Burgess Hill’s first building boom:

by Heather Warne

The purpose of this article is to see how much of Burgess Hill had been built by 1879, fifty years after the Keymer Enclosure Act of 1828-9 and 22 years after the Clayton Enclosure Act.  1879 is chosen as a terminus for this article because the Ordnance Survey teams worked in our local area from 1875 to 1879 and the results were published as large-scale maps at 6 inches and 25 inches to the mile. We can be sure that what is shown on that map was there by 1879. At the end of this article you can see overlapping sections of the map, covering the whole town, as it then was.  They run clockwise around the town beginning in the Fairplace Hill area (NW), which runs south to the centre of St. John’s Park); NE (continuation eastwards across the north of the town to Worlds End); Mid E. (south of Keymer Junction and including the town ends of Mill Road, Grove Road and Keymer road);  SE ( West end of Birchwood Grove Road  and continuing south  past Folders Lane to High Chimneys area);  SW (Franklands Mansion and, west of the railway, north to the Hammonds area); Mid W (partly as SW, but continuing north to the potteries area). This last overlaps with the south part of the NW sheet where we started. The stick-on circles in different colours are to help navigation. The same two colours as you go round indicate the precise overlaps on each image. For added interest, there are two photos in each section of buildings which had been built by 1879.

The maps below run clockwise round the town as follows:  NW, NE, Mid E, SE, SW, Mid W, along with the illustrative photos.

Many grand and glorious mansions, noteworthy villas and appealing Victorian terraces of artisan housing were erected in 19th-century Burgess Hill for all classes of its residents.  Whether they have since been demolished or whether they are fortunate enough to have survived, several deserve their own mini-histories which we hope that others might tackle in due course. But for now, an overview must suffice.  This piece is about our first urban growth, not the older farms and cottages.  For our earlier rural history, you can go to: Earlier History

The Turnpike Road continued to bring private travellers through St. John’s Common in the second half of the 19^th century, but the road’s local commercial traffic was also increasing, serving the brick and tile yards as well as delivering families of new workers into the area, in carts and wagons presumably, rather than by anything expensive. The 1841 Census return shows that the majority of the expanding workforce on St. John’s Common were not born in Sussex. This all created a need for new ‘artisan’ housing on the common. John Hayward’s research on the Turnpike (see Earlier History) mentions that some London stockbrokers living in Brighton were actually doing a daily commute by stage coach on this route to the city and back again. It was this class of new resident that was attracted to the idea of a house on a hill with a view, only 9 miles from Brighton. The arrival of the railway in the 1840s had accelerated this trend.

At that time Haywards Heath had only limited attraction for newcomers because their, very large, common (stretching, in the modern landscape, from the Princess Royal Hospital down to the Railway Station area) remained ‘open’ until later in the 19th century. While Burgess Hill was experiencing its first surge of new residents, Haywards Heath was still for grazing and gathering. It had its building hey-day a few decades later. At Burgess Hill the commons had been sold off in lots from1828 onwards. This was the key that made Burgess Hill the destination for all sorts of incomers.  Neither the expanded brick and tile industries nor the new upper-class houses could function without an influx of working families.

After around 1865, when the hill had become populated and the parish church had opened on its present site, there was a pressing need to develop a direct route from hill to church. I have not yet established the exact date when it was laid out, but the new ‘Church Road’ was on the map by 1875. However, in line with all the other new local roads that sprang up with the new houses, it may have been ‘private’ at that time – in terms of responsibility for maintenance – and it probably had no pavements or drainage. As historian A.H. Gregory observes in his Story of Burgess Hill (1933)……some of the best residential areas in Burgess Hill had the worst roads. He personally could remember  …  when there were ruts over 1½ foot deep…in Park Road (east), Ferndale Road, Glendale Road and Silverdale Road.  There had been no public provision, beyond the few main roads ordered in the Enclosure Acts. Locals would have to wait until 1892 and the founding of the ‘Local Board’ before any real improvement came.

