Burgess Hill’s Heritage
Heritage is many-faceted. It is made up of the people who once lived and worked here and events of note; it is the buildings, some older, some younger, among which we live and work; it is the older rural landscape – often still ‘hidden’ in plain sight – if only we knew what we were looking at! In recent years we have been working in tandem with the Town Council to understand our history so as to identify what is of value in our local heritage, and to spread the word.
Do join us in flagging up the people, their stories, the buildings, the trees, hedges and the green spaces you value, and join us in our ‘heritage hunt’. We can’t conserve it once it’s gone!!!!!!!!!!!! But if we are lucky we can identify it and preserve it.
Dunkeld House, was the home of Colonel Robert McKergow of Twineham. It was built circa 1871 for Robert Mckergow (Senior) a scottish wine Merchant, and is one of several large mansions which formerly crowned the top of the town. Others were Samson Copestake’s ‘Wynnstay’ and a mansion called Tower House. Both have since been since demolished. The house opposite Tower House still stands at the top of Silverdale Road and has survived as Oak Lodge nursing home.
Dunkeld House
Wynnstay
Tower House
The next three images show people engaged in aspects of our history: Farm workers at Burgess Hill Farm, the Chapman family who were owners of the Burgess Hill Steam Laundry and a shot of Burgess Hill Fire Brigade.
Farmworkers Burgess Hill Farm
The Chapman Family
Burgess Hill Fire Brigade
Down in the town, the old Police Station has gone but the ‘Constitutional Club’, our first seat of local government, has survived. In the London Road, Henry Burt, co-founder of the famous building firm Norman and Burt, built his own house displaying his HB ‘logo’ (now painted over, above the main door), which we have now adopted as our Association logo, rescued from the building by Fred Avery.
Old Police Station
Constitutional Club
Henry Burt’s House
In recent years, despite our objections, we have been unable to save two historic houses which had escaped being ‘listed’ as of historic merit, the 17th century King’s Head pub at Fairplace Hill, demolished in 2013 and the far older Bridge Hall Farm at the bottom of the Hill, demolished in 2021. Luckily its complex of barns have survived as the Oak Barn Bar & Restaurant.
Kings Head from the rear
Removal of Kings Head Wattles
Bridge Hall
For a brief analysis as to why Burgess Hill’s history and heritage had, until recent times been generally overlooked, Go to: Why Burgess Hill’s heritage has been overlooked
Did you know – we have three conservation areas?
In 1982 and 1989 Mid Sussex District Council officer Alma Howell, with help and advice from ourselves, created three separate areas of Burgess Hill as Conservation areas: Specific value was put on the use of brick, tile hanging and decorative roof features as products of the local industries. It also commented on the presence of substantial trees in the first two area as part of their essential character. It was realised that many buildings of superb merit, built by local firms using local materials, had already been pulled down. The first two conservation areas relate to the superior housing around Silverdale Road and Park Road. The third relates to the streets of mid-Victorian ‘artisan’ housing immediately west of London Road.
1. The Silverdale, Road Birchwood Grove and Keymer Road area:
Many really superb houses still stand in this leafy, elevated part of town which in the second half of the 19th century attracted well-to-do people from Brighton and elsewhere to buy a plot of land and have a house built.
The local brick and tile entrepreneurs also bought here. The owner of the Keymer Brick and tile works in Junction Road, Sampson Copestake built ‘Wynnstay’ on the western curve of the hill, commanding fine views as far as Chanctonbury Ring near Worthing. It was pulled down in the 1970s. His manager at the works had his house built on the other side of the road and it is now part of the Burgess Hill School for Girls. One resident, Thomas F. L. Blaker, resident of a house called Avonhurst at the top of Junction Road, was so taken with his new surrounds and so keen to promote it to others that he published a small booklet advertising Burgess Hill as a Health Resort (John Beal & Co.,), 1883. The fresh airs, charming local woods and walks and the interesting local geology are all enthusiastically extolled! A decade later a property company had been formed to create Silverdale, Ferndale and Glendale roads on the eastern flank of the hill. It is here, with Keymer Road itself and Birchwood Grove Road that a wonderful variety of Victorian houses still stand and hopefully, protected by the Conservation order, will continue to stand into the distant future.
Keymer Road at the top of the hill was first developed for the very-well-off who built several prestigious mansions there, including the white-painted ranges now part of ‘Burgess Hill Girls’ school. Hard on their heels, the east flank of the hill was purchased by a property company who then developed ‘The Burgess Hill Estate’, in a variety of Victorian and Edwardian styles in Silverdale, Ferndale and Glendale Roads.
2. St. John’s Church and the St John’s Park area
St John’s Common was once a very large area and the part which lay east of the London Road began to be laid out as streets and houses, from 1828 on. It was big enough to accommodate attractive Victorian and Edwardian houses as well as industry. The prime sites for these houses were, however, on the opposite side of the new St. John’s Park, well away from the brick, tile and pottery sites -which clung to the London Road and Station Road (also then known as Potters Lane).
The conservation area concentrates on Upper St. John’s Road, Park Road and, built a bit later on, Crescent Road. Other even-finer residences were built at the west end of what became Leylands Road (formerly known as Lye Lane) but, apart from Marle Place which still stands and is in Local Authority use, they have since been pulled down.
The examples below are of late-Victorian and Edwardian buildings around St. John’s Park, one of the first areas of Burgess Hill to be developed for the incoming middle classes. The park and the (latterly) white-painted ‘Park Centre’ were both donated to the town by benefactress Emily Temple in 1873. The redbrick pair, with decorative cream brick courses are part of a row in Lower Church Road which she also built. The pediment detail shown is a bold feature of the Providence Strict Baptist chapel, built opposite the park in 1875 by Simeon Norman.
