The seventeenth century
Historic England dates the core of Hilltop Cottage and Alameda to the seventeenth century or earlier. The building is timber framed, with painted brick infill, fishscale tile hanging on the upper floor and a tiled roof.
Local tradition remembered the cottage as an early coaching inn with a large stone mounting block beside in the front garden. The ancient block had a foot hole cut into the face and was used by riders, to mount horses. The block was moved to the grass area outside Church Cottage some years ago. Another memory is of the old petrol pump working at the front of the house, this is depicted in some of the old postcards.
The nineteenth-century maps record the development of the property. The old cottage originally stood back from the unmade track, with a wooden grocery building at the front left-hand side and an orchard and farmland around the property. The brick shop wing was added later in the nineteenth century and is identified in the statutory listing as The Old Stores.
James Puttock’s grocery
The 1841 census records James Puttock as the grocer using the wooden building. By January 1851 the business was in financial difficulty. A notice in the Sussex Advertiser recorded that James Puttock, otherwise Bowley, of Loxwood, shopkeeper, had assigned his real estate, personal estate and effects to Henry Botting of Loxwood, miller, and Thomas Elliott of Love’s Farm, farmer, as trustees for his creditors. The indenture was dated 25 January 1851 and executed by James Puttock, Henry Botting and Thomas Elliott on 30 January.
The grocery continued and in 1861 John Botting was recorded here as a miller, grocer and dealer.
Edward Pannell and the Post Office
The 1871 census records Edward Pannell, aged twenty-seven, at High House as a grocer. During Edward Pannell’s occupation the brick shop extension was built beside the old cottage and the Post Office was established at Hill Top. The first Ordnance Survey map, surveyed in the 1870s, marks the Post Office here.
In January 1873 Edward’s mother Jane Pannell died at Loxwood in sad circumstances. The inquest heard that Edward Pannell lived a short distance from his parents and was called to the house after his mother’s body had been discovered. Edward Pannell was still listed as the Loxwood grocer in 1876 but in 1880 he directed the sale of a substantial group of Loxwood property, including meadow and orchard land, brick houses and cottages in and around Chapel Road, now Station Road.
John Elliott takes over the store
John Elliott was born at Plaistow. The 1871 census records him at Great Bookham in Surrey, where he was working as a grocer’s assistant in a general shop. By the 1881 census John Elliott had settled in Loxwood and was the grocer at Hill Top, his brother Edwin was with him, and Elizabeth Gadd kept house.
John Elliott married Alice Olivia Rapley in 1883. Their daughter Florence Elliott was born in Loxwood in 1885. Sadly, Alice died in 1887, leaving John with their young daughter and the business to run. The 1891 census records John Elliott, aged forty-three, as a widowed grocer on Loxwood Street. Florence Elliott, aged six, was at home. Kate Botting, aged twenty-six, was the housekeeper. James Conway, aged twenty-five, and Archibald Botting, aged sixteen, were grocer’s assistants, while Jane Puttock, aged thirteen, was the general servant.
Trades along the High Street and Cherry Villa
The census returns for the neighbouring cottages record the mixture of trades found along this part of High Street. Shoemaking, butchery, grocery work, lath cleaving, carting, baking, laundry work and harness-making were all represented among the households between Hill Top and the lower part of the village. The older houses were often divided into small dwellings occupied by working families.
Cherry Villa belonged to this older group of roadside houses. It has an early timber-framed core, and later sales particulars record exposed wall and ceiling beams, flagstone flooring and an old timber door. The building stood just beyond a wooden saddler’s and harness-maker’s shop, which was between Hill Top and Cherry Villa.
1891 – John Elliott buys the neighbouring properties
On 29 April 1891 Henry Hemming, the local land agent, offered a group of Loxwood freeholds for sale at the King’s Head Hotel in Horsham. The sale came from the estate of the Loxwood butcher, the late John Sopp and included a substantial run of property along this part of High Street. John Elliott bought the first lot for £450.
The lot included Cherry Villa and the separate saddler’s and harness-maker’s premises, Charles Peacock was the saddler and harness-maker.
On 5 July 1898 the Sussex Agricultural Express listed John Elliott of Loxwood, grocer, among the nominees for the Wisborough Green School Board.
1899 – the Post Office moves and Cherry Cottage is built
A newspaper notice in 1899 records that John Elliott relinquished the post of sub-postmaster after holding it for a number of years. John Foster Dennis received the appointment, and the new Post Office opened for money orders and savings-bank business on 1 June at the shop opposite the village pond, beside Hall House.
Hill Top continued as a grocery and general store. With the Post Office moved and the neighbouring harness-maker’s premises in his ownership, John Elliott removed the old wooden building and built Cherry Cottage on the site around 1900.
