Sussex Archaeology and History
Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0
The establishment and impact of the railway - setting the scene
John Minnis
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The London Brighton & South Coast Railway dominated railway development in Sussex in the Victorian and Edwardian period. Central to its policy was the protection of its monopoly of the Brighton traffic and, to a lesser extent, that of the other South Coast resorts it served. It was, however, subject to competition from other railway companies and was prepared and, on occasion, compelled to spend large sums in the provision of improved infrastructure and services to ensure that it retained its resort traffic. Financially, it skated on thin ice at several points in its existence and there was, at times, a substantial gap between the company’s image and the reality of what many of its passengers experienced. Its Pullman cars conveyed some of the richest passengers in the country and its 3/- excursions, some of the poorest. How could such differing demands be reconciled? Much more reliant on passenger traffic than most of the larger railway companies, its goods services still had an important role to play in bringing coal and building materials down to Sussex towns and in distributing agricultural produce and timber.
John Minnis FSA
John is a retired Senior Investigator with English Heritage/ Historic England and, before that, was a researcher/ writer with the Pevsner Architectural Guides. He specialises in road and rail transport buildings and among his publications are England’s Motoring Heritage from the Air (2014), Britain’s Lost Railways (2011), and the co-authored Carscapes: the Motor Car, Architecture and Landscape in England (2012). He has taught on university extra-mural courses and has written extensively on the railways of Sussex, including E J Bedford of Lewes: Photographer of the London Brighton & South Coast Railway (1989).
Uckfield Line Bridge Lewes
Dr Geoffrey Mead
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Geoff was born and raised in Brighton and took his BA, MA, and PhD as a Geographer at the University of Sussex, where he worked in the Adult Education department with the Landscape Studies degree team and as Convenor for Local History. His PhD thesis was on the suburban growth of interwar Brighton, centred on the area of Patcham.
Phoenix Foundry Lewes
"A man may have constant employ"
The changing industrial landscapes of Sussex
Geoffrey Mead
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The ‘long’ 19th century saw the concepts of ‘Continuity & Change’ epitomised in the industrial landscape of the county. The primary industries of agriculture, forestry, fishing, and mineral extraction carried on throughout the period, but change was afoot in the employments of the county. At the start of Victoria’s reign there were workers lately employed the final gasp of the Wealden iron industry; there were appalling roads across the Weald, resorts were for those with leisure time and private transport; by the end of the period airplanes were flying out of Shoreham airfield, an electric railway ran on Brighton seafront and the railways brought the coast within an hour of the metropolis. The rapid rise of the coastal urban communities brought employments in a range of manufacturing processes, and in service industries, but also brought miserable housing conditions and scandalous health issues. The growth of coastal tourism brought in construction workers for housing, hotels, and leisure facilities such as piers; while the rise in population created markets for brewers and bakers, for services such as laundries and retailing. The Sussex of 1910 was recognisable as the Sussex of 1837, but shifts in the county economy meant different lives for much of the population.
Resort development at the Sussex seaside
Kathryn Ferry
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Social change and transport improvements provoked an era of massive growth at the Sussex seaside as more people travelled to more resorts more quickly. Existing resorts flourished even as competition intensified from new coastal destinations and new types of building appeared to cater for visitors. Many key elements of the seafront date from this period, including grand hotels, promenade piers and seafront shelters. The quality of these amenities, whether large or small, helped set the social tone of the resort and gave each place its distinctive appeal. This period also witnessed a shift in emphasis from health tourism to concerted pleasure seeking as the upper-class habit of holidaymaking gradually filtered down the social hierarchy to middle class families and working-class excursionists.
Mocatta Station, Brighton
Dr Kathryn Ferry
Kathryn is a historian who specialises in the architectural and cultural history of the seaside. She wrote her Cambridge University PhD thesis on the architect and designer Owen Jones (1809-74) then worked as a conservation advisor for The Victorian Society. Since going freelance she has written books on subjects including beach huts, bungalows, and Butlin’s. Her book on Twentieth Century Seaside Architecture was published by Batsford in May this year and she is now writing a monograph on Victorian pier engineer Eugenius Birch. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former trustee of the National Piers Society and a founder member of the Seaside Heritage Network.
Chris Hare
Chris was born in Worthing in 1962, and apart from time away at university and a stint as an adult education manager in Newton Abbot, Devon, Chris has lived in the town all his life. His interest in history began when his grandmother used to buy him Ladybird Adventures in History books whenever she visited. His interest in local history began, when studying A Levels at Worthing Sixth Form College, he came across the Worthing Skeleton Army riots of 1884 and the dramatic 'Reading of the Riot Act' that followed: he has been hooked ever since.
Chris has a first degree in British Studies and an MA in Life History. He has worked for the Centre of Continuing Education at the University of Sussex, he was later an adult education manager at Newton Abbot, and then for Midhurst and Petworth. Since 2009, Chris has run his own heritage consultancy, History People UK, during which time he has managed over 30 community heritage projects in Sussex and Hampshire, mainly funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund grants.
