Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

When Miss Bracken came to live in Sutton with her widowed mother and two sisters, Sutton was still very much an agricultural town with a very rural aspect. This was about 1820, and being well-off they were able to move into Vesey House, no. 5, Hig...

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when this picture was painted, some of the houses in High Street were still occupied by gentry families. To the left, the two-storey house with dormer windows and an archway is no. 38, and the three-storey ...

The barn at New Shipton Farm is a very old timber-framed structure. The main supports are crucks, giant A-frames made from the two halves of a single oak tree split down the middle. So far it is the only building in Sutton where the method of dat...

In the 1530s John Harman alias Vesey, Bishop of Exeter, bestowed many gifts on his native town, Sutton Coldfield. One of these gifts, the pair of organs he gave to the Parish Church, suggests that he had an ear for music, hardly surprising in view...

Simon Perrot Esquire was a substantial townsman of Sutton Coldfield, holding the post of Warden (equivalent to Mayor) in 1580 and 1590. He had mansion house in Maney which probably stood in Manor Hill by the railway bridge - it was knocked down ov...

By the 1860s railways had become the most successful carriers of goods traffic, and a wide network had come into existence. Most of the railways carrying the freight generated by the mines and factories of the industrial revolution belonged to a f...

Joseph Webster leased Penns Mill in 1751, and converted it to a wire mill. He already had two mills in Perry Barr, but the power generated by the water-wheel at Penns was greater than the two Perry Barr mills combined. The process of wire-making r...

The name Sutton Coldfield  seems to have a simple explanation – south town in a field where charcoal was made. But each element of the name – sut, ton (originally “tun”), cold and field – is a bit of a puzzle. T...

Sutton Park, granted to Sutton Coldfield in 1528 by Royal Charter, was soon under threat from another provision of the same Charter.  This permitted anyone wishing to establish a farm of up to sixty acres on the common lands to do so, paying ...

Rabbits are not native to this country, having been introduced in the twelfth century, but they had been bred on mainland Europe since Roman times. Rabbits did not roam freely over the countryside but lived in special areas set aside for them whic...