Pease Pottage
| Pease Pottage | |
| Sussex | |
|---|---|
 The Black Swan Inn, Peas Pottage | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | TQ255325 |
| Location: | 51°4’60"N, 0°12’3"W |
| Data | |
| Post town: | Crawley |
| Postcode: | RH11 |
| Dialling code: | 01293 |
| Local Government | |
| Council: | Mid Sussex |
| Parliamentary constituency: |
Horsham |
Pease Pottage is a village in the north of Sussex, on the southern edge of the Crawley built-up area.
The village has a motorway service station ('Pease Pottage Services') on the M23 motorway, which also serves as a local shop for the residents of the village: a footpath was constructed to allow pedestrian access from the village. It is where the M23 and A23, the London to Brighton road, meet the A264 to Horsham.
The Church of the Ascension, a chapel of ease to St Mary's Church, Slaugham, opened in 1875, but is no longer in use.[1]
Pease Pottage Radar is around half a mile west of Pease Pottage and is visible from much of the village. It is an air traffic control radar for NATS and takes advantage of a position 460 feet above sea level; some 250 feet above the nearby Gatwick Airport.
Name
Pease Pottage is an old name for pease pudding. A popular legend has it that the village name came from serving this food to convicts either on their way from London to the South Coast or from East Grinstead to Horsham although this seems implausible and it is not clear why convicts would travel along either route.
The name 'Peaspottage Gate' first appears on Budgen's Map of Sussex made in 1724 at the southern end of a road from Crawley where it met the Ridgeway, and is on the border of the parishes of Slaugham and Worth. This is before the turnpikes (1771), and so was not a toll gate. It was probably a gate between St Leonard's Forest and Tilgate Forest (part of Worth Forest), and 'peasepottage' is probably a reference to soft muddy ground.[2] The name is not on Speed's map of 1610 (surveyed in the 1590s). 'Gate' was dropped from the name when the tollgate was removed in 1877.
History
Pease Pottage stands on an ancient, pre-Roman trackway that ran in an east to west direction along the Forest Ridge from Ashdown Forest through West Hoathly, Turners Hill and Pease Pottage to Horsham.
The area now known as Pease Pottage was long in the parish of Slaugham, a place first mentioned around 1095 when the tithes were granted to the Priory of St Pancras in Lewes. The church dates from the early 12th century.
A road developed along Parish Lane crossing Standford Brook at Cinder Banks, which is clearly shown on Budgen's 1724 map which indicates a few buildings at Pease Pottage Gate with Buchan Hill to the west and a road north through Broadfield and Hogs Hill to Crawley. The road south to Handcross is not shown.
Cinder Banks takes its name from a double blast furnace known as Worth Furnace which was producing cannons in 1547 – a double furnace was required to produce enough iron for a cannon. Originally owned by Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, it passed to Thomas Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Sudeley when Norfolk was accused of treason. Seymour suffered the same fate, and an inventory of his property taken in 1550 gives detailed information of the furnace which included 29 guns and six tons of shot. The furnace produced cast iron, some of which was taken north to the Blackwater finery forge (now under Maidenbower) to be converted into wrought iron. The furnace closed in the early 17th century due to a shortage of iron ore and wood. Thomas Seymore in his brief ownership suggested building a new town in the nearby park of Bewbush.[3]
The main route between London and Brighton was further east (in 1756 the London-Brighton stage coach went via East Grinstead and Lewes). A toll road from Crawley north to London was built in the early 18th century, but the road south to Brighton through Pease Pottage was not constructed until 1770. The Ridgeway (today known as Horsham Road and Forest Road) was turnpiked in 1771 being the main Horsham-Crawley road prior to the McAdam Road being built in 1823 (now the old route of the A264 – it would have been extremely wet before it was given a hard surface). There were two London-Brighton coaches a day in each direction in 1797.
