The Knowhere Guide

Best and Worst in Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands*

Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands Triumphs and Tragedies

Favourite Building

• The town hall has a lot of history, and the three tuns pub supposedly has a secret tunnel underneath it that runs from one end of town to the next. It is a very old pub that Henry 8th waqs rumoured to have stayed at when hunting in Sutton Park.
• The church at the top of the town centre, supposed to be haunted but very cool
• All saints Church at the top of Belwell Lane in Four Oaks. Iused to go to cubs behind it. I think we were the 17th B on a Tuesday night. We were the best cubs team in the 70's
• Could u please add Fairfax school to your list of favourite schools!!!!
• Has to be the Gate, bring it back!!
• Magnificent houses in Four Oaks Park, Old parts of Penns Hall,
• Town Middle School - now a baptist church - old Victorian school with massive slassrooms, always a good laugh.
• The late Sutton Coldfield bus garage on Upper Holland RD.
• The Town Hall.
• OSCOTT COLLEGE (St. Mary's Seminary)
• Sutton Girls' School. Crap school, great building. Also check out the farmhouse where Bishop Vesey was born on Moor Hall Drive.
• Sutton Coldfield station. Maybe because it reminds of excitng adventures of going into Brum shopping when I was 13.
• Three Tuns at the top of high street. Am impressed with the managers remodeling

Demolish It Now Building

• Marks & Spencers
• Gracechurg shopping centre (bring back the old shopfronts)
• John Wilmott School!
• The Case is Altered, nuff said
• Goodbye Parker's Taxi Rank! The days of your little hut hideout are numbered! I love Parkers Taxis. They deserve a better building.
• The Lanes Shopping Centre, Wylde Green
• Fairfax and Plantsbrook Schools. Full of Kappa Slappa's and troublemakers. Most of whom do not even live in Sutton Coldfield
• Bishop Vesey Grammar School. Auschwitz prisoners had it easier. I told them I wanted to work in broadcasting, but the all-knowing careers masters said I'd never do it, and to get a bank job. I've been a BRMB DJ, and I'm now a BBC cameraman, so up yours, Big John!
• Belwell's at Mere Green - stuck in 1985 or what?
• The entire town centre 1974-2000.
• Gracechurch Shopping Centre car park, bloody awful. Only redeeming feature is that its sight let's you know you've reached Sutton on the train from Brum.......
• PLease demolish the newly constructed Allders shopping 'complex'. Praise be to mock-Tudor!
• Most of the town centre! I miss the old shops on the Parade that had character that were demolished in the 70's to make way for the Gracechurch Centre. Sutton town centre is now a characterless concrete monstrosity.
• Odeon
• The Halfway House. Preferably WITH the management inside.
• Barleys in Mere Green.........need I say more?

The Best Things

• Rosies on a Thursday night!!!
• The new M6 Toll Road
• It's too small to be noticed much, and too big to be invisible. I always go when I want to get away for a while. It's a perfect little town, and deserves to stay that way. I had all my first adventures in Sutton, and I love it to bits
• John wilmot from 1960 to 1965, I was gutted when i did not get into BVGS but never regretted JW. A>W>Paton took me shopifting in Woolworths (allegedly)
• Moving away with mom following my parents divorce. I learned there was a life outside of Sutton.
• Sutton Park is a little piece of heaven.
• Long lunch hours spent on the school field at JWS (late 8o's)
• the park, playing in the rugby team at Bishop Vesey's and thrashing John Wilmot school every year. Getting drunk in the Barley Mow, getting sausage chips and curry sauce then walking along the railway line from Four oaks to Wylde Green as a short cut seemed like a good idea at the time. I also know the identity of the ex Veseyan who stole Bobby Atkins's graduation gown from his office. Don't worry mate your secrets safe, I would blackmail you with requests for bottles of Newcastle brown ale at the gate, except it's gone, will have to settle for the Station then!!
• Green and Leafy park
• Bishop Vesey's Grammar School- Officially the best rugby team in the region, best team in the school for 70 years. Also best exam results and some good teachers (now). Very little bullying.
• All the pubs and wine bars.
• The people are dead friendly, and you always seem to bump into one wherever you are in the world. I was rescued from drunken oblivion in a French ski bar by some bloke who I only know 'went to Arthur Terry!' Everyone is a Villa Fan..Bluenoses can stay 'southside'!!
• The park.
• Somone said: "The best thing about Bishop-fucking-Vesey was the "berry attacks" on Phil Coulson in Physics" - I remember this and was in that year. It wasn't like a prison when I was there, but kids did get bullied - and I know the big-nosed games master with the TR7 you are referring to. Don't remember any drug abuse, just shoplifting! Sounds like every school doesn't it? As for computers being a passing fad - I was there then as well and now work in IT - and one brainiac from then is now a "Wizard without portfolio" at Apple! Go figure.
• The Suttonians are jolly nice people (unlike the people from that ghastly town ten miles further south).
• Sutton Park without a doubt
• The best thing about Bishop-fucking-Vesey was the "berry attacks" on Phil Coulson in Physics.
• The Park without a doubt. Please can we do something about the petrol-headed boy racers from Town Gate before someone gets killed.
• It is such a comfortable place.... leafy, there is the park, good links,...
• Esther McDermott lives there, so does Ian Rivers. The One Of The LADS club was founded there.
• It's a nice place to live but property is a bit expensive.
• Danny House Cantonese is THE BEST.
• Sutton College is excellent.
• John Clover Music in Mere Green. Full of American guitars at good prices. Fender, Gibson, Rickenbacker, Gretsch. John is very patient. I tried almost every guitar in the shop before I bought my Fender Strat, he stayed open after hours for me. He's got a mate who repairs vintage amps as well.
• Bole Music in Boldmere. Andy Bole is incredibly knowledgeable about guitars and stocks Dobro Guitars from America, which are hard to come by. He has some unusual stuff and he knows what he's talking about. He is one hell of a guitar player too, and a nice guy. Pay him a visit.
• I was born and bred in Sutton Coldfield. Great place, but don't go to the Fox & Dogs on Little Sutton Road, because it is a dive.
• Easy access to Birmingham International Airport, NEC Concert venues and everything that goes on in Birmingham.
• Convenience - good links with rest of UK via road, rail and air.

