can still be traced, and indicate...

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...

Church repairs Sutton Parish Church consisted of a chancel, a nave and a tower until Bishop Vesey added to its beauty and seating capacity by building two handsome aisles. The original north and south walls were replaced by a series of large Roma...

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 ...

The Medieval way of farming was still being practised by John Greasebrook, a yeoman farmer from Wigginshill who died in 1671. When he made his will, Greasebrook itemized all his land, including twenty-six ridges in the open fields of Wigginshill (...

Under the Feudal system, villagers rented their farmland from the lord of the manor. In 1308 an inquiry at Sutton set out the conditions which applied locally when land was rented, not for money, but in return for services such as working on the l...

Our Medieval ancestors needed a constant supply of wood to keep their fires going, heating their houses and cooking their food. In Sutton there was no shortage of wood, and the Lord of the Manor allowed all the inhabitants “to have the dead ...

A plan of the proposed route for the railway line to Sutton from Aston was produced in 1858. The line passed mostly through fields, and no houses would need to be demolished when the line was built, but even so there were some awkward spots. The l...

“Verily there are snobs of every degree” - so wrote Richard Holbeche in 1892. He was remembering the 1860s, when the Hartopp family of Four Oaks Hall always arrived late at church, and made a great display of going to their seats with “ridiculous ...

Starter Homes 1830 style.Thomas Hayward, who started out as a wheelwright, went into property development, and was Sutton’s first speculative builder. The population of Sutton was increasing rapidly in 1830, leading to a demand for new housing - s...

Two hundred years ago the road to Lichfield crossed Ley Hill Common to Mere Green and then followed the twisty lane which is now Hill Village Road. There were houses on either side of Hill Village Road, and lanes leading off to left and right. The...

The little medieval settlement of Hill Hook did not amount to much - a few cottages, a farmhouse and some fields surrounded on all sides by open common land. The origin of the name is obscure, although Hill Village was not far away, on the other s...

The Schoolmaster of Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School from 1647 to 1659 was John Elly. This was the period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, when literacy was seen as very desirable – perhaps Mr Elly was giving lessons to local children a...

The Clarenceux King of Arms, the Chester Herald, and Rouge Dragon Pursuivant conducted a visitation of the County of Warwick in 1682. They were officers of the College of Arms, and their business was to ensure that families with coats of arms were...

Langley Hall, which stood in Ox Leys Road, was pulled down in the 1820s; at one time it was the richest and most splendid house in Sutton. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the powerful De Bereford family of Wishaw, passing by inheritance to Gilbe...

“Peace!!” wrote Sarah Holbeche under the heading June 14th 1814 in her diary, “Great rejoicings, ox roasted at Ley Hill (then all open common), bread let down in heaps from carts, my first parasol, alas! Proving how heavy the storm by its green dy...

John Honeybourne had to stop what he was doing on Tuesday 19th November 1751 when the Constable ordered him to be on the jury at a Coroner’s Inquest that afternoon. He and eleven others were to attend “The Dwelling House of Samuel Smit...

Sutton Coldfield Manor House was pulled down in the 1520s. It had been more like a castle, with a curtain wall and a gatehouse, and the stone buildings included the Chapel of St. Blaise. In its hey-day in the twelfth century it would have been a g...

Mill Street was very steep and narrow in the early 1800s. Near the top of the hill, beside the workhouse, on the corner of Church Hill, was the town pump, where people used to go with their pails and gossip “as they do at fountains abroad&rd...

Sutton Coldfield covers twenty square miles, and some parts of it are remote from most residents. To the south, a short stretch of the boundary is formed by the river Tame – perhaps the first settlers arrived by water thousands of years ago,...

Jane Pudsey was a very wealthy widow in 1680 when she married the 40-year-old architect William Wilson. Wilson had been accustomed to earn his living from commissions for his work as a sculptor and stonemason, and is said to have spent time in Lon...

Jane Harman was engaged to be married to George Middlemore of Haselwell (near Stirchley on the other side of Birmingham). A marriage settlement document was drawn up on 14th December 1525. George’s father agreed to give the Haselwell estate to the...

Sutton Park was a popular destination for a day out in the 1850s. On the first of August 1853 Alderman Cutler told a meeting of Birmingham Town Council that at least fifty “Gypsying Parties” had left Birmingham the previous day, many of them headi...

The old Peddimore Hall, according to Sir William Dugdale in his Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656, was then nothing but a deserted ruin surrounded by a moat. It had been built as a prestigious house half-way between Wigginshill and Wal...

Town School’s attendance register for 1826 gives the names of the first children to go to school under the newly-approved scheme for regulating Sutton’s affairs. The register records the names and occupations of each child’s pare...

The Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield (that is, the Corporation) were involved in a long court case, finally resolved in 1825. The case, in the Court of Chancery, related to the way the funds of the Corporation were used, and at the end of th...

The house in High Street which was demolished to make way for the Midland railway line in the 1870s had been home to the five Holbeche sisters for over forty years. On the opposite side of the road is the Royal Hotel, but it was not a hotel in the...

“Hunting and shooting are the principal diversions here” - so wrote an anonymous author of a history of Sutton Coldfield in 1762. He comments on the large number of foxes, hares and partridges, and on the wild ducks and teal to be foun...

Where the Mall shopping centre in Sutton now stands there used to be a large pool, which was the reservoir for the town watermill. It extended beyond Brassington Avenue, and the water was held back by a dam from Manor Road to the bottom of Mill St...

Looking for Thomas Clifton’s house Thomas Clifton of Coleshill married Elizabeth Curson of Sutton Coldfield in 1646, and came to live with her in her house in Sutton High Street. He was in the cloth trade, being referred to as a Dyer and Shearman...

Thomas Clifton - a ghost from the past. Writing in Scenes from Sutton’s Past, Jim May described Thomas Clifton as “a decent, sober, hard-working man”. This opinion was based solely on Clifton’s probate records - his will a...

Giving evidence to a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1859, Henry Columbus Hurry the railway surveyor said “I am speaking about the Three Tuns Inn, which I take to be the centre of the town.” The Three Tuns has long been a familiar land...

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...

Three yeomen of Sutton, William Twamley, Richard Kesterton and Isaac Terry were accustomed to put horses into Sutton Park to graze, paying the Warden and Society tenpence a quarter. In 1787 the Warden started to charge 18d. a quarter, and our thre...

Wigginshill did not become part of Sutton Coldfield until 1125, when the Earl of Warwick succeeded King Henry I as lord of the manor. Listed as “Winchicelle” in the Domesday Book of 1086, it was a small settlement, with its three open fields of th...

William Felton, having lost his leg in an accident in 1823, decided to start a school. The school began in the front room of a house in High Street (now demolished) next to the Royal Hotel. He went to Birmingham to learn Dr. Bell’s system of...