Cottages, Brickmakers, and the old locals:

The rise of the local brick and tile trade in Burgess Hill from around 1520 onwards, utilising the deep clays of St. John’s Common, and surrounding farms, brought a steady flow of families of a new type into the area from that date. The previous population expansion of the 12th-14th centuries had been a matter of local farming families acquiring new acres to grow enough crops to support themselves.  Then, from around 1520, a handful of local landholders began to use brick to enhance their timber-framed houses. Digging clay from their own land caused few problems locally.  But as the popularity of brick grew, in the late 16^th– and early 17th-century, the trade expanded into the open common at the heart of our community and this brought conflicts of interest. Several new families arrived in the area and built new cottages in tiny half-acre cottage plots of land, either to start up as brickmakers or to work in one of these small enterprises. Their plots were mostly tacked on to the edges of the common, all around its length and breadth, or were perilously perched in slivers of rough ground at the sides of the road. Those adjoining the common, or within it, generally managed to expand later to two or more acres.

Two early brick-making ‘cottages’, both in use by around 1575, were ‘island sites’ offset several hundred yards into each common so as to cause the least offence to their farming neighbours. One was at Gattons (where Gattons School and adjacent houses stand, off Royal George Road) on the west side of the common and the other, known as ‘Slutswell’, was on the east side of the common, on land now adjacent to Sussex House/ American Express.  The curving northern boundary of Gattons can still be seen in the adjacent open space called ‘St. John’s Common’, a rare survival of an early hedgerow.

A slight curve in Junction Road, near the top, at nos. 49 to 65, is the imprint of a former wayside cottage strip, put up by  a well-off local farmer around 1600, probably for the tenant to dig sand out of the side of the hill. Sand was an ingredient in the brickmaking process. This strata of sand also cropped up on the west side of the hill, at Burgess Hill Farm. It could also have been in the Grove Road area where several new cottages arrived a bit later in that century to house an incoming brickmaker and labourers. In 1604, a small cottage erected on Keymer Road for an incoming brickyard worker, was permitted by the manor officials to remain there, against the wishes of the commoners, who wanted it pulled down. Miraculously, it still survives – now known as Farthings Cottage. (For a photo, go back to Heritage: earlier history abstract.) Thomas Pockney, tenant of Burgess Hill farm in the late-17^th century was manufacturing bricks on site as well as farming, paying his tithes in bricks and bushels of peas, enabling the both the owner to build a commodious new farm house entirely in brick and the rector of Clayton to build a substantial new rectory in that village. 

The following photos show:

First – An early brick chimney at the west end of Hammonds Place, probably  dating to the 1520s when the Wood family owned the house;

Second – Pear Tree cottage, on the site of Slutteswell, (now American Express) the small brickyard where seven generations of the Marten family of brickmakers made their debut in 1616.

And third an anonymous painting of the late-17thc. brick-built Burgess Hill farmhouse (site, just downhill from Burgess Hill Station)

Bitter arguments had arisen between the old established farmers and the incomers who, it was claimed, had stolen their pasturage of the commons and were putting their animals at risk of falling into pits. The main trouble was that the new brick and tile makers had generally not applied for proper permission from the manor court to dig clay on the common, so they usually just did it anyway and hoped to get away with it.  And so, the commoners continued to lodge their complaints at the court – which is a good thing for history because otherwise we would be unaware of any of this. In the long term, however, all was not lost. It turned out that the commoners, who were generally the better-off farmers of the area, were actually rather interested in improving their smoky, leaky, draughty old farmhouses by adding a nice new chimney stack and keeping the wind and rain at bay with a good bit of tile hanging. Some of the local yeomanry even got themselves involved in the industry. Burgess Hill’s brick and tile trade flourished because the well-healed local farmers in a five-mile radius or more were keen to purchase the products.

A scion of the Turner family of Oldlands in Hassocks set up a new brick and tile yard near the Fair Place around 1650, a site more recently marked by Covers, Builders’ Merchants yard at the bend in Fairfield Road.  Receiving a welcome injection of finance from one Thomas Dunstall, a merchant of Hurstpierpoint, it expanded into a successful business and the financier’s name has defined the business and its memory ever since. His own home, ‘Dunstalls’, still exists in Hurst High Street, west of the church entrance. The AWod or Attewode (Wood) family at Hammonds were involved in supporting the new trade in the early 1500s – while the Michelbornes, their successors from the 1550s on, did the same. Both will have used the brick and tile products, the Woods probably doing the first stage, mainly chimneys and hearths, while the Michelbornes aggrandised the entire site and turned it into a mansion.

The following images show:

First – Thomas Dunstall’s house in Hurstpierpoint.

Second – chimney pots in Clayton village; most probably from Dunstall’s brickyard whose manager, Richard Divall lived just south of the churchyard.

Third – Oldland cottage, near Oldland windmill. The first known brickmaker at Dunstall’s was a relative of the owner of Oldland House.

