If I was to be asked - and strangely I never have been - to name my favourite Victorian clergyman from Sutton Coldfield, the answer would very probably be the Revd. E.H. Kittoe of St. Michael's, Boldmere. Edward Hooper Kittoe was the first incum...

There will be quite a lot of Suttonians who remember the Empress Cinema, which stood on the site now occupied by the Red Rose Centre. I certainly paid a few visits there as a young boy before its demolition in 1971. Built of reinforced concrete ...

In 1731-32 a young man in his early 20s was looking for a position. He wondered if there might be a post as assistant master at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School. Such a post would carry the very satisfactory salary of £20 a year. The headmaster of ...

In June 1900, with a storm brewing over Sutton Park, a visitor from Birmingham found himself shelter- ing in a nearby pub. He had a view across the park and suddenly 'a brilliant flash of sheet lightning illuminated the whole scene and next cam...

A quarter of a century after it opened, there were people living in Sutton Coldfield who were still put out by the building of a railway line across Suttoil Park. Their favourite word for describing the line was 'eyesore', but they were always h...

Last week I found myself a bidder in an online auction to secure an item related to the history of Sutton Coldfield. Actually that sentence is stretching it a little bit: for 'a bidder' read 'only bidder'. So what did I get for my unchallenged £...

On Wednesday December 20, 1916 Joel Cadbury left his home in Tudor Hill to walk to Sutton Coldfield railway station. He was a member of the famous chocolate-making family - though he himself was a button manufacturer. Cadbury was accompanied to ...

In the mid-1880s the population of Sutton Coldfield stood at around 8,000. By 1914 it had reached around 20,000. The reason for this pronounced growth in population was that considerably more people were settling in Sutton than were leaving it. ...

The warden and society and, after 1886, the town council sold licences to businessmen who wished to exploit the commercial potential of the pools in Sutton Park. This involved refreshments, the hiring of rowing boats, skating and angling. This w...

At the turn of the 20th century there was a nursing home in Maney, but the town did not have a hospital. This meant that those who suffered serious accidents had to be taken to Birmingham. The need for a hospital in Sutton was clear, but the com...