Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

There is some evidence that Great Sutton (the part of Sutton centred on High Street) was a farming community in 1150 with two or three large open fields divided up into strips of land. Each farmer had ten or more half-acre strips in each field, pa...

Karl Philipp Moritz, a German student, visited England in 1782 when he was 26 years old, and the next year his account of this visit, “Journeys of a German in England” was published. When he travelled from London to Castleton to see the famous Pea...

The new secondary school in Upper Holland Road remained unfinished and empty at the beginning of World War II, earmarked for possible military use. America entered the war at the end of 1941, and the build-up of American forces in Britain began. T...

The Enclosure Commissioner for Sutton Coldfield followed the boundary of Sutton in 1824 along Hurst Green Lane “across a lane called Dog Lane leading to Minworth” (now Summer Lane) to the triangular green at Hurst Green. This green was...

Sutton Coldfield became a self-governing town in 1528 thanks to a Royal Charter granted by King Henry VIII. Instead of a mayor and corporation the charter specified a warden and society - the first wardens were all relatives of Bishop Vesey. On th...

Sir William Dugdale, writing in 1656, says that Bishop Vesey built “51 Stone houses” and “began to set up a trade of clothing” in Sutton, while a more contemporary writer, Leland, who visited Sutton in about 1540, reported ...

William Frederick Woodington died in 1893 aged 87. He was an artist and sculptor of note, and among his papers was a short account of his life, mostly concerned with his Sutton Coldfield childhood. In 1898 this memoir was published in a local maga...

Miss Bracken, writing in 1860, could say of Sutton, “Here the cottager, rambling in search of his depastured cattle, feels the pleasure of possessing rights, not the less acceptable that he shares them with his richest and his poorest neighbour.” ...

Although the name Wylde Green sounds as if made up by an estate agent, it is in fact very old. Records of the local court from the sixteenth century give “Maney and the Wylde” as one of five districts in Sutton, with its own tithingmen. The tithin...