The most-prestigious new villas, in extensive grounds, were built uphill from the railway station in Keymer Road, on both sides of Keymer Road. The plots on the west side had been part of Burgess Hill Farm, which was now cut off by the railway. As this elevation commanded fine views to the west it was an obvious ‘first choice’ for the well-off. By 1879 Oakhall (home of the Crunden family), Woodside and Greenlands (with a croquet lawn) had arrived; and Franklands, a former farm nearer the railway, had turned into a mansion. One of the photos shown with the S.E. part of the map is Wigmore House, Keymer Rd. This was formerly known as Woodside. It stood on an old smallholding called Lotmotts, dating from the 17^th century or earlier, and it was built for the Dickinsons, a family who contributed much to the early life of the town.  Our Association has recently accepted a gift of family records and artefacts from a Dickinson heir.

On the east side of Keymer Road, returning north of Folders Lane, other large residences began to line the road – Fir Grove, Bellavista, Hillside, Tower House, with The Oaks and two other houses, unnamed on the map, in the area of Burgess Hill Girls School.  A photo of Fir Grove is shown with the S.E. section of the map.  Also on the east side, Birchwood Grove Road and Glendale Road had been laid out and had begun to be developed by 1879, while Silverdale Road had been named and laid out but, apart from a mansion called Burgess Hill House where Tower House flats now stand, no other houses had been built. A few large houses, unnamed apart from Dunkeld House, were around the top of Junction Road. Oakwood Road had been laid out but nothing had yet been built.

On the S.W. part of the map, set apart from the new mansions on the hill and very close to the railway, Franklands ‘mansion’ had been developed on the site of a pre-existing farm of the same name. The photo shows it in the days when it as used as a health hydro. Crossing to the west side of the railway, the pre-existing farmland, partly belonged to Bachelors Farm and partly to a couple of  holdings each called ‘Part of Groveland’.  There had been very little development by 1875, apart from the London Road School, just south of Station Road, in this part of town. However, the old farm complex at the larger ‘Groveland’ had acquired a new residence, in Victorian style. This can be seen in the photo, albeit a pale image. Though it is a bit indistinct, it is the only photo we have. We believe it was taken from a house in meadow Lane, and if so, it is of interest that the site still looks like a working farm, even in the mid 20^th century. We have no old photos of an earlier farm house.

On the old Keymer Common further north up the London Road, although industry and small-to-medium houses had occupied most of the land adjoining the old turnpike road, there was still plenty of scope to build large villas surrounded by undeveloped fields. The most favoured spot for a large mansion was the double aspect ridge at the west end of Leylands Road. There we had, west to east, St. John’s House, Wyberlye, The Beacon and Highlands, all since demolished. These can all be located on the NW. section of the map.

Elsewhere, returning more to the centre of the town (maps Mid E. and Mid W.) a few good villas had been built such as the Grove, still standing in Grove Road, Freshfield House in Crescent Road, with Hilldrop as a lone outpost half way up Park Road and Parkhall at the junction with Mill Road, recently redeveloped as a block of flats. Many of the fields between Leylands Road , Mill Road and Crescent Road had been purchased by the sheep breeder, John Ellman of Glynde.  The Sussex historian Thomas Horsfield remarks in his piece on Keymer parish in 1834 that the 33 acres called ‘Warners’ – presumably named after a tenant farmer – had been drained (and improved) ‘with great success’. The new farmhouse for this land is shown in 1875 just east of St. John’s Churchyard but its approach is now from Crescent Road. The new St. John’s Church, was  built on land formerly belonging to that farm, owned in the 1860s by one John Archer. By 1875 it had attracted a small cluster of houses around it, which have since been demolished.

For the Mid East part of the town the first photo shows Prospect Place at the top of Junction Road, where one to our two early post offices had been opened to serve the new population of the hill.  The second photo shows the large house called Firtoft which had been developed in Mill Road on the site of an old cottage, with additional plots of enclosed common. At the time of the photo, 1920s, it was the ‘Savoy School’ for boys.

