Zoe Toft jointly established Sutton Coldfield Heritage Network in 2022, to promote engagement with and the celebration of local history and heritage in her adopted home town of Sutton Coldfield. This grew out of her time as volunteering with a charity which supports the public libraries in the town, and for whom she had developed a wide range of local history activities, including an interactive map of memories, singing workshops creating new 'folk songs' based on people's stories about the town as well as a series of talks about different part of Sutton, and its musical, sporting and culinary history. There's another side though to Zoe - by day she is an attendance officer at a secondary school, and when she's not in a library archive or out walking looking for remains of stories from the past, she likes to run, grow flowers and make lino prints.
This is the amazing story of a piece of land now largely covered by tarmac and astroturf. Once, however, it echoed to the sound of high wire walkers, the wise words of wizards, and at times the growl of pumas, the screeches of monkeys and fun fair rides, with the air heavy with the scent of 20,000 roses and 300 different types of rhododendron. It's the tale of how Sutton got and lost its very own Crystal Palace, from its beginnings as a Victorian pleasure garden, through to its development as a permanent Pat Collins amusement park.
