Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The opening 0f the Sutton Coldfield Branch line of railway in 1862 marked a great change in the town’s history. Looking back, it seemed to later Victorians that it was the end of ‘old Sutton’, a rural market town idyll suddenly b...

The old Rectory stands in Coleshill Street, across Trinity Hill from the Churchyard. On the opposite side of the road, nos. 1,3 and 5, is another former rectory, but it stopped being a Rectory three hundred years ago. In 1689 John Riland was prese...

Sutton Coldfield officially became a town in 1528. For centuries before then it had been the Manor of Sutton Coldfield, and for most of the time it had been in the possession of the Earl of Warwick. The Earl had many manors, and one of his agents ...

Sutton Coldfield has a number of stone houses dating from the sixteenth century of a kind not found anywhere else in England. According to the great historian Sir William Dugdale, Bishop Vesey built fifty-one of these stone houses here, where prev...

The Parade in Sutton Coldfield was christened in 1880 - before that it was known as The Dam. For many centuries it was indeed a dam, forming a large reservoir extending beyond the present shopping centre and railway embankment, fed by the E Brook....

The old Walmley School was demolished in 2004, and two new houses were built on the site. It had long since been converted into a dwelling house and had a pleasant rural setting off Fox Hollies Road, only to be surrounded by new housing with the e...

The first Warden of the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield, named in the Royal Charter, was William Gibbons, who took up office on December 16th 1528. He was to assemble all the men of Sutton over 22 years of age in the newly-built Moot Hall to elect ...

“October 29th 1847. Mr. and Mrs. Grundy came to Mrs. Willoughby’s house” - so wrote Sarah Holbeche in her diary. This diary was recently rediscovered and transcribed by Janet Jordan, and a copy can be seen in Sutton Reference Lib...

At one time every building was made of timber and heated by wood-burning fires, farmers used wooden fences , blacksmiths used charcoal; wheels, wagons and tools were mostly wooden - in short, a good supply of all kinds of woodland products was ess...

Sutton’s former workhouse in Mill Street is a reminder that there were many poor people living in Sutton in the past. In the Middle Ages the poor of Sutton were given alms by the officers of the Court Leet - these were the men chosen each ye...