Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

George Eliot, the famous novelist, was born in 1819, daughter of Robert Evans and his second wife, and christened Mary Ann. By his first wife Robert Evans had a son, Robert, born in 1802; this Robert eventually married Jane, and they had several c...

The Medieval Manor of Sutton Coldfield was well-supplied with woodland, meeting the needs of the population for fuel, building, fencing, tools and furniture. The woodland needed careful management to make it productive. Trees were felled so that n...

The Sutton Byway, a seven mile route through Sutton’s Green Belt, was set out in 1986 by Birmingham City Council in conjunction with Sutton Coldfield Civic Society. The byway footpath passes through the fields from Hillwood Road to Worcester Lane,...

The late John Harrison, who was a keen rambler as well as being Chairman of Sutton Coldfield Civic Society, wanted to promote a ten-mile walk round the fringes of Sutton which he called the Sutton Chain of Footpaths. This was achieved in 1986 when...

The town of Sutton Coldfield was governed by the Warden and Society, a self-elected body charged with running the town in accordance with the terms of the Charter. Some inhabitants felt that the Warden and Society was failing in its duty, and took...

The July 11th 1876 issue of the Sutton Coldfield News contained a letter from “Grumbler”, saying “we want more than public-house knowledge and we have an idea that a portion of the town’s wealth should be expended in a free library, and thus be th...

Sarah Holbeche’s Diary gives a glimpse of everyday life in Sutton in the mid-nineteenth century. Sarah Holbeche (1803-1882), a lady who lived in a large house in High Street with her four spinster sisters, compiled the diary over a period fr...

Clifton Street is one of several roads in Sutton to have been obliterated by redevelopment; for example, the Gracechurch Centre now stands on what used to be Avenue Road, and Newhall Street is somewhere underneath Newhall Walk. Clifton Street ran ...

Richard Holbeche was born in 1850 in a large house, no.1 Coleshill Street. Over forty years later, on his return from abroad, he found Sutton Coldfield much changed. It was no longer the quiet market town of his youth, so he wrote a memoir of his ...

Known until recently as Church House, 15 Coleshill Street was described by Richard Holbeche as “the ugly red house opposite the Church Yard”. Holbeche was recollecting the Coleshill Street of his childhood in the 1850s, when the three-...

There were about forty provincial newspapers in England in 1800, and a good percentage of their content consisted of national news and snippets from around the country obtained by the editors through a network - journalists would send items by pos...

The Sutton Coldfield estate which once belonged to Simon Parratt was purchased by Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1594, using money bequeathed to the College by Sir Wolstan Dixie. The annual rent from this “Dixie” estate of £30 wa...

The “Old Duke” beer house, built by George Smith in 1853 changed hands a few years later, and Charles Atkins became the tenant. Atkins, his wife Mary and their two young sons moved here from London - he set up in the Old Duke as a reta...

Sarah Holbeche, a Sutton Lady whose Victorian Diary is in Sutton Reference Library, could, in 1840, walk from Sutton up Birmingham Road past the Golden Cup Inn through rural countryside to the hamlet of Maney. Most of the fields were part of the 2...

Sutton Coldfield High Street is a Conservation Area, “an area of special architectural and historic interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance”. The area was recently reviewed, and earlier thi...

The Plough and Harrow Inn on Slade Road just east of Little Sutton was built on the site of a row of cottages and other old buildings. This isolated settlement on the fringes of Little Sutton consisted of a row of eleven houses and cottages known ...

The chain of footpaths proposed in the 1960s continues from Hill Hook along Hill Hook Road for the next three-quarters of a mile. Hill Hook Road was laid out when the commons were enclosed, passing over the part of the commons called Lower Hook Fi...

In the 1960s it was possible to follow a chain of footpaths from the north of Sutton through the Sutton countryside for ten miles, ending near Minworth. However, by 1985, when this route was being enhanced and designated as the Sutton Byway, the a...

In the eighteenth century the road from Sutton Coldfield to Lichfield was a tortuous and narrow lane, leading up from Mere Green through the village of Hill and on to the common which sloped down towards Staffordshire. The whole route was greatly ...

A necessary resource for any settlement is access to fresh water, and water was readily available in Sutton Coldfield, as a writer in 1762 observed: “In digging wells, after one or two shallow strata of mould, gravel, and clay, a hard sand, ...