3. The Fairfield and Livingstone Road area
By the time that the western part of St. John’s Common was laid out for housing and other uses, from 1857 to 1860, so many new families had flocked to the area for jobs in the brickworks or in the service industries that there was a shortage of housing for ordinary working families. The result was that the West Street and Fairfield Road areas as well as the western frontage to the London Road, opposite the Park, contains an interesting variety of ‘artisan’ housing. But because the new house plots which were put up for sale were only big enough to take one, two or, at most, three houses and because they were not all built upon at exactly the same time, the result is a pleasing variety of domestic house styles.
Artisan housing began to be built from 1860 onwards around Fairfield Road after the enclosure of Clayton Common. The earliest phase of development was in West Street, including the Cricketers public house, which strangely, have been excluded from the Conservation Area. Next came the southern part of Fairfield Road and its adjoining streets. The entire development was a response to an urgent need to house all the incoming families who came to work in the town’s growing brick, tile, pottery and building industries.
To learn more, about the conservation areas go to: Conservation Areas in Mid Sussex
The ‘Public Realm Assets’ project
The Town Council took the initiative recently to identify what is left of our Victorian and Edwardian heritage, and also to create a record of the locations and the building phases of the earlier cottages and farmhouses and cottages that are still standing in Burgess Hill. A start has at least been made. The initial list has been published.
In an email dated 12th February 2021, Judy Pointing of the Burgess Hill Town Council asked Fred Avery if he would help with a heritage project. On the web site of the Sussex Heritage Trust she had found that they were promoting a campaign to record ‘Public Realm Assets’. She felt that Burgess Hill should participate and she suggested that Fred would be the ideal person, with his profound knowledge of the Town, that he might compile a list of its heritage buildings and other items of note.
Fred Avery tells the story:
The following day, I agreed to make a start, beginning with listing the old red telephone boxes which the Town Council had already bought and which were being adapted, with the involvement of residents in the immediate vicinity of each box, for community use.
There were four other categories: 1. Farmhouses and cottages; 2. Victorian and Edwardian Buildings 3. Churches and Schools; 4. Plaques, terra cotta and street furniture.
The Town Council appointed Emily Bryant to photograph all the items on my list, to create a record to be kept by the Town Council and a duplicate by the Heritage and History Association. On 22nd April 2021 I completed a list of everything that came to mind in each of the categories and Emily is taking photos of almost everything listed in her own time. It will be necessary to get permission from some private properties.
One detached building of which I had no previous knowledge is hidden behind shops in London Road and believed to be a brewery dating back to the mid 1870s. It belonged to Thomas Stroud Saunders from Twickenham who was supplying alcoholic drinks to the Victoria Pleasure Gardens from 1898.
Grove Farm House
Women’s Institute Hall
Fairfield Road Terracotta
The completed Public Realm Asset List has now been produced and is on the Town Council Website and it has also been sent to The Sussex Heritage Trust. Copies were available at publication (early 2022) and may still be available at the Help Point in Church Walk. Fred Avery has already made some additions and amendments. If you notice or know of anything in and around the town that you feel should be added, do let the Town Council know.
Some visual aspects of our past
We have made a start on identifying what is still standing and visible throughout the town of Burgess Hill, both at its heart in the Town Centre in its surrounding residential areas.
In our project to highlight how ancient and modern features of Burgess Hill’s history can be found side by side throughout the town, we have produced a map showing our fairly recent built heritage and our rural past when our area was almost entirely agricultural, such as the standing (and fallen) trees which mark old hedge lines, old boundaries etc along with images showing the present day, most of which local residents will immediately recognise. To get a flavour of our work go to our Visual Heritage page, for a more in-depth view go to Visual Heritage – more detail.
The early stages
The processes by which the town of Burgess Hill came into being, out of the old St. John’s Common and, once the railway had come, the story of how it spread onto the hill of Burgess Hill, is told in detail elsewhere. To find out more about this: Go to the ‘Birth of the Town’
The even earlier stages
In which the community of old St. John’s Common thrived here from Anglo-Saxon times onwards is told in a series of articles which touch on major subjects like religion, the Reformation, the rise of the industry and the struggles of the rural poor. brick and tile trade here, rural poverty and unrest – as well as describing the background of their daily lives .
Heather has written a precis of our rural history, showing something of the lives of those who formerly lived on the land on which Burgess Hill now stands. It springs from her life time of work and research as a local archivist and Adult Education teacher. It is a story of a community, settled from Anglo-Saxon or early medieval times, linked by the common at their heart and united in the struggle to win a living from a tough clay soil. But the same community was divided into different manors and parishes and, as time went on, by their place in the social order, rich or poor. Aspects of their lives, how they farmed, how they worshipped, or the effects of King Henry VIIIth’s Reformation are brought to life by 6 further essays which examine the local details of our early history – all of this gradually evolving for around 1000 years before the Town was born.
Signs and indications and the general legacy of our rural past are ‘hidden in plain sight’. They are visibly threaded through the Burgess Hill we see today, but one needs to know something of the main story to know what we are looking at. It is an important but, if recent experience is relevant, elusive subject to get a grip on. Since 2013 we have lost two iconic timber-framed buildings each of which played a prominent role in our earlier community. Since the 1950s when Burgess Hill began to be developed, we have lost many more. We must not lose any more as a result of our general ignorance. Let’s now shine a light on the markers of our past. To read about it, Go to Earlier History
As a reflection on the particular problems that affected past “historians” attitude to our town and drew a veil over our history go to Why Burgess Hill’s heritage as been overlooked.