A reflection on the old St. John’s Common

It had evidently been envisaged that the Clayton enclosure might have the effect of creating a unified new town of St. John’s which centred on the London Road, in harmony with the already-developed Keymer enclosures. The Clayton enclosure plan therefore provided a plot for a new church in the London Road, on the northern corner of Royal George Road.  The official document which records the decisions as to rights of common and the allocation or sale of plots of land is called an ‘enclosure award’.  Clayton’s award tells us that it was the Rector of Clayton-cum-Keymer, the Archdeacon James Garbett who was granted this plot. He had long been campaigning for land and the funds to provide the people of St. Johns with their own parish church. The benign lord of the manor, William John Campion, was evidently sympathetic to the cause.  The death knell for this plan, however, was that the opening of the Railway had already caused a spread of development up onto the hill east of the Railway station. People living in that area were not so keen on the London Road church site – it was too far away. Instead of using that site, a plan took root for new parish church to be built further east. A suitable field was purchased at the east end of what later became St. John’s Park, and building plans were commenced. Much of the new town’s spiritual, commercial (other than brick and tile) and cultural activities then began to evolve around the centre of the old Keymer Common. The project for a new parish church on the London Road was left in limbo but eventually, though by what processes it is unclear, part of the plot of land was claimed for a different slant of God’s work. The Methodists built their first mission church on it and, a few rebuilds later, their present church still stands there. Parts of the plot were sold off, perhaps to raise building funds.

The new church of St. John the Evangelist was built by 1863, and at the same time the new civil parish of ‘Burgess Hill was created with powers of local governance, uniting both sides of the former common as one community. The old manorial divisions were now irrelevant and would soon be forgotten. East and west could move forward and each could contribute in equal measure to building both the housing and the social infrastructure of their new town, incoming families and old locals working together in the task.

One of the first tasks was to get people to the new church. Lower Church Road was set out to give access for those on the west side of town to get to Church. But it was also a bonus for those who lived up on or near the hill. Church Road, which gets us from the Station to the shops today, did not then exist.  People had to go the long way round, westwards via Potter’s Lane (Station Road), At the end of Station Road they turned north and walked up as far as royal George Road then turned east and went north up London Road then back up east and went back up eastwards by Lower Church Road to the church.  On the Clayton side of the old Common there was by then an increase in traffic along Royal George Road, which was still a private enclosure road. However, its general usefulness to the infant town was now recognised and it was adopted by the parish as a public responsibility.

For the next 90 years Burgess Hill would gradually develop along the lines the enclosure surveyors had set out, but in piecemeal fashion.  In the first 20 years after the enclosure land values shot up.  In an aerial view reproduced in 1938 by A.H. Gregory in his Mid Sussex through the Ages (p. 287) we can still see the ‘enclosure’ framework, a grid of rectangular plots across the town on both sides of the common.  Many of them were then, and some still are, under grass in a natural state.

The following images show: award text relating to the intended parish church plot in London Road (scanned from the solicitors’ copy of the Award); Lower Church Road – the last lap on the journey from the hill to the new parish church before Church Road was built;  Aerial view of Royal George Road as set out in 1855-6.

Enclosure brings about an utter transformation, almost totally obscuring the ‘look’ of its former landscape. Any urbanisation process does this to a degree; but an enclosure does it dramatically by adding rectangular allotments on to old sinuous farm boundaries, obscuring them within a sea of grid lines. It is only by looking at the actual enclosure plans that we can rediscover the old shapes and locations of farms and understand the transformation. The haphazard growth of bushes and trees in a large untended area was replaced by a complex network of large or small rectangular plots intended either for building plots or for managed agriculture. The broad centre of modern Burgess Hill is therefore a grid of residential roads, some open rectangles of grass and a spread of former industrial sites. It is all strung upon the framework designed in 1828 by the Keymer enclosure surveyor, Henry Walter.  Several residential roads are aligned on the straight hedges of the plots put up for sale.

The later Clayton enclosure process from 1852-1857 was relatively kind to the older tracks which wound across and around the edges of the commons, but Keymer’s enclosure was brutal and the old tracks were largely quashed. From earliest times, radiating diagonally from the points of entry to the common, they had allowed people short cuts across the whole, together with access in and out of the farmsteads all around and to the windmill on the crest of the ridge. One of the diagonal routes was the ancient (Iron Age) Ditchling to Anstye trackway, which once plied NW across open common to Fairplace Hill from what is now, approximately, the roundabout at Barclays Bank. We can only wonder how long it took for the imprint of 1000 years of feet, hooves and cart tracks to fade away. Hugh Matthews mentions some of Clayton Common’s lost tracks on pages 124-125 of his book.