Riot and Respectability in a seaside town
Chris Hare
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For centuries, Worthing had been a small agricultural hamlet within the parish of Broadwater, with a sideline in fishing; but all that changed during the nineteenth century as the hamlet developed into a seaside resort. A population of 2,000 in 1800 had risen to 5,000 by 1850, and 12,000 by 1880, ending the century pushing 20,000. This population growth was fed by working and retired professionals moving in from London and the colonies, with poorer people moving in from outlying villages, where opportunities in agriculture were declining. Throughout the nineteenth century there was a growing tension between these groups, including incidents of rough music and other street protests, culminating in the anti-Salvation Army riots of 1884. Nine years later allegations of corruption and incompetence were levelled at the town authorities following a disastrous outbreak of typhoid fever in the town in which nearly 200 people died. The local legend of the 'Forty Thieves', that was still remembered by older people in Worthing within living memory, recalls those days, and the intense rivalry and distrust that marked the conduct of local politics at that time.
Still a Remote Backwater - the slow development of Chichester
Alan Green
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Victorian Chichester was an important market town, but Its significance as a port was fast waning owing to the progressive silting-up of the harbour. It was also the cathedral city for the whole of Sussex and home to the Bishop, Dean and countless clergy and church musicians. It was all very Trollopian – indeed it could have been the very model for Barchester.
However, Chichester suffered from not being on a direct route either to London, or from London to anywhere more important, which made for slow and indirect public services. You had to make an effort to get there and back. The railway came relatively early to the city, arriving from Brighton in 1846 and extending on to Portsmouth the following year, but it did not encourage a rapid expansion as might be expected. Its population in 1841 was 8512 growing to 8934 in 1901 when the Good Queen died and was still only 8943 in 1911, just after Edward VII did the same. Why should this have been? This slow growth continued into the 21st century and at the census of 2001 it was only 25,520 (but for a wider area) compared with Winchester, another cathedral city the same distance from London but only one hour from Waterloo, at 41,365.
Victorian Chichester was not an industrial town, but did boast two small iron foundries and several breweries and, as with all cathedral cities, it attracted the professions of law and medicine. Juxtaposed as it was between the two burgeoning towns of Portsmouth and Brighton the new railway gave its citizens access to greater employment opportunities in these places, one being the dockyard at Portsmouth.
Chichester was run by a Mayor and Corporation, all of whom lived and worked in the city. Characteristically for Sussex, they wouldn’t be druv resenting all government influence which was seen as ‘interference’ in its affairs; Victorian Chichester was self-contained and somewhat inward looking.
Alan Green
Alan is the author of nine books on the history of his native Chichester. He serves on the committees of Chichester Local History Society and Sussex Industrial Archaeology Society and is a regular contributor to their journals. For 15 years he was Chairman of the Chichester Conservation Area Advisory Committee, on which he represented the Georgian Group.
Plumpton, Norman's Brickyard, c. 1900
Brian Short
Brian is Emeritus Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex with a particular interest in the rural landscapes and society of the 18th to 20th centuries. Recent books have included Turbulent Foresters: a Landscape Biography of Ashdown Forest (2023) and his edited version of Peter Brandon’s Sussex Writers in their Landscape (2024).
Complementary or competitive?
Agricultural progress and the search for a rural idyll in Sussex 1840 - 1914
Brian Short
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By the early years of Victoria’s reign the farming in Sussex attracted few admirers. Considerable progress had indeed been made in the breeding of sheep by John Ellman at Glynde and gentlemen in the previous century had interested themselves in various aspects of agriculture. But farming in the Weald in particular was condemned as backward, offering little to pauperised communities, many of whose members looked to leave rather than scratch out a precarious living. The advent of the railways in the 1840s brought the prospect of better connectivities and wider markets for farmers, including to the growing coastal resorts, but at the same time allowed newcomers to Sussex who did not look to the productivity of the soil but rather to the beauty of an undeveloped countryside where the rural idyll might be lived out. So to what extent did this growing social movement complement the agriculture of Sussex as the century progressed or did it retard progress as wealthier families came to seek unchanging countrysides and ‘peasant’ rustics, illuminated in literature and painting?
The railways, rural recession, and the Country House - Wealden new builds and Downland decline
Sue Berry
Following on from Professor Short’s talk, I will explore how incomers to the Weald built grand houses with small estates surrounding them for privacy. Most were weekend retreats but millions of pounds in modern money were lavished on them. Most of the capital came from businesses manufacturing established in the midlands and north of England and from financial services such as banks such as Huth, a commercial bank that flourished into the interwar period. Well known architects were employed to build new or to modernise old houses in the Weald, each surrounded by fashionable landscaping and well furnished. The Loder family spent the huge fortune their grandfather made in Russia on their homes and grounds and became well known for their collecting and breeding of exotic plants. At first, it was the railway services and cheap land with the varied topography then demanded for the gardens which lured the wealthy. Before 1914, it was accessibility by car. Meanwhile the agricultural recession of the later nineteenth resulted in the break up of the old estates and a surfeit of country houses on the then unfashionable Downs. We shall see that most of the houses did not fare well.
Dr Sue Berry FSA
Sue had a long teaching career which including a spell in a school for partially hearing children where it was a delight to see teenagers who would not have thrived in large classes and big school flourish, passing state exams, and moving on to college or to work. A spell in a teacher’s training college merged with a polytechnic which became a university gave ended in a Business School where she taught tourism studies, ran consultancies, and became involved with the National Trust, for which she chaired a finance committee. She continued with history research and publication and still publishes and lectures. The article on which her talk is based is in the Sussex Archaeological Collections for 2023 but can be downloaded along with a lot of her research from Academia.edu. Type in Sue Berry or Sue Farrant. Most of it uses Sussex as a case study and especially Brighton.