Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

At the age of 26 John Lilly was working as a shopman at a firm of tailors in Liverpool. This was in 1851, but the next year he moved to Birmingham and set up his own business in Bull Street. The business prospered, and a few years later he married...

William Gibbons of Little Sutton married Agnes Harman. This was in or about 1490, when Agnes’s brother John Harman’s career was just beginning - by 1519 when Harman became Bishop of Exeter he was a rich and powerful man, and had changed his name t...

The farmhouse at New Shipton, near Walmley, was built soon after Ralph and Katherine Floyer inherited the estate in 1715, and the Floyers continued in ownership until 1855. The new house, a three-storey double fronted Georgian brick farmhouse, was...

Vesey House in High Street was under construction in 1635, being built in brick by John Burges, the Rector of Sutton at the time. It was a two-storey house with stone quoins at the corners and seven regularly-spaced stone window frames on the firs...

Weighbridge as 204 22.6.12Richard Holbeche, recollecting the Sutton of his youth, wrote about the family living opposite his house in Coleshill Street - “Neale and his wife were quiet, chapel-going people. Neale was a boot-maker, and attende...

The Warden and Society of Sutton fenced off some fields at Echelhurst in 1733. William Smith was paid £2. 8s. 8d for getting the stakes from Sutton Park, Machin and Whitman supplied sixteen loads of thorns at nine shillings a load, and Georg...

In a letter dated 2nd August 1786 the Rector of Sutton, Richard Bisse Riland, wrote to his wife of his safe arrival at Sheffield “The coach stood at the Ton’s (i.e. the Three Tuns) door at Sutton, and in getting into it we found three of Mr. Westl...

The town of Sutton Coldfield covered approximately 13,000 acres in 1820 - Sutton Park accounted for 2,300 acres of this, another 3,500 acres was open common land, with 7,200 acres of farmland. Parts of the commons were named; New Shipton Field was...

William Gibbons of New Hall died in 1543, and his son Thomas inherited. The land at New Hall consisted of only a few fields near to the hall, but Thomas took advantage of a clause in the Town Charter of Sutton allowing him to take in and cultivate...

Richard Scott of Great Barr Hall purchased Little Aston Hall from the Ducies, who had held it since 1621. Scott rebuilt the hall in 1730, and it passed to William Tennant, who refurbished the Hall in the Palladian style and landscaped the grounds ...