John Elliott and Kate Botting married in 1899. Kate Elliott had grown up in the grocery and drapery trade. The 1881 census records sixteen-year-old Kate Botting as a draper’s assistant in her father George Botting’s shop at East Street, Billingshurst, where George Botting was a draper and grocer employing three men and a boy. By the 1891 census Kate Botting was housekeeper in John Elliott’s household.
Inside John Elliott’s general store
The 1901 census records John Elliott as a fifty-three-year-old grocer with his wife Kate Elliott, their young daughters Nellie Elliott and Jessie Elliott, John Elliott’s sister Fanny Elliott, grocer’s assistant Frederick Lusted and domestic servant Mabel Wooldridge.
A photograph taken around 1909 shows the old cottage beside the shop. The shop has a broad glazed frontage filled with goods, with figures standing at the doorway beneath the Elliott name.
A West Sussex Gazette advertisement of 24 March 1910 records one part of the trade. Under the business name ‘J. and E. Elliott’, the store advertised G. S. Constable & Sons’ Arundel mild and bitter ales, stout and porter in casks of 4½, 6, 9 or 18 gallons. Prices began at tenpence a gallon, and a fine-flavour bitter ale was offered at one shilling a gallon. By 1911 the census described John Elliott as a ‘grocer and draper and general stores’. Florence Elliott worked as an assistant in the shop, while Nellie Elliott and Jessie Elliott were at school. Catherine Botting and Mabel Botting were housekeepers and May Bristow was a domestic servant.
A photograph from about 1915 shows the shop windows packed with stock and three men in white aprons at the frontage. Boxes, sacks and advertising boards stand outside, together with a Gilbey’s Wines and Spirits sign.
John Austin Harris and The Stores
By 1921 John Austin Harris was running Hill Top. His census return gives his occupation as grocer, baker and general stores and records him as an employer working at home. His daughters Doris Irene Harris, aged seventeen, and Constance Queenie Harris, aged fifteen, lived with him; Doris Irene Harris carried out home duties and Constance Queenie Harris was in full-time education. The household occupied five rooms.
The business became widely remembered simply as ‘The Stores’. Connie Bayley, writing about her memories of Loxwood recalled John Austin Harris delivering groceries by horse and cart and remembered the shop’s bow-fronted window. A photograph from the mid-1920s shows a horse and cart on the road while an upright petrol pump stands beside the shop. Connie Bayley also remembered the large mounting stone in Alameda’s front garden.
Early Loxwood telephone subscriber lists give Hill Top Stores the number Loxwood 4.
Cherry Cottage and Cherry Villa
The 1921 census names Cherry Cottage and Cherry Villa clearly. At Cherry Cottage, Henry Cooper, aged forty-seven, worked as an estate labourer at Lakers Lodge and lived with his wife Ann Cooper, aged forty-nine, and their son Ernest Leslie Cooper, aged eighteen, an engineer. Harriet Venn, a seventy-six-year-old widow, was visiting on census night. The cottage contained five rooms.
Cherry Villa was also recorded as a five-room house. Edward Robert Bays, aged forty-eight, lived there with his wife Elizabeth Florence Bays. Edward Robert Bays was a police constable employed by West Sussex County Council and based at Loxwood.
John Elliott 1937
John Elliott died at Cranleigh in 1937, aged eighty-eight. His obituary in the West Sussex Gazette on 28 January recalled that he had carried on the Loxwood grocery business for many years and had retired about twenty-three years earlier, around 1914.
The 1939 Register taken just before WW2 records Mary Harris at ‘The Store’ with Doris Irene Harris and Constance Queenie Harris; Constance Queenie Harris was working as a schoolteacher.
1944 – Hill Top joins Aylward, Smith & Co
For decades Hill Top Stores traded independently while the Dependant Brethren developed the Combination Stores beside the village pond. In 1944 Aylward, Smith & Co, the company associated with the Dependants, acquired Hill Top Stores.
Grocery trading later gave way to Loxwood Antiques. Newspaper advertisements in 1948 offered ‘Antiques and Curios’ from the premises, including Christmas presents during November and December.
A photograph from around 1950 shows the old cottage and shop block beside a road carrying motor traffic and marked with a white centre line. The petrol pump remained beside the frontage.
From Loxwood Antiques to The Old Stores
Loxwood Antiques continued in the former store premises through the later twentieth century. In February 1993 Chichester District Council granted permission for the ground-floor area last used as a retail antiques shop to become residential accommodation. The commercial wing became The Old Stores.
Historic England identifies the seventeenth-century or earlier timber-framed cottage and the nineteenth-century shop wing as one Grade II listed group. Modern sales particulars record exposed oak joinery and an old smoke chamber in the cottage.
The original shop safe survives inside Hilltop Cottage.