The Worst Things

• The Kevs that come in from the rougher parts of town that pollute our street with cider bottles and lambrini!!!
• You can't go anywhere without running into loads of townies (the dumb kids who wear rockports and waterproofs all year round.)
• Sutton schools being full of bullies from outside Sutton
• All the rough people from Castle Vale and Erdington take over the bars in Sutton on Friday and Saturday nights - sutton used to be a nice place - now it is full of sutton-wannabes!!
• The hills
• The heirarchy of schools, from BVGS downwards in the 1960s.
• My father still lives there !
• The roads are in a mess. I always think that this is because Sutton is a Conservative area inside a Labour council and it's their way of punishing us.
• No live music venues.
• The security guard who used to prowl the BHS coffee shop in the late 80's and who would throw you out if you were under 18 and had taken longer than 15mins to drink your cup of tea. Think we used to call him 'Rambo'???
• Big John at Vesey did a passable Joesph Mengele act, and the old part of the school does resemble Colditz, as did the attitude of everyone there during my time before liberation to the 6th form of Arthur Terry and mixed sex classes, it was like my birthday every day!
• Sutton Coldfield is a real dump. There are too many pubs etc. in the centre These leave in their wake, rubbish, sick, the place is disgusting, especially for early shoppers and people with children.
• Coming back to Sutton once or twice a year and being unable to get into half the pubs because a gorilla from Kingstanding deems my attire to be that of a troublemaker (which strikes me as an odd comment coming from a wannabe gangster).
• BVGS - an outsider's view. Went to progressive/alternative value schools in M'chester and London,also at BVGS in late 80s. School didn't work 'cos Big John wanted it to be like a public school. 6th form report said I had a 'disturbingly immature attitude' for snoozing in class and opting out of crap lessons. But got As and Bs at A level. BVGS more liberal now, I think!
• Can get very busy on the roads at peek times.
• Trying to re-name the historic Three Tuns pub to a F**ker and Firkin! He's probably dead now, thank god, but "Bean" Jackson, the vicious old-git maths teacher at Vesey scarred me for life. I left school specifically to get away from him. In fact, Big John Harvey, Don Hardy, Cooper, and the rest of 'em made the Gestapo look like nuns!
• Bishop Vesey's - there's a common thread here!!! I was the only kid in my class to leave at 16, and they told me I'd made a big mistake. Own IT Company by 25, BMW Z3 and a collection of motorbikes,....yeah right! My only regret is that I've had to pimp myself in the South to get that, as the only computer in town when I left was a ZX Spectrum!
• Nutters in the park.
• I recently revisited S.C and was very disapointed where has all the charecter gone our family had lived in the village and surrounding areas for some 300 years my g.g.grand father build the " folly" tower in the park.. Mad as a hatter I think! It would appear and the reason why we moved from and never returned to sutton was because of the attituded of the people who were moving to the area .. they thought it was " the end of the rainbow" and became the real snobs of sutton. There was alot community closesness in sutton albiet in a Very reseverd way but never the less it was there, where has the charicter gone, Sutton did teach me however to deal with predjudice..
• The passenger trains don't get any further than (the) Lichfield Trent Valley - through service to at least Derby, please, this IS a Royal TOWN, you know. Dr. Beeching, who removed the miserly north-bound service to Burton-upon-Trent, and closed Sutton Park Station. All buses [sic, according to TWM] going south of the Yenton! TWM - need I say any more.
• Getting tanked up in town and walking the 2-3 miles home cuz there's no busses after the last 966.
• O'Neills mock-Irish pub (adjacent to Cafe Rouge mock-French restaurant). This pub houses an incredibly obnoxious manageress and four bouncers/primates whose only vestage of power is to refuse entry to paying customers of a legal age. This entry should also come under the 'buildings to demolish' section too, along with Sloans and its equally uninspired clientele.
• I agree with the guy who said Bishop Vesey Grammar School was a prison. They told me I had no future, T.T. wont exist etc etc. Company Director at 31. Nuff said.
• The park now being closed to traffic, causing HUGE traffic jams on the Lichfield road
• You made a mistake. Sutton Park was given to us by Mr. Arthur Terry who bought the land from Henry VIII and then gave it to us, the public, to breed cows, hunt boar and shoot birds. I know this because a local school, Arthur Terry School, was named after him because of this.
• I didn't find people snobbish. And as a Yank, I was more than a little bit different
• The fact Sutton kids can't get into Sutton schools
• The fact that the BNRR is being built through green belt l,and (and two SSSI's)
• It's full of people who like to beat you up if you're a tiny bit different.
• Useless for pub grub - too many snobs.
• Not many.

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Last updated: 2007-11-11