The extinction of St. John’s Common

By Heather Warne

As Hugh Matthews observes in his commentary on the two commons enclosures, Keymer’s and Clayton’s, the latter dealt far more fairly with its ordinary commoners regarding the pro-rata share they got for their holdings. Of its 103 acres, a relatively smaller portion than that in Keymer was allocated to sales. A larger area was granted to the commoners, as can be seen in the enclosure plan.  Clayton’s enclosure took place nearly 30 years after that of Keymer. It was a much smaller manor than Keymer, and its farms which held rights of common were generally small. The ‘great and the good’ of the manor were mainly freeholders and thus, by the custom that prevailed in our local manors, excluded from an interest in the common.

By the 1850s, the expanded brick and tile on the Keymer side of the London Road had brought an influx of new workers and their families and the proposed enclosure was seen as an opportunity to meet the growing need for new houses. The scheme attracted speculators as Keymer’s enclosure had done, but the plots for sale were smaller, more suited for a small row or a pair of houses, or, as Mr George Godley, owner of the Friar’s Oak Inn had in mind, a public house (The Royal George). Two builders from the Keymer side of the common, Thomas Alfrey and Henry Wolven invested in plots.

Unlike Keymer’s enclosure, the turnpike (London Road) could not be the main focus of development. This was because most of its frontage actually lay in Keymer and was already developing under its own steam.  The manor/parish boundary had wandered over the road and didn’t wander back again until half way down Fairplace Hill). Today’s Italian restaurant, Buon Appetito, Eclipse Design, the Café opposite the Park and their neighbours northwards up the road were in Keymer. They had already been built or their land at least was ‘spoken for’ by 1852. So, instead, a new axis of development was laid out a little further west and was later named as Fairfield Road.

On Fairplace Hill, the Enclosure scheme provided access to the muddle of old cottage plots and tracks around the north-west side of the old ‘Fair Place’ field by laying out the new Fairfield Road on its immediate north and west sides. This was where, ‘time out of mind’, the midsummer sheep fairs had been held. Curving round west and south from Fairplace hill, this section of Fairfield Road then met up with an old east-west through-route from Chailey Common to Hurstpierpoint or Goddards Green. It had come from Wivelsfield Green’ via the track to Lockstrood, in the area of the old Royal Oak Inn; then down Janes Lane and along ‘Lye Lane’, (Leylands Road). The Clayton enclosure created cross-roads here by taking Fairfield Road in a dead-straight line south from the old track and linking it to another new east -west enclosure road across the common, which became known as Royal George Road. The old east-west track became West Street as it crossed the common and, on leaving the common, two old lanes, Malthouse Lane and Gatehouse Lane, took people to their preferred destination of Hurstpierpoint or Goddards Green.

It was the new intersection of West Street and Fairfield Road that became the hub of the new house plots put up for sale. Radiating out from the new crossroads, all the new house plots found buyers.  The area had easy access from the north and the south as well as from east to west.  However, there was no immediate rush to build further out from this core. The southern stretch of Fairfield Road remained undeveloped as late as 1880 and the Victorian housing in West Street peters out west of the junction with Dunstall Avenue.  Once Lower Church Road had been set up on the Keymer side of the Common, access to Royal George Road was easier and late Victorian development began to spread west along it and north up Fairfield Road.

The Clayton enclosure plan – NB: I have not put modern reference points on this map because I think the distinctive courses of the three main roads, London Road, Royal George Road and West Street, together with the alignment of the new Fairfield Road make the plan easy to correlate with the modern townscape.

