Study materials

The full collection of our websites articles, essay’s, and information categorised and all in one place for easy access.

From 1979 until now – The Burgess Hill History Society was founded in 1979 out of the fact that there were a number of different people researching various aspects of the town’s history at that time…

Burgess Hill Heritage Overlooked  – Antiquarian’ interest in local history burgeoned during the 19th century and much was written on the charming villages of mid Sussex. But these authors overlooked our workaday brick, tile and pottery town…

Burgess Hill Lost & Standing Heritage – A pictorial selection of our lost and standing, rural and urban heritage…

Visual Heritage – more detail – Further information on our rural & urban visual history…

Origins of Settlement and farming – By looking at all relevant early records of local land holding, which survive sparsely from the 13th to the 16th centuries, then fully from 1600 on, it is possible to distinguish which farms paid rents which reflected a pre-Norman type of land use…

Burgess Hill’s name and it’s other early place names – Our town’s name relates to the hill-top or ‘burgh’ above Burgess Hill’s main railway station…

Cottages, brickmakers and the old locals 1550 – 1780 – 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 into the area…

Obligations to the community – Although there was no Town, District, or County council before the late 19th Century, local government has always existed under one umbrella or another…

The problem of the poor – Down to 1536 we were a Roman Catholic nation. Charity to the poor had been dispensed by Christian institutions and through individual gifts by churches and church members, in life or at death…

Chapel and Church – There was only one religion available to people in rural England before the Reformation of 1536 and that was Roman Catholicism…

London to Brighton Turnpike Road – During the 16th century and onwards, as manorial control withered away and brick and tile making and iron working grew, complaints arose, both from locals as well as travellers from elsewhere, about deep and impassable mud on our roads…

Extinction of St John’s Common Keymer side – People travelling through St. John’s Common had noticed its vacant land and its mixed residential and industrial character, and pressure began to mount to put it all up for sale…

The arrival of the railway – The first proposal for a railway linking London with Brighton was made in February 1823…

Extinction of St John’s Common Clayton side – 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…

St John’s Common Reflection – 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…

Burgess Hills first building boom 1828 – 1879 – 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…

Burgess Hill’s brick, tile and pottery hey-day – From 1830 onwards, the most familiar sights to local residents must have been the many rows of long narrow sheds, kilns, and large mounds of clay left to weather…

Ongoing story of the Railway – The Lewes line gained a boost when the Keymer Brick & Tile Company began production in 1875 at a site off Junction Road, adjacent to the line. A siding was built into the works.  This brought in wagons, mainly of coal for firing the kilns, etc., and took out wagons of bricks, tiles and terracotta ware…

Places of worship – A variety of churches of different denominations have been built in Burgess Hill since the town got started and the first of them was St. John’s Chapel in Leylands Road, which stands to this day…

Education – In 1811 the National Society for promoting the Education of the Poor had been founded as the Church of England’s response to the increase in chapel attendence by the non-conformist churches in industrial areas…

Cinema in Burgess Hill 1912 to present – Burgess Hill got its first cinema in 1912 after local business man, A. Downer, had obtained permission to erect a ‘Picture Palace’. This is the same site in Cyprus Road as where ‘Orion’ now stands…

Notable People – more detail – Here we look at William Norman, Simeon Norman, Emily Temple, Bee Mason, and the Norris Brothers, more will be added over time…

A Handful of Historic Events – We have picked a couple of notable events to record on this page but there must be many more that could be recounted. Do let us know if you have details of others we could put up at a later date…