Sutton Coldfield Local History Research Group

The prehistoric inhabitants of England needed various products for their survival, one of which was salt. Packhorses carried salt from the production areas to places all over the country, following tracks that are now referred to as salt ways. The...

At their meeting of 29th September 1943 the Corporation of Sutton decided on a rate for the next six months, and so that everyone would know that the notice was official it was resolved “that the Common Seal of the Council be affixed thereto...

The valley between Springfield Road and Fox Hollies Road becomes shallower towards its head near Walmley. The Anglo-Saxon word for the upper end of this kind of valley was “Hale”, and this particular hale, being rather broad, was descr...

Early maps of Warwickshire, such as the sixteenth and seventeenth century ones by Saxton and Speed, are too small in scale and insufficiently accurate to tell us much about Sutton Coldfield. It is not until 1793, with the publication of William Ya...

The idea of being able to travel back in time is an attractive one to writers and film-makers, being the concept behind a number of best-sellers and award-winning films. Historians often use a different kind of time travel, using their imagination...

The E Brook rises in Sutton Park and flows out of the Park near Town Gate. The late Dennis Hurley speculated that, say 5,000 years ago, the broad flat valley between Manor Hill and Mill Street was a marshy morass, the E Brook following a course pa...

Lord of the Manor of Sutton in 1127 was the Earl of Warwick, Roger of Newburgh. He was well-travelled, making several pilgrimages to the Holy Land; his son Earl William died in Jerusalem in 1184. In the 1400s a later Earl of Warwick, Richard Beauc...

A number of the stone houses built by Bishop Vesey in Sutton in the 1520s survive – there is one at Maney and another in Wylde Green Road. However, stone was not normally used for houses in Sutton Coldfield, most local buildings being timber...

Moor Hall Farm, 29, Moor Hall Drive, a grade II* listed building, is reputed to be the birthplace of Sutton’s great benefactor, Bishop Vesey. Miss Bracken, writing in 1860, refers to it as the Moat House - “tradition fixes the Moat House as his bi...

“Walmley and Beyond the Wood” was one of the five administrative “Quarters” of Sutton, and lay in the south-eastern corner of the town. Sometimes it was treated as two separate locations, Walmley including Pedimore to the s...