The census returns, published 1841-1891 were analysed for A Very Improving Neighbourhood (see notes below), as was the developing structure of society in Burgess Hill – local government, charity and welfare provision, education, and a burgeoning of church building of various denominations. The effects of pandemics such as cholera and measles, both killers in their day had given birth to a rather wobbly form of medical provision. Burgess Hill had attracted some wealthy people, many of whom gave service to the community as well as passing on the legacy of their fine houses to the next generation. Our 19th-century town was broadly based, from rich to poor. This book helps us understand the social context of our built heritage.

In 1841 there were 1,187 residents of the St. John’s Common and Burgess Hill areas and in 1871 there were 2,764, an increase of 1577; or actually a bit more as the 1841 figures were swollen by railway workers who departed shortly after. By 1881 the population was 3,140. The areas of housing shown by the Ordnance Survey of 1875-9 thus shows the spread of a population of approximately 3,000 people.  When my late husband and I came here as newly-weds in 1967 the population was around 7000 and we felt we had come to a small country town.

From 1828 to 1879 the growth of the town-centre brick and tile industry had caused a surge in  building so as to provide modest family homes  together with the shops and services that people needed. There were several cottages new and old around Station Road and within the brick yards themselves, and a strip of housing ran up the west side of the London Road, to include the charming row with the former café opposite St. John’s Park. But the houses we now see west of this strip (Gloucester and Newport Roads) had not yet arrived. The south part of Fairfield Road between West Street and Royal George Road had been laid out by the enclosure of Clayton common in 1855, but no houses had yet been built along it.

There are details of how these new ‘enclosure’ roads were laid out on the old Clayton part of St. John’s Common in ‘Earlier History’.  By 1875, Cromwell Road was in place and had a row of houses on its north side but nothing on the south.  The N.W. section of the map shows us that by 1875 the ancient medieval hamlet of Fairplace was expanding as a northern hub, with its own Post Office. Artisan housing had spread some way down West Street, around the north part of Fairfield Road and part way down Fairplace Hill. Dunstall Farm Road had not yet arrived. On the east side of Fairplace Hill there were still several older properties intermingled with newer infill.

The photos show us the recently-built North House on Fair Place Hill, erected on former open land just north of the old smithy. The latter had, most-probably, been there since Domesday. The Cricketers, the new public house laid out by the Clayton Enclosure plan at the junction of Fairfield Road and West Street, had been designed to serve not only the new ‘locals’ but also the various groups of people either coming to the annual sheep fairs, or to the cricket matches, both of which were taking place in Fairfield Rec.

For more details about the enclosures of the commons and the early hamlet of (St. John’s) Fair Place go to: Earlier History

Returning to the Mid-West section of the town, the housing projects of benefactress Emily Temple were already in place by 1875 – the large villas in Upper St. John’s Road and smaller ‘middle class’ villas in Lower Church Road opposite the Park, all in distinctive red brick with cream brick banding. A pair of semis next door to the St. John’s Institute (Park Centre), which she had provided for the community, are a strong feature at the NE corner of the park. The Institute also had the same decorative brickwork, but in latter years it has been painted over.

The first photo shows her houses in Lower Church Road. The second photo shows the former houses, since demolished, which had been built on the south side of the new parish church. The modern road system still curves around the church, but not in the same close alignment as in 1875.

And finally, we come to the N.E. section of the map which had attracted only limited development at this stage. Worlds End, which is now the hub of the north easter corner, did not develop until after Wivelsfield Station was opened in the late 1880s. The Watermill Inn is shown,  but perhaps not yet in its modern form. Its attached older building (once Waugh’s the chemist’s and since then, the Vet’s premises, is reputed locally to have been an earlier pub, serving the small hamlet of cottages dotted around the south end of Valebridge Common.  The Junction Road Schools (Manor Field) had not yet been built. In Junction Road towards the junction of the main line and the Lewes line, three villas had appeared, the station master’s house on the west of the road and Meadbourne villa (a gracious semi-detached) which we see in the second photo, with Cants villa (since demolished) on the east of the road. The photo shows the early semis, which seem to be called Meadbourne villa on the map.

