Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

At 23 to 29 Penns Lane there was a curious building, known as the Round House - it was demolished in 1970. The Round House was built in the 1840s, on land owned by Stanley’s Charity, when the surrounding area was still open country. In plan ...

Warwickshire County Council was the education authority for Sutton Coldfield in the 1890s. In 1891 the County encouraged Sutton town council (to which most of the local management of education was delegated) to set up a Technical Education committ...

Set in the attractive Bodington Gardens on Birmingham Road, The Smithy is one of Sutton’s oldest buildings. It now houses the Driffold Gallery, and was the Borough Museum of Sutton Coldfield until 1974. The small museum opened in 1962, and i...

Ralph Sponer lived at the stone house known as Moor Hall Farm in 1550. This house, in Moor Hall Drive, is traditionally supposed to be the birthplace of Bishop Vesey, who built his mansion of Moor Hall nearby in 1525. The 1525 Moor Hall was built ...

Bishop Vesey spent a fortune on improvements to Sutton Coldfield, including paving the streets of the town at a cost of £40.3s.8d. The streets paved were High Street, Coleshill Street and Mill Street, the weekly market being held at the junction o...

There were over 100 cottages in Sutton in the eighteenth century, most of them being home to farm workers, but there were also a number of craftsmen living in there. Weaving was a traditional cottage industry before the Industrial Revolution, and ...

“The Rectory of Sutton is worth a clear £400 per annum” - so wrote “Agricola” in “A History of Sutton Coldfield by an Impartial Hand” in 1762. This annual income came mostly from the tithes which the Recto...

Travel on the roads in the nineteenth century was not free - every so often you would come to a toll gate and have to pay a fee to go through. There was a toll gate in Sutton, in Lichfield Road next to the junction with Tamworth Road. The toll hou...

Preserved in the Lichfield Diocesan Record Office is the will of Thomas Patterton, who died in 1690. He was a yeoman living in Walmley, and the will mentions a room in his house which was “next the street”. This street is now Walmley Ash Lane - Wa...

For sixty years after the Norman Conquest Sutton Coldfield was a royal manor. During this time the King’s men improved the Manor House, giving it a curtain wall of stone and a chapel dedicated to St. Blaize, and adding the deer park which is...