Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

In 1764 there was a public house in Mill Street called the Bulls Head. It was part of the Sutton Coldfield estate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In 1594, when the college purchased the estate, it was listed as a private house. According to a surv...

Enclosure of the commons under the 1824 Act of Parliament transformed the landscape of Sutton Coldfield. In addition to the many miles of public roads set out across the commons with geometrical precision, there were also 29 private roads. Some of...

Two hundred years ago the network of roads and lanes connecting the various settlements and farms in and around Sutton Coldfield crossed through farmland and over the open commons. The routes through farmland were well-defined, bounded by hedges a...

The Branch line to Sutton Coldfield opened for passenger traffic on June 2nd 1862, and the owner of the line, the London and North Western Railway Company, had to produce the locomotives and rolling stock which would operate the service. At the en...

Henry Curzon, a farmer of Hill Village Road, and Edward Adcock, a yeoman of Shenstone, took on a lease from the Warden and Society of Sutton Coldfield on the eighteenth of February 1782. This was a twenty-one year lease of “the Pond or Stew ...

Hill and Little Sutton Quarter was one of the five districts of Sutton from ancient times until the nineteenth century. It contained a large area of common land, in a swathe from Four Oaks Common in the west, then Hill Hook Field, then across Lich...

Plantsbrook School occupies the site in Upper Holland Road where once stood Holland House. This was a big house whose ornamental grounds extended over the land now occupied by Town School and Holland House School, and was in its hey-day in 1900 wh...

Sutton’s town charter, granted in 1528, provided for two annual fairs to be held there. The Trinity Fair was held “every feast eve and morrow” of Trinity Sunday (eight weeks after Easter), while the other fair was held for three days at the feast ...

The hamlet of Maney was an ancient settlement of a few houses clustered round what is now Bodington Gardens. It was a rural community with an open field system of farming, the fields extending to the south and east as far as Wylde Green Road. The ...

One of the five medieval Quarters of Sutton was named “Maney and the Wylde”. Most of the houses in this quarter were gathered in the hamlet of Maney, centred on a village green where the “Old Smithy” now stands, and extendi...