Thus, after a tricky start, by around 1700 the two elements of the local populace had gradually come to an accommodation with each other. Between 1650 and 1700 clay digging and firing had largely been allocated its own proper land, a process which later spawned our modern Town Centre by leaving it unfit for agriculture but fine for the 1973 development of the pedestrianised shopping area, town square and Martlets Hall/Library – a process which is now being re-thought along different lines.

By 1680, adjoining the ‘town centre’ brickyards, a timber merchant had set up his yard on land now lying just to the west of Macdonalds.  Small cottages locally began to be built entirely in brick, meaning that their essential structure was from brick, not from timber framing. However, there was still a lot of carpentry work to be provided for the roofs, ceilings and doors. Although the new cottages were quite small, they were generally built with a chimney and an upper floor, requiring timber supports and floorboards. Several new cottages arrived around the edges of the old Fair Place at the top of Fairplace Hill, their occupants providing services as carpenters, wheelwrights or butchers. There was a fellmonger a bit further south, selling leather for waistcoats and breeches. The King’s Head had a two-acre orchard (for making cider – a common local drink in those days), while the landlord was described as a ‘victualler’. St. John’s Common had developed into a community which was now bigger and more diverse than its two parent communities, the villages of Clayton and Keymer.

In the early 1700s you could buy fresh fish outside the King’s Head from a man who came up regularly from Brighton (see notes below). At Dunstall’s brick yard over the road, a second brick kiln had been built by 1716 and its financiers were Henry Campion of Danny House, Hurstpierpoint and Anthony Springett, lord of the manor of Plumpton. The great and the good were still very interested in the produce of the kilns. At the old blacksmith’s work-shop a step downhill from the inn, the working blacksmith from 1717 until his death was John Clarke. In 1778, after his widow had died, a daughter took over, Elizabeth – with her husband , one Thomas Packham. Thus entered a family to St. John’s, whose surname continued as part of the town’s trading history until the 20th century. Not only the Packhams but several other Burgess Hill families can trace their names back to this burgeoning proto-industrial period and earlier. Local historian Fred Avery perhaps has the longest local pedigree we know of, his forebears once having owned Fowles Farm and his surname going back to a farm in Isaacs Lane called Averyes in 1601, later becoming ‘Woodfield Lodge’.  This house is now in the path of the Northern Arc development sweeping through that area.

People were now rubbing along as neighbours in the new community of St. John’s Common as demonstrated by marriages between brickmaking and local farming families. On Fairplace Hill the King’s Head faced competition in 1738 from a cottage on the west side of the hill calling itself ‘The White Hart’, owned in 1728 by Elizabeth Brooker. A bit further down on the same side, farmer Thomas Howell of ‘Fair Place farm’ was also a wheelwright. Regular cart loads of heavy bricks being delivered to outlying customers would have generated a good crop of bent wheels and broken axles. John Clarke’s smithy would have made the iron cart rims.  Cottage-dwelling labourers did not have the time or the land to live off their own crops, so St. John’s Common had at least two shops by the early 18^th century, that is, cottages used as general stores, crammed with every type of commodity any local might possibly need. One was on Fairplace Hill and another in the Grove Road area. (See notes below). Others popped up as the century wore on, one situated under what is now the Waitrose car park.  Adjacent, from the mid-18^th century on, were some purpose-built ’Potters kilns’ at a site, not under the car park, but approximately under the clock tower of Waitrose, a design which strangely ghosts the elevations of the former kilns. Brickmaking families such as the Parkers, the Martens, the Butchers, the Taylors, and others, formed long-lasting family dynasties, creating a strong local trade to continue into the 19th century and beyond.

A.H. Gregory, in his Story of Burgess Hill (p. 73) embarked on a short history of local brickmaking by noting, …..the St. John’s Original Brick, Tile and Pottery works date back to 1714.  He was referring to the yard in Station Road now generally referred to as ‘Meeds’ after its 19th-century owners.  This brick yard did indeed describe themselves as ‘St. John’s Original’.   From this, it is now sometimes said, quite wrongly, that brickmaking began in Burgess Hill in 1714. By contrast, Thomas Marten, who had then recently inherited the yard from his father, was the 7th generation of brickmaking Martens of St. John’s Common, in direct father-to-son succession. He was the 4th generation on the Meeds site. In 1615, his earliest recorded forefather, Samuel Marten had taken over the Slutswell ‘island site’ (adjacent the American Express offices). He was named as a brickmaker, but even had his trade not been mentioned, the site name itself could have been a give-away. Slutch is a dialect word for muddy clay (cited in OED,1933). The cottage name itself tells us that by 1615, there were visible effects of at least 40 years of clay digging – a bare expanse of muddy clay rather than a heathy, grassy pasture where animals could graze.