Perimeters in mid green, edged darker green: the old farms around the Common and their owners. Pale mauve, all down the right hand side: land belonging to the Keymer part of St. John’s common, already enclosed. Lighter green: – edged red on the north curve of Fairfield Road,  Clayton’s part of the old medieval Fair Field (the rest of it was over the Keymer boundary). Red indicates that a few cottages had been built on the site since the 1600s;  green further south: the new site designated exercise and recreation, and later ratified as the ‘Fairfield Recreation Ground’, for cricket and for the annual sheep fairs. Orange: island sites of cottage intakes from the common. Gatton’s, off Royal George Road is an early brick and tile site with later additions on its east side which were used as a parish poor house from mid-17th century to 1834. Purple: land purchased by William John Campion of Danny House in Hurst, lord of the manor of Clayton. Apart from housing development along West Street, much of this land is still open for public use as part of the area now designated as ‘St. John’s Common’.
Yellow: the building plots for sale along West Street. Far smaller than the sale plots on the Keymer side, they were designed to attract small builders to help house the working residents of St. John’s Common. Blue: large corner plot abutting London Road and Royal George Road, designated for a new church. Nothing was built there until the present Methodist Church took up the northern half of the plot. Areas left uncoloured: are the generous amount of land allotted to the copyhold tenants of the manor from Clayton village northward to the north side of Fairplace Hill. Unlike Keymer, Clayton had no outlying tenants in other parishes, so the local tenants had no competition.

One new brick and tile business did make use of the turnpike (London Road) frontage south of Royal George Road as did the Royal George public house on its north side. It was developed on newly enclosed land tacked on to Fowles and Barber’s farms to become ‘Pottery No. 1’ on the 1879 O.S. map.  The farm’s owner, Thomas Avery (ancestor of our historian Fred Avery) bought one of the plots for sale here and got another plot as an allotment of common and went into business with his son-in-law Charles Tulley, successfully competing with the established firms of Richard and Nathan Norman, and John Gravett, on the other side of the London Road. They later built the west-facing row of houses then known as Avery’s Cottages, which still stand in Livingstone Road.

Compared with Keymer, Clayton’s legal procedures were quite low key. By 1852, when it began, so many commons were being enclosed for housing and other development nationally that there was no need to obtain a private act of Parliament. The copyholders of the manor had all applied to William Campion of Danny in Hurstpierpoint, the lord of the manor. His consent was given, and Clayton was included with 26 other commons elsewhere. They were then all dealt with in one parliamentary session, Clayton being no. 18 on the list. There was some discussion about allotments for growing vegetables, which was not taken up; but three acres were to be set aside for exercise and recreation, which later became the Fairfield Recreation Ground. In 1865 the Parish Council drew up regulations for the new ground and we find it had to double up both as a new venue for the sheep fairs and for cricket.  A new site was needed for the sheep fairs because the old one (Fairlea Close today, with its front and back access lanes) was to be utterly hemmed in by the new building plots. An auctioneer of Clayton, Samuel Ridley bought two adjacent plots on the south west corner of West Street which became ‘The Cricketers’ public house.

Unlike the raft of officials dealing with Keymer’s enclosure, Clayton’s was managed by one John Wood, a land agent and valuer, in his office in Hurst. It did take rather a long time though. The lots were drawn up and put up for sale in 1854, and viewings were invited at Hurst or at the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton.  They were all sold in advance for £1,182, a sum which covered the entire cost of the enclosure.  Hugh Matthews has a complete breakdown of the prices of the main plots and the names of those who bought them in his book, Burgess Hill (cited above), and a full assessment of who got what, and how fair it was for the commoners. It actually seems very fair for them, compared with Keymer, a fact which not only relates to the relatively lower costs of this procedure but also to a more benign approach on the part of the Lord of the manor, William Campion of Danny. He paid good money, £104, for a large plot down West Street and, as his lordly dues from the enclosure, he only took a small percentage per acre which would have raised him no more than £23.  His family had long been supportive of our early brick and tile industry here on the Clayton side of the common. The actual award, which enabled all the agreed sales and allotments to go ahead, was not signed until 30 April 1857 and new building was underway shortly after.

As with the Keymer enclosure, the surveyor’s basic lay-out of streets has entirely informed the subsequent development of that part of town. The Keymer plan, covering a larger area, did not get down to the actual level of house plots but Clayton’s did and they precisely relate to the housing that we see there today. In conclusion, it is the earlier history of the centre of Burgess Hill as one open common in two jurisdictions, coupled with the actual dates that each was enclosed, that has shaped the whole swathe of our town as we see it today from the Woolpack Inn on the west to Burgess Hill Railway station on the east.

The following photographs show examples of West street houses built on the plots put up for sale, and although not specifically designated a building plot, Cromwell Road was laid out in parallel to the general scheme.

For further reflections on the changes and developments that the two enclosures brought go to A reflection on the old St John’s Common