Those places that people still needed to get to were to be served by brand new roads, built to standard widths of 30 feet for a public road, 20 feet for a private road – and all dead-straight if possible as it was cheaper and was considered more convenient.  What has become the town centre was badly served. Had the enclosure come after the railway, things would have been done very differently, with the railway station as a natural hub. But where might the railway station have been?  One of the early railway plans made use of St. John’s Common for the new railway, bringing the proposed line roughly along what is now Mill Road.

The only roads on the Keymer side which were declared public at Enclosure were the resurfaced Potters Lane (now Station Road) on the south side of the common and a new road plying east west from the old Lye Lane on the north side heading to Fairplace Hill. This today is the middle stretch of Leylands road from Lowlands Road west to the London road.

Existing owners of plots in the common were provided with ‘private roads’ meaning that future upkeep would be the land-owners’ responsibility. The windmill was not recognised as a public asset in that the new road (now Mill Road), although designed to pass close by, was set up as a private road, of only 20 feet in width rather than the 30 feet allowed for public roads. So, to get to the mill, people from Fairplace Hill would have had to use Leylands, then Mill Road; or people from the Hammonds area would use Potters Lane (Station Road) and Mill Road. No more cutting straight across the common as they had done in the past! A little toll cottage still exists at the junction of Mill Road and Leylands road.

Potter’s Lane was hemmed in by all the old brick and tile-making plots on either side, which helped it to survive more or less on its old tracks. In the old days, people travelling towards Haywards Heath from the east end of Lye Lane, went along by the curving hedge of a small farm called North Inholmes (at Worlds End Post Office and Stores) and then came out on the southern tip of Valebridge Common. They then chose one of two ancient cart tracks which had followed either the west hedge of the old common, or its east hedge, towards their separate crossings of the river Adur.  After enclosure they were confronted by a brutal new alignment of a dead-straight enclosure road (now Valebridge Road) up the centre of what had been the old open common.  But I dare say they enjoyed the convenience of it.

On the Clayton side of the common, Royal George Road and West Street replicate the former east/west routes across the common, heading to and from Malthouse and Gatehouse Lanes, but without any of the subtle character of the tracks they replaced. Yeakell and Gardner’s map of Sussex in 1795 shows a meandering version of what became Royal George Road at enclosure, tracking a NW course round the south and west edges of the Common. There is one ancient track we can still walk along. Now called Westhill Drive (off Orchard Road), it formerly led along the edge of the common to the old medieval farmsteads of Fowles and Barbers. The former still stands on the north side of the lane and the site of the latter is a large Victorian house on the south side.

The following images show: First, a drawing entitled ‘St John’s Common’ by Simeon Norman (1860s). Second, digging a veg plot near the old windmill, and third, aerial view, from “Mid-Sussex through the Ages” by A.H. Gregory (Charles Clarke, 1938) of modern roads following the old enclosure plot boundaries.

The impulse to build had slowed down dramatically by the early 20th century. More recently however, it began to gallop. Since the 1950s the town has burst out of its old commons, taking new housing developments into the old farmland all around. The process continues with the Northern Arc housing project, now in progress.  But we should not fail to credit the former commons, and the way they were extinguished, for their role in defining that part of Burgess Hill that lies between Hammonds and Fairplace Hill; (old) Barclays Bank and Freeks Farm, the Woolpack and Worlds End.

Much work has been done over the past 30 years by the partnership of the Town Council, Mid Sussex District Council and the Friends of Bedelands, of Batchelors Farm and of the Green Circle network, to preserve access to our old countryside. It has enhanced the amenity value of our surrounds both for people and for wildlife. It has enabled the preservation of the western core of the old Clayton common. The Fairfield Recreation Ground, which was designated as the new sheep fair and cricket ground at enclosure, now links to further open ground with a pond to the west, which in turn links by footpath access to the churchyard of St Edwards Church and to the Woolpack Inn.  In memory of its earlier past the open ground was recently named ’St John’s Common’. Though it only represents a tiny acreage of the former Clayton and Keymer Commons combined, it is good to have the name of the common in black and white on the map.

Notes:

Original documents: Keymer Enclosure Award and Plans, WSRO QDD/6/1 E3; proceedings – ESRO/The Keep SAS Acc 98; these loose, uncatalogued papers include official Enclosure decisions of great interest; Clayton enclosure Award and map: solicitor’s copy in ESRO. ADA 16; re. the creation of Fairfield Rec., WSRO, PAR 294, 12/1, March 1865.

Hugh Matthews, Burgess Hill (as cited previously), Chapter 6 re. Keymer, and Chapter 7 re. Clayton.

Dr. Peter Brandon, The Inclosure of Keymer Common, Sussex Notes and Queries, 15, no. 6 (1960)

Concerning re the rapid 19thc. growth of population in Brighton, reaching 65,000 by 1851, see J. R. Armstrong, A history of Sussex (Phillimore, 1974); and cap. 47 in K. Leslie and B. Short, An historical Atlas of Sussex (Phillimore, 1999).