In the early 19th century, Thomas Erskine (Lord Chancellor 1806–1807), son of the Earl of Buchan purchased Buchan Hill in the early 19th century and built a house in the fork between the two roads descending from the north end of Grouse Road towards Bewbush and Gossops Green. Although it is widely believed that Buchan Hill was named after his father, the name is on Budgen's map some 80 years earlier. The house is now the home of Cottesmore School.
William Cobbett travelled the ridgeway on 31 July 1823., and wrote about it in his Rural Rides.
"...CRAWLEY...go two miles along the road...to Brighton; then you turn to the right [at Pease Pottage] and go over six of the worst miles in England...The first two of these miserable miles go through the estate of Lord ERSKINE. It was a bare heath here and there, in the better parts of it, some scrubby birch. It has been, in part, planted with fir-trees, which are as ugly as the heath was; and, in short, it is a most villainous track."
In Reminiscences of Horsham by Henry Burstow he states that on 4 October 1837 he went to Pease Pottage to see Queen Victoria pass through on her way from London to Brighton. There was "a large archway made of evergreens, with VICTORIA REGINA worked on it in various coloured dahlias".
Pease Pottage would have benefited from the toll roads, but lost the Crawley-Horsham traffic in 1823 with the opening of the new McAdam road through Faygate, and the London and Brighton Railway completed in 1841 which skirted along the eastern boundary of Pease Pottage cutting through Tilgate Forest alongside Standford Brook and through a tunnel under High Street. The Pease Pottage tollgate was removed in 1877. In 1896 on the day after the red flag law expired, 25 cars left London for Brighton, but half had broken down by Crawley. This event is still celebrated in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run which still goes past Pease Pottage on the first Sunday in November.
To the south of Pease Pottage is Tilgate Forest Row which had three shops, a blacksmith and post office. The Pease Pottage cricket field was between here and Pease Pottage (now a car breakers yard). The cricket field was made in 1874, but was ploughed up in 1939 as part of the war effort. It had a London horse-drawn tram as a pavilion. The ground was up to county ground standards.
The next major change to Pease Pottage was the opening of the M23 motorway in 1975 which continued as the A23 road, a two lane dual carriageway south to Handcross with the houses of Tilgate Forest Row facing onto it. The service station was opened in about 1990. The road layout was changed again in the mid-1990s with the A23 moved a few yards west and widened to three lanes. The old southbound carriageway became a new road to Handcross, and another new road was built on the other side of the A23 to Woodhurst. Tilgate Forest Row is now separated from Pease Pottage by ten traffic lanes.
A large number of houses have been built since 1946 when Pease Pottage consisted of a few buildings near the crossroads and a few isolated buildings on the A23. The first development was west along Horsham Road, mainly bungalows. This was followed by modern estates behind the Black Swan and to the west of the old A23 (now Brighton Road South). The last of these was on the site of Hemsleys nursery, south of which are Finches playing fields. Some apartments have been built on the old maintenance deport on the east side of Old Brighton Road North. In latter years, development has spread so that the gap between Pease Pottage and Crawley has disappeared.
In popular culture
Pease Pottage featured in the 1953 film Genevieve as a very remote village deep in the Sussex countryside.
The fictional Doctor Who character Melanie Jane Bush lived at 36 Downview Crescent before joining the Sixth Doctor as a companion in the 23rd season.
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Pease Pottage) |
References
- ↑ Allen, John (5 September 2011). "Slaugham – (1) St Mary, (2) All Saints, Handcross and (3) Ascension, Pease Pottage". Sussex Parish Churches website. Sussex Parish Churches (www.sussexparishchurches.org). Archived from the original on 28 July 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20110728073954/http://www.sussexparishchurches.org/content/view/562/33/. Retrieved 13 February 2012.
- ↑ Mills, Anthony David: 'A Dictionary of British Place-Names' (Oxford University Press, 2003) ISBN 978-0-19-852758-9
- ↑ Gwynne, Peter (1990). "The Sixteenth Century: The First Building Boom". A History of Crawley. Chichester: Phillimore & Company. pp. 98. ISBN 0-85033-718-6.