Also on map NE we can see that a modest new community was incubating half way along Leylands Road, centred on the new Gas Works and a new business, the ‘Oldstream’ brickyard. William Berry was the proprietor of the latter in the 1880s.  For workers’ housing, ‘Ganders Row’ in Freeks Lane and a few new cottages on the north side of Leylands Road had been built, while the Windmill public which we see, with the Gas works, in the first photo, catered for their leisure. Remarkably, this pub is still flourishing today.   The decommissioned gas holder stood for decades on the site during the late 1900s, but since demolition the site is occupied by Lidl’s supermarket.

Finally, tracking back up Junction Road to the hill, (Mid E section), we can see the artisan housing which had spread downhill northwards along ‘Junction Road towards the Level Crossing.  These houses had been built after the railway came and it is likely their main raison d’etre was to house the servants and staff of the enormous villas on the hill, as well as those who worked in adjacent industries.

To sum up, it is clear that for a town which has almost continuously expanded since the 1850s and which still continues on that path, the year 1879 is an arbitrary terminus for this study. The fact that several of the streets now familiar to us were laid out, but not yet built upon by 1879, invites some interesting research in the Census returns, and in newspaper archives, on the Town’s continuing development.  The original records of the old Burgess Hill Urban District Council (which had its own authority over planning decisions, unlike today), should contain much useful information. They are in West Sussex Record Office at Chichester.

Another very important point is this: Burgess Hill has grown from the outside in. It has imploded. A town which has emerged from an enclosed pasture common at heart does not follow a normal pattern of urban spread, outward from an earlier nucleus. We will look in vain for a cluster of timber-framed village houses at our centre. Instead, our more interesting and historically-important early houses were farms dotted around the open common.  Regrettably, the individual isolation of each farmhouse, when the tide of modern housing development was about to engulf its land, was a force too strong for most of them to survive. The common was shaped like the half of the egg you can see protruding from an egg cup: the pointy end was at the Woolpack pub, formerly ‘West End Farm’, (a lone survivor on the west); and Mill Road was roughly the rim of the egg cup on the east. The common had a sporadic inner circle of 16th and 17th century cottages relating to early brick and tile production. Most, but not quite all of these have since been demolished. How and to whom plots were allotted or sold in the early and mid-19^th century when the commons were enclosed has had a profound effect on the age and styles of houses throughout Burgess Hill. It has created an apparently haphazard mixture of old and new. But there is always some sort of underlying logic waiting to be discovered, a challenge we hope others will tackle in the future.

To conclude, our architectural heritage in Burgess Hill, often tucked away behind other phases of building, is not always obvious., but the task of seeking it out and flagging it up is ongoing.

For more on this go to our Heritage page.

To follow the details of how St. John’s Common was extinguished, go to Birth of the Town

The first Ordnance Survey was published in a one-inch series in the first decade of the 19th century when fear of French invasion was rising. The 6-inch series is useful in that it shows individual field and property boundaries and in my 44 years of local landscape history research I have found it very useful for plotting the bounds of older maps and other data, because it is easy to correlate the information with the modern scene. Thus, it is perfect for seeing precisely how far Burgess Hill had developed by 1879.

The O.S. 25-inch series is able to carry a little more detail and it is easier to distinguish drives, barns, outbuildings and other small details. Further editions in both scales came out from 1891 and to modern times, making it easy to continue with comparisons of housing growth.

For those who want to do further research, the surveyors’ note books which accompany the 25 inch maps, and the maps themselves, are held at the British Library (adjacent to St. Pancras International Station and easy to access from Burgess Hill via Thameslink). I needed a reader’s card when I last went, but that might have changed. East and West Sussex Record Offices at Falmer and Chichester also have sets of the maps.

For further research, see also the information given in finding out for yourself.