Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

A feature of Sutton Park, marked on the Ordnance Survey map as “earthwork”, has long been known as the Ancient Encampment. Did our prehistoric forebears fight off their attackers here, as imagined by some writers? The answer is to be f...

In Sutton in the 1630s religion was a hot topic - wars of religion had been rumbling on in Europe for thirty years, and there was a widespread sense that protestantism was under threat from the Roman Catholic church. The King James Bible of 1611 g...

About half a mile north of the Asda supermarket at Minworth lies Peddimore Hall, surrounded by its moat. This is not the original building, as Sir William Dugdale observed in his Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656: “Here is now no...

In the 1870s, when the population of the town grew from 5938 to 7737, the character of Sutton Coldfield was changing from rural to urban. This was also a decade of change for the Parish Church of the town, changes prompted partly by the desire to ...

An unpublished manuscript known as the Holbeche Diary was in circulation in Sutton in the 1890s. Written in 1892 by Richard Holbeche, it is not a diary at all, but his recollections of the Sutton Coldfield of his youth in the 1850s, “before Sutton...

The art of managing woodland so that it produced a regular supply of the right kind of timber and other products developed over thousands of years, and was well understood in Medieval Sutton Coldfield. You had to surround the wood with a ditch and...

On a hillside off Ox Leys Road, overlooking the Falcon Lodge Estate, stands a block of apartments, the former stables and outbuildings of Langley Hall. Langley Hall itself was demolished in the 1820s, leaving only part of a moat and some uneven gr...

Much more is known about the origins of Sutton Park now than forty years ago. Then historians were writing that it was a survival of an ancient forest and chase which once extended over a much wider area, and was left in its natural state when the...

Some of the place-names in Sutton Coldfield originated a very long time ago. Working out the derivation of names, however, is partly guesswork, so Miss Bracken (History of the Forest and Chase of Sutton Coldfield, 1860) may be mistaken in giving a...

William Duke of Normandy led an army across the English Channel to invade England in 1066. William defeated King Harold’s English army at the Battle of Hastings - this English army was made up of numerous Anglo-Saxon lords and their follower...