In 1852, at the age of thirty-nine, Thomas Pearson was living in St Nicholas Street with his wife and children, already a well-established watch finisher in the city. Among his apprentices was Philip Cohen, a member of one of Coventry’s foremost Jewish families, who later became a prominent manufacturer with his own business in Chapelfields.
The idea of living outside the cramped and unhealthy city on the select new little estate at Earlsdon apparently attracted Pearson, and he became one of the first settlers there, building a house with its own top shop on what was then Cromwell Street (now Berkeley Road South), where he and his sons could work.
Over the years the Pearson family became greatly respected as one of the most outstanding in terms of its contribution to the local community. Devout Wesleyan Methodists and staunch supporters of the Temperance Movement, it was mainly through the efforts of brothers Tom and Arthur Pearson — both watch finishers, having been apprenticed to their father — that the Methodist Church took root in Earlsdon in 1873 and flourished. The story of that chapel, which eventually became the Criterion Theatre, is told in the Methodist Chapel page.