An old building and a fireback dated 1606
Hall House is listed as an eighteenth-century or earlier building. Its long two-storey form has changed over time, with brickwork at ground level, tile hanging above and later windows facing Guildford Road. Local accounts also describe soot-darkened timbers within the roof, associated with an earlier phase when a large room was heated from an open hearth.
An object once kept in the kitchen carried an even earlier date. A cast-iron fireback was marked ‘E. F. 1606’. At the top was an eagle above a crown, and below was a coat of arms with three eagles. The arms were identified with the Francis family of Staffordshire.
A fireback stood at the rear of a fireplace, protecting the wall from heat and throwing warmth back into the room. The date belongs to the iron plate itself, and its survival at Hall House added another layer to a building whose roadside history reached back well before the nineteenth century.
1757 – the turnpike road through Loxwood
In 1757 Parliament authorised a turnpike road from Alfold Bars in Surrey to St Mary’s Gate at Arundel. The road passed through Loxwood, continued over New Pound Common and New Bridge, then ran through Pulborough and Bury towards Arundel.
Turnpike roads were maintained by trustees. Travellers paid tolls at gates along the route, and the money was spent on repairs, drainage and road improvements. For Loxwood the new road concentrated carts, wagons, horses and other traffic onto a more dependable north-south route.
Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons and a member of the family that owned extensive property around Loxwood, headed the list of promoters. Hall House belonged to the Onslow estate and now stood beside an increasingly important road while the older green lane survived behind it.
1796 – John Hemmings at the Drovers Arms
The clearest eighteenth-century record of the inn comes from an Onslow family settlement of 1796. Hall House was described as ‘A Public house in Loxwood let to John Hemmings at £15 per annum.’
John Hemmings had the lease for the inn at a time when the turnpike was carrying regular traffic through the village. The Drovers Arms served a road used by local farmers, carriers, tradesmen, travellers and livestock. An inn could provide ale and meals, accommodation, stabling and space for horses, while the surrounding ground offered room for the movement of animals and carts.
The name Cattle Drovers Arms remained attached to the property in local memory. Its location suited that trade: the older route passed behind the house and the turnpike now ran through the village beside it.
The inn moves to the river crossing
Around the end of the eighteenth century the centre of the village inn trade moved south to the river crossing. A second Onslow property there became the Onslow Arms, standing beside the turnpike near the bridge and toll house.
The move placed the inn directly on the developing transport route through the valley. The Wey and Arun Junction Canal followed soon afterwards, bringing canal construction and then barge traffic through the same area. The Onslow Arms is named in the Wey and Arun Junction Canal Act of 1813, by which time Hall House had ceased trading as the village inn.
Hall House then entered a different period. The old public rooms became domestic space, and the property developed into a house with a small agricultural holding. The former Drovers Arms remained beside the road while the Onslow Arms took over the public-house trade near the river.
1823 – the Hemming name and the turnpike
The Hemming name remained connected with Loxwood’s road system. In September 1823 the Sussex Advertiser carried a notice for the annual meeting of the trustees of the Alfold Bars and Newbridge turnpike road. The meeting was to be held at the Three Crowns Inn in Wisborough Green.
The notice was signed ‘John Hemming, Jun., Loxwood, Clerk to the Trustees.’ The clerk handled the formal business of the turnpike trust, including notices and meetings for the road that ran through Loxwood. The entry belongs to the same road history that had shaped Hall House during its years as an inn.
Hall House Farm and Elizabeth Carter’s school
By the later nineteenth century Hall House was listed as a small farm as well as a home. The 1881 census records John Ovington, aged forty-seven, as the head of the household and a farmer of ten acres. His sister Jane Ovington, aged forty-two, kept house.
Their lodger was Elizabeth Carter, aged fifty-six, born at Bramley in Surrey. Her occupation was recorded as school mistress. Elizabeth had already been living in Loxwood by the 1871 census, and by 1881 her work brought a small school into Hall House.
A school run from a private house was commonly known as a dame school. Children could be taught reading, writing, simple arithmetic and sewing in a domestic room, usually for a small weekly payment. Hall House therefore combined several parts of village life under one roof: John Ovington worked the ten-acre holding, Jane managed the household and Elizabeth Carter taught local children.
The arrangement suited a period before education in rural villages had taken its later institutional form. A former inn had become farmhouse, home and school.
1914 – the old inn sign still survived
In 1914 John Charles Buckwell, a Brighton solicitor published ‘Stories of Loxwood’ in the Sussex Archaeological Collections. He described Hall House as a farmhouse and recorded one striking survival from its inn years.
An iron arm still projected from the back of the building. It had once carried the swinging inn sign. The bracket stood beside the old green lane, keeping a visible link with the years when travellers approached Hall House from that side.
Buckwell also described the 1606 fireback in the kitchen and the green lane behind the property. His account caught Hall House at the beginning of the twentieth century with three parts of its older history still visible together: the former inn building, the old road and the iron fitting for the signboard.
Hall House and the Dependant Brethren
Around 1920 Hall House and its agricultural ground became part of the property held by Aylward, Smith & Co, the company associated with Loxwood’s Dependant Brethren. The Brethren, commonly called the Cokelers, already operated the Combination Stores beside the village pond and held farms, houses and other property around Loxwood.
Hall House was used as cottages during this period, while the agricultural holding became known as Hall Hurst Farm. The farm buildings remained part of the roadside scene into the mid-twentieth century, when photographs show barns, yards and hedged boundaries around the property.
The purchase brought Hall House into the same network as other Dependant properties in the village. Members worked in farming, shopkeeping, baking, delivery work and village trades, and the company’s farms supplied employment and produce alongside the Combination Stores.
Hall Hurst Farm and the twentieth century
Hall Hurst Farm continued beside Hall House through the middle decades of the twentieth century. Photographs from around 1960 record a very different Guildford Road from the one known to John Hemmings in 1796: motor cars had replaced most horse traffic, road markings crossed the former turnpike, and the farm buildings still stood beside the old house.
Aylward, Smith & Co sold the Hall House property in 1961. The sale brought the Dependant period to an end after about four decades of company ownership. Hall House continued as separate homes, while the surrounding farm property changed with later development.
The building was added to the statutory list at Grade II in 1985. The listing records Nos 1 and 2 Hall House and identifies the structure as an eighteenth-century or earlier former inn.
From Drovers Arms to Hall House
Hall House has carried several lives within the same long building. The eighteenth-century public house served the road and its drovers; the nineteenth-century household combined a ten-acre farm with Elizabeth Carter’s small school; the twentieth century brought the Dependant Brethren and Hall Hurst Farm.
The ancient lane behind the house remains the strongest physical clue to the first of those stories. It runs past the side from which the inn sign once projected, along the route used before the turnpike established Guildford Road as the main way through Loxwood.
