The Middy March 4 1999

Come into the garden!

Stroll down the Lanes in Brighton and you will see a treasure trove of Art Deco furniture and memorabilia. Travel a short distance north into mid Sussex territory and you will find the ideal place to display your bric-a-brac.

For nestling close to the Downs is a “Pioneer Garden City” of the 1930s – 

“The deliberate and careful creation of the first beginnings of the modern stirring of heart which makes a man cry out against crowded, monotonous towns.”  

This was how the Hassocks Homes Estate was described in the Middy in 1936.  Advertisements for the new houses targeted city dwellers, urging them to seek the good life in the countryside.

Built partially on the site of the former Orchard Tea Gardens, the estate was loosely based on Ebenezer Howard's concept of the ‘garden city’ which combined the advantages of both town and country.

Howard’s influential ideas for self-financing communities sited in open countryside would, it was hoped, attract people from overcrowded cities and stem the tide of rural de-population.

Howard's ideas, published in his book ‘Tomorrow’ in 1898, found expression in the first garden city at Letchworth.

The Hassocks Homes Estate was built as a dormitory community near the railway and represented the adoption of Howard's principles on a more limited scale.

The development reflected the interwar housing boom, spurred on by the electrification of the London Brighton line in 1933 and greater mobility in the labour market as workers moved to the more prosperous south in search of work.

The estate, built around Grand Avenue, reflect the architectural trends of the period for wide avenues, well designed housing and ample gardens.

The houses, with gardens averaging one sixth of an acre, attracted busloads of prospective buyers from Brighton – lured by electric lighting and other mod cons.

The kitchens were described in the Middy as “a veritable housewives paradise”. Instead of dark basement sculleries there were bright tiled walls, built-in sinks and electric cookers.

John Power and his family were the first occupants of number 33 Grand Avenue in 1937– a detached three bedroom property with two reception rooms and an integral garage.

John recalls: “The property cost my father £850.00 freehold, which included electrical fittings – very Art Deco, and the then innovative provision of an electric cooker, a mottled grey cast-iron affair, built like a battleship, and which took nearly as long to heat up!”

The new properties had steel window frames, central heating, a domestic hot water system, comprising a solid fuel boiler, and galvanised iron tank and pipe into the bath, basin and sink.

All this in an era when many Victorian homes still had a single cold water tap, outside lavatories and gas or oil lamps.

Prices started from around £500 freehold for a two bedroom bungalow and were within the grasp of skilled workers swelling the ranks of the burgeoning middle classes.

All the houses were of a similar architectural style which kept their prices at affordable rates. By contrast, some of the detached houses erected in the 1920s and 30s in Clayton Avenue and Hurst Road show their individuality with mock Tudor timbers, leaded windows, wood panelling and gables.

The new houses were beyond the means of farm labourers, gradually turfed off the land by increased mechanisation.

Generations of labourers who have lived in tied farm cottages were forced to look for work and cheap housing in the towns.

Families on low incomes relied on the new council housing, typically erected in ribbon developments on the outskirts of villages where land was cheap.

In the case of Hassocks, the first council estates were built in London Road, and Lodge Lane, Keymer in 1922 – some distance away from the heart of village life.

By the end of the 1930s well over 600 new houses had been erected on the Hassocks Homes Estate and the opening of the Studio Cinema by Sir William Campion in 1938 did more than anything else to put Hassocks firmly on the map.

Run by the Fletcher-Barnett syndicate, the cinema took just 15 weeks to build on the site where Budgens now stands.

Village resident Horace Broad quipped at a dinner to launch the cinema: “Take your wife along or if she won't go take some somebody else's wife. It all cements good fellowship”.

John Power recalls: “I remember coming home by train from school in Brighton on winter evenings and seeing the red and green neon lights reflected in the window of the shops. To a ten year old, Las Vegas had come to Sussex.”

Cinema-goers could wallow in the success of film stars from their own parishes. Donald Sinden held from Ditchling, Paul Schofield from Handcross, and Dirk Bogarde’s parents resided at Hillside Cottage, Clayton in the late 1940s.

Renamed the Orion in 1947 the cinema was demolished at the end of the nineteen sixties to make way for the new Orion shopping arcade.

Hassocks continue to expand until the end of the 1970s when large-scale building work virtually ceased.

In 1900, Hassocks had been little more than a railway station in the parishes of Clayton and Keymer. By the end of the 1970s, the combined population exceeded 5,000 – nearly a fivefold increase.

The byproduct of such rapid growth was the erosion of the Sussex accent and the broadening of people's horizons.

Better housing combined with public broadcasting and the popularity of the cinema played their part in widening people’s expectations.

Working-class girls began to look beyond the confines of domestic service for work, and by the late 1930s, the Downs Domestic Bureau in Station Approach was placing prominent ads in the Middy urgently seeking general servants, cooks and parlourmaid.

Today the houses in Grand Avenue retain much of their character. Walk down the Avenue and across the High Street and you will see a reminder of a much earlier age – Parklands Road with its neat rows of terrace Victorian cottages built for the railway workers who constructed Clayton tunnel.

Parklands was nicknamed ‘Incubator alley’ in Edwardian times because of all the children who played in the street.

At the end of the Great War, ‘Incubator Alley’ was silent. Villager Emmie Combridge recalls: “It was as if every boy in the road had gone – boys who had just left school. There were very few left.”

The old way of life disappeared with a lost generation in Flanders.

The Hassocks Homes Estate breathed new life into the community and helped to fulfil Lloyd George's wish to make Britain a land fit for heroes to live in.