Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

Moat House in Lichfield Road was built by the architect Sir William Wilson in the 1690s. With its pilasters, balustrades, cornices and symmetry it showed Suttonians all the features of the new architectural style brought to England by Inigo Jones ...

Villa residences, large houses for newly-rich manufacturers and industrialists, were being built in Sutton Coldfield from the 1840s onwards. Birmingham Road and Chester Road were favoured sites - some of the villas are still there - and in 1872 on...

At one time every field in Sutton had a name. Sometimes the names were simply descriptive, such as Triangle Piece and Roundabout Piece, or referred to some landmark, for example Apple Tree Field or Finger Post Piece, which was near the corner of L...

In 1650 the Civil War was over, Oliver Cromwell was in power and puritans held sway. Births, marriages and deaths still occurred, however, still celebrated in church by the vicar and recorded in the parish register by the clerk - not good enough f...

The Sutton Coldfield hand-axe (photo courtesy of Andy Howard, University of Birmingham) An excellent example of a stone-age hand axe lay undiscovered in the centre of Sutton Coldfield for over fifty thousand years. It was unearthed in 2006, a...

Four Oaks Park in 1820 covered 46 acres, not big enough for the owner of Four Oaks Hall, Sir Edmund Hartopp. By taking 63 acres from the adjacent Sutton Park, he could enlarge his Four Oaks Park to a more respectable size, but the Court of Chancer...

Supervised by the foresters and woodwards of Sutton Chase, the householders of medieval Sutton were allowed to take enough material from the woods to repair and maintain their hedges during lent. The most important hedges were the ones round the o...

The official opening of Keepers Baths, July 30th 1887 (photo courtesy of Sutton Reference Library). “The dam at Keepers Pool broke one day” wrote Richard Holbeche in his Diary, “carrying off all the water, which much surpris...

Miss Bracken’s sketch shows Keepers Pool as it was in 1831, before trees had grown up to obscure the view of the town. (picture courtesy Sutton Reference Library) Keepers Pool in Sutton Park is said to have been made in the fifteenth ce...

Some of the roads and lanes in Sutton are very ancient - the present A5127 possibly follows the route of a prehistoric Salt way. The earliest documentary reference to roads dates from 1260, when Bulls Lane and Ox Leys Road are described as two gre...