Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The east window of the Vesey Chapel in Sutton Parish Church is known as the Bishops Window, because each of the four panels celebrates a bishop who had Sutton connections. Only one of the bishops was a previous Rector of Sutton, John Arundel, Rect...

When King Henry I gave Sutton to the Earl of Warwick in 1126, he included a large section of the Forest of Kank. Forests included all kinds of country - woods, fields, open commons and villages - subject to strict laws designed to preserve the gam...

Young Frank Chavasse, who lived in Wylde Green House, wrote in his diary on April the ninth 1864 “Very shocked to read in the paper of the sudden death of Mr. Attwood”. Thomas Aurelius Attwood, who lived in Kingsbury Road Erdington in ...

The southern boundary of Sutton Park originally lay to the south of Monmouth Drive, but around 1530 the newly-created Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield granted hundreds of acres of this part of the Park to entrepreneurs who established three ...

The east window of the Vesey Chapel in Sutton Parish Church was installed in 1870, and is by the firm of Ballantyne of Edinburgh. It is known as the Bishops Window, because each of the four panels celebrates a bishop who had a Sutton connection. ...

A map of Sutton made in 1824 shows that Powells Pool was outside the boundary of Sutton Park, and that fields belonging to Stonehouse Farm lay between the pool and the Park. A public road led past the dam of Powells pool and through the yard of th...

No-one knows how long ago it was that the causeway across the valley, now known as the Parade, was first constructed. Perhaps it started life as an embanked trackway, or perhaps it doubled up from the start as the dam for the town’s mill poo...

Edward and Thomas Willoughby, father and son, were prominent Suttonians in the seventeenth century. Edward, whose brother was Sir Percival Willoughby of Middleton, was Warden in 1622 and built the stone house at no. 1 High Street; Thomas lived at ...

The earliest documentary reference to a church in Sutton Coldfield is in 1291, when the “Taxation of Pope Nicholas” in the Vatican Archives in Rome refers to a payment by Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, for Holy Trinity Church in Sutton, valued at...

Shirley Farmer Steele Perkins, a rich attorney, lived at Moat House, which he had inherited from his father-in-law, Joseph Duncumb. Commenting that the intellectual society of Sutton reached its zenith in the 1830s, Riland Bedford, in his “The Ril...