Although Thomas Marten’s family were not the very first brick and tile makers on St. John’s Common, nevertheless, because of his long family pedigree in local brickmaking, Thomas Marten was reasonably justified in making the claim of ‘Original’ for his brick and tile yard. But he did it in the face of stiff local competition, as a marketing statement, not as a history narrative. In the 1690s the Butcher family (from Hurstpierpoint) had taken over the Martens’ expanded Slutswell site with its two kilns which by then had 10 acres of land stretching right across ‘The Brow’ to where the Town Council Offices and Help point now stand at the bottom of Church Road. The two brickyards in the Fairplace/West Street area were both offering further strong competition. ‘Grove Farm’ had also been set up as a separate freehold enterprise with 5 acres of its own land, in which Thomas Marchant, the diarist, of Hurstpierpoint had an interest. (Re. his diary, see notes).  In the face of all this competition in 1714, it was imperative for his survival that Thomas Marten should boldly market his family’s credentials as ‘first in the field’. 

Returning to the earlier battles of the 16th and 17th centuries, the lords of the manors seem generally to have been on the side of the brick and tile makers, even to the extent of helping them out with the finance for building kilns.  As historians, we rely on written sources for periods beyond living memory. But it is worth remembering that in earlier times, agreements could often be sealed with a hand shake – in this case between owner of the mining rights (the manorial lord) and a prospective brickmaker. The local farmers had no agency in the pact except as possessors of rights of common. This was their one weapon and they used it, frequently and loudly, but generally to no avail. Their heated requests for new cottages to be pulled down were ignored.  The lords of the manor wanted to support the new industry and its workers for much bigger and grander building projects than the average commoner, and, all things considered, the ‘average commoner, or local farmer, wanted his home improvements! And thus, I am quite confident in my mind, that it was the 16th to 18th centuries that laid the foundations of modern Burgess Hill in one respect at least, by creating a society that had become integrated and comfortable with their special mix of manufacturing and rural life.

Finally, in building large houses, materials were often brought in from several suppliers. Those houses we know to have used Burgess Hill bricks, either substantially or moderately, from the 16^th to the 18^th centuries include: Hammonds Place (1500s on); Danny House in Hurst (1570s and ?18thc.); Oldlands in Hassocks (from c.1650); Theobalds in Wivelsfield (mid. 1600s); Legh Manor in Cuckfield (early 1700s); Ockley Manor in Keymer (c.1680-1700); and Stanmer House near Brighton (early 18thc).  Henry Bowyer, ironmaster and developer of Cuckfield Iron Furnace, was the late 16^th century owner of Cuckfield Park, a house he substantially enlarged in brick.. Records survive of his carting clay from Sheddingdean farm at the time – though some of it might have been to build the furnace. Thomas Marchant’s diary in the early 1700s reveals that much of the brick and tile work we can see in Hurstpierpoint village today was sourced from the St. John’s Common  brickyards. Many more destinations of Burgess Hill’s bricks and clay might be discovered if anyone is patient enough to continue the research.

This section relies in part on the joint research of Hugh Matthews and myself during the 1980s, which resulted in the book in his authorship, Burgess Hill (Phillimore 1989).  Since then, I have continued to research our early brick and tile trade.  I later supplied names and brief details of our early brickmakers to Molly Beswick for her book, Brickmaking in Sussex: a history and gazetteer (Middleton Press, 1993). In it, Molly quoted her source as H. Warne, Heart of Burgess Hill: the brick and tile makers of St. John’s Common (forthcoming).

Meeting up with her at a function in 2001, she chided me for still being forthcoming. Writing now in my 81^st year, I very much regret that I am still forthcoming! But publication of that work is the next project on the list. The intervening years have not been wasted. In continuing with my research, I have gained a far greater knowledge of the subject. I have come to understand not least the supportive role of the richer local landowners living within a five-mile range of Burgess Hill, but also that it was our own ‘home spun’ Wood family (AWod, Atte wode and variants) who, I eventually worked out, were the owners of Hammonds before the Michelbornes came, and it was they who invested in the local trade and got it going. To me this was a very gratifying discovery. I had been staring at the clues for years but not making the connection! If all else fails, I am hopeful that one of my children will make sense of my detailed brick and tile research work so far and publish it ‘posthumously’!

The diary, 1714-1728, of William Marchant of Hurstpierpoint records his buying fish at Fairplace, as well as numerous other visits to St. John’s for a variety of reasons. He sent his two farm hands up to the common on numerous occasions, to buy brick and tile and transport it back down to Hurst. Other entries make it perfectly clear that many of the houses we can see today in that village were weather-protected, built or rebuilt in Burgess Hill brick and tile. The diary itself is in private hands but was transcribed and privately published in 2005 by the Hurst History Study Group.

Re. the early shops, which served Burgess Hill people during the 18th and early 19^th centuries, Hugh Matthews, Burgess Hill, Chapter 4, The embryo town, pages 56-58, has wonderful details in his book, of what they sold, as well as the possessions in the cottages of other local residents and traders. For general stores in the early 18^th century, he covers the Fairplace Hill shop of Elizabeth Ford and another in the Mill Road/ Grove area owned by John Marten. He also gives details of what the working craftsmen had in their ‘shops’- or rather, in modern parlance, ‘workshops’. Page 61 has a list of the tools in the Fairplace Hill smithy. Indeed, all of Chapter 4 should be read by those who are interested in the development of our community before the commons were enclosed.