Qualla: Sutton Coldfield

Sutton Coldfield: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit In Vitrio, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a stretch of woodland inside the city of Birmingham that the city has been trying, without quite admitting it, to lose for a century. Sutton Park covers 2,224 acres of heath, oakwood, gorse, and pools, a national nature reserve sitting inside the eighth-largest city in the United Kingdom. It survived because Henry VIII, prompted by a Lichfield-born bishop named John Vesey, granted Sutton Coldfield a charter in 1528 that turned the manor into the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield and gave its inhabitants the right to hunt and fish freely on the land. The charter survives in fragments. The park survives whole. Drive north out of central Birmingham for seven miles and you arrive in a place that calls itself a town, has its own parish council, has its own mayor, and is technically a district of Britain's second city.

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Image: In Vitrio | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sutton Coldfield: Charcoal Town

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 3.0. The etymology is straightforward. Sutton is south town, south of Tamworth and Lichfield. Coldfield is more interesting. The col is charcoal. The men who worked these woods burned the trees into charcoal for the West Midlands ironworks, and the field they worked was the col-field....

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Image: Bs0u10e01 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sutton Coldfield: Bishop Vesey's Town

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ROWLAND TURNER, CC BY-SA 2.0. By 1500 Sutton Coldfield had decayed. The Wars of the Roses had emptied the markets. The manor house was falling down. In 1510 the king's officer sold its timbers to the Marquess of Dorset, who carried them off to Leicestershire to build Bradgate House. The man who saved the town...

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Image: ROWLAND TURNER | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sutton Coldfield: Ashford v Thornton

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brianboru100, CC BY-SA 3.0. In May 1817 a young woman named Mary Ashford walked out of a party in Erdington with a man named Abraham Thornton and was never seen alive again. Her body was pulled the following morning from a water-filled pit by Penns Lane. Thornton was tried for her murder and rape. He produc...

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Image: Brianboru100 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sutton Coldfield: Inside the City

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erebus555, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sutton joined Birmingham in 1974, swallowed up by the Local Government Act and the creation of the West Midlands metropolitan county. The townspeople have not entirely forgiven it. In 2014 a long local campaign won official confirmation from a government minister in the House of ...

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Image: Erebus555 | CC BY-SA 3.0