In its pure form the feudal system allowed men to hold land from their feudal lord in return for services and other obligations, but from the beginning some of these services had been replaced by money rents. For example, in about 1200 Waleran Ear...

That the open field system of agriculture was followed in Sutton Coldfield in the Middle Ages is evident from documentary sources. The actual location of the open fields is harder to determine because the earliest large-scale maps of the area date...

The Sutton Byway is a seven-and-a-half mile (12 kilometre) route through Sutton Coldfield’s Green Belt from Hillwood to Peddimore. An earlier version of the byway, known as the Rural Way, began at Hill Hook, and included the stretch of Hillw...

An analysis of the Sutton Parish Registers made in 1762 showed that in the twenty years to 1761 there were 747 baptisms and 694 burials, suggesting a small increase in population. However in 1774 the Rector, Richard Bisse Riland, took a census of ...

The early population history of Sutton Coldfield (from about 3,000 BC) is a story of gradual growth to a figure of about 1,500 followed by a sudden decline. Although Sutton Coldfield as an administrative area did not exist in Roman Britain, the ar...

Demolition of Hill Hook Mill and the adjoining miller’s house took place in 1970. For some years the site of the buildings and the nearby mill pool were left derelict and neglected, but in 1986 the pool was reinstated with a new dam, and the...

Until the development of steam power late in the eighteenth century, most machinery was driven by water power. Watermills, like any mechanical device, needed to be serviced and repaired to keep them in working order, and this was the miller’s resp...

In the late eighteenth century seven packs of hounds were kept within five miles of Sutton, and the favourite occupation of the local gentry was hunting. The Warden and Society of Sutton decided each year which master of foxhounds should have the ...

Knowing he was dying, Thomas Clifton of Sutton Coldfield made his will on the eighth of November 1684, and he was buried five days later, on November thirteenth 1684. Francis Clifton, son of Thomas, was the executor of the will, and in order to pr...

The Manor of Sutton Coldfield was a royal manor belonging to King Henry I from 1100 until 1126. King Henry loved to hunt, and made a large park specially for conserving and hunting his favourite fallow deer at another of his manors, Woodstock in O...

The Plough and Harrow public house lies on Slade Road to the east of Little Sutton, a 1960s building surrounded by modern housing estates. In spite of appearances, this pub replaced an earlier Plough and Harrow which occupied a site which is now t...

The first mention of Simon Parratt in the Sutton Coldfield archives is in the record of the Court Leet of September 30th 1579, when the servant of “Simon Perott Esquire” was fined 10d for brawling. At that time the honorific “Esquire” denoted the ...

The 1540s were a time of great upheaval in England. One result of the dissolution of the monasteries, the turmoil in the church, and increasing population, was an increase in vagrancy, with men who were unable to make a living in their home parish...

In the fifteenth century most of the houses and cottages in the Sutton area were timber-framed buildings with thatched roofs; perhaps there were a few houses built of cob, known locally as mud houses, but bricks were unheard of. Many of the timber...

Sarah Holbeche was born in 1802 at Ivy House, now no. 20 High Street, Sutton Coldfield. Then, Sarah recalled, in 1804 “My father and mother with their one child moved to what is now Mrs. Sadler’s House (now 36 High Street) where Mary, Vincent, Tho...

News received on Monday May 7th 1945 of the German High Command’s unconditional surrender put the people of Sutton Coldfield “in joyous mood”. The following morning newspapers announced that Tuesday May 8th was Victory in Europe ...

The first official census in Britain took place in 1801, when the number of people living in Sutton Coldfield was found to be 2,847. Earlier estimates of the population are less reliable, although a census of Sutton taken by the Rector in 1771 was...

Sutton Library, on Lower Parade, is on the site of an earlier building, the Empress Cinema, which opened on January 1st 1923 and closed in July 1971. In a recent article, local historian Don McCollam has listed all the films screened at the cinema...

New Hall Mill in Wylde Green Road, Sutton’s only surviving watermill, is run by the volunteer group “The Friends of New Hall Mill”. As well as maintaining and working the historic mill, the Friends look after the Miller’s g...

William Croxall of Little Sutton made his will on June 8th 1569. Two months earlier a survey of his farm had been made, showing that he was the tenant of thirty-seven strips of land in three open fields. This distribution of his holding is consist...