Medieval occupation beneath the farmyard
The earliest dated evidence comes from archaeological work carried out before redevelopment in the 1990s. An evaluation in 1996 found activity from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. After Chichester District Council granted permission in 1997 for demolition of later farm buildings and redevelopment, archaeologists opened seven trenches across the site.
Simon Stevens, the archaeologist who published the excavation in Sussex Archaeological Collections in 2006, recorded 132 pottery sherds from eleven contexts. The medieval pottery was concentrated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with a smaller quantity from the fifteenth. Most came from cooking vessels, while enough fine jug fragments survived for pottery specialist Luke Barber to describe the site as relatively high status.
Post-holes in the excavation contained medieval pottery, oyster shell and ironworking waste. A later ditch produced residual medieval pottery and fragments of glazed ridge and roof tile. Stevens considered the post-holes capable of belonging to part of a medieval structure, perhaps an outbuilding, while unabraded pottery indicated domestic activity close by.
Ironworking had also taken place on or near the farmstead. Thirty-four pieces of slag represented both bloomery smelting and forging. The excavation report concluded that small-scale smelting and secondary working occurred on the site or close enough for the waste products to be deposited there.
The old house and the moat
John Charles Buckwell, a Brighton solicitor and member of the Sussex Archaeological Society who published ‘Stories of Loxwood’ in 1914, knew the farmhouse before the fire. He described its front as Tudor in character but drew attention to the rear, where upright oak posts stood fairly close together with plaster between them. He placed that earlier frame in the opening part of the fifteenth century.
Buckwell also recorded visible remains of a moat on the west and south sides of Loxwood Place. Waller Stevens, a former owner, told him that he had traced a continuation south and east of Willetts on the opposite side of the road and believed the watercourse had once enclosed both properties. A 1974 survey in the Loxwood archive still marked the earthwork beside Loxwood Place.
The 1997 excavation was designed partly to investigate the moat, but the trenches did not intersect it. Simon Stevens set out two possibilities: the enclosed site may have been larger than the development area, perhaps extending across the road, or the surviving earthwork may have belonged to an incomplete moat. The Chichester District Historic Environment Record continues to identify Loxwood Place as a homestead moat and house.
A seventeenth-century barn and an eighteenth-century Granary
The building appraisal undertaken with the 1997 archaeological project recorded a seventeenth-century barn in the farm complex containing reused fourteenth-century timbers. The medieval material in that barn supported the excavation evidence for a substantial earlier building at Loxwood Place.
The surviving listed Granary has a different date. Historic England’s National Heritage List records it as a mid-eighteenth-century timber-framed granary and listed it at Grade II on 23 April 1996, list entry 1269014. The seventeenth-century barn with reused medieval timbers and the surviving Granary belong to separate phases of the old farmstead.
Historic England describes the Granary as a rectangular building of three by four bays. Weatherboarding covers the timber frame, which is lifted above the ground on red-brick piers capped by circular stones. A half-hipped tiled roof covers the store, with wooden steps rising to a plank door at one end. The doorway was refurbished during the twentieth century, while its old pintle hinges were retained.
At the opposite end, a casement window was inserted into the gable. Inside, boarded walls enclose the storage space and the roof uses queen posts with through purlins and an inserted ridgepiece. The raised floor kept harvested grain clear of damp ground, while the projecting circular stones above the piers impeded rats and mice trying to reach the store.
Samuel Hieronymus Grimm records Loxwood Place in 1791
In June 1791 the topographical artist Samuel Hieronymus Grimm drew Loxwood Place. His view records the farmhouse before nineteenth-century alterations, standing behind a working yard with substantial agricultural buildings, fences and cultivated ground. The drawing preserves the farmstead at a date when the Granary was already part of the eighteenth-century agricultural landscape.
The Onslow family then held extensive property around Loxwood and Drungewick. A marriage settlement made in 1796 for General Denzil Onslow and Ann Catherine Petre described Loxwood Place with its barns, stables, outbuildings, courts, yards, gardens, orchards, farms, meadows, pastures and feedings. The holding contained about 180 acres in Loxwood and neighbouring Alfold.
The canal cuts across the farm access
Loxwood Place still belonged to General Denzil Onslow when Parliament authorised the Wey and Arun Junction Canal in 1813. John Hemmings occupied the property, and the house and garden were protected from compulsory acquisition under the canal legislation.
Canal construction cut across the approach to the farm. A draft agreement dated 18 May 1817 records John King of Loxwood, the Wey and Arun Junction Canal Company and Denzil Onslow arranging another route. King agreed to sell land called Lower Nicholes so that a new access could be made to Loxwood Place.
John King and the 1830 enclosure
By the enclosure of Loxwood Common in 1830 the ownership had changed. John King held Loxwood Place, and the enclosure award allotted him additional frontage land in respect of the property.
Loxwood Place for sale in 1848
An 1848 advertisement offered the Manors of Drungewick and Loxwood with a large freehold estate of about 1,400 acres around Wisborough Green, Alfold and Rudgwick. Drungewick House was occupied by James Wood, while Loxwood Place was described as another desirable residence in the tenure of Mr Chapman, surrounded by productive arable, pasture and meadow land.
William Churchman’s 300-acre farm
The census taken on 30 March 1851 puts figures against the working farm. William Churchman, aged fifty-three, lived at Loxwood Place with his wife Catherine and their family. He described himself as a farmer of 300 acres employing fourteen labourers.
Their adult son William was also a farmer. At twenty-eight he worked 120 acres and employed three labourers. The household also included farm labourers and general servants.
Penny Readings at Loxwood Place
The Churchmans also opened the house for village entertainment. On 11 February 1868 the Chichester Express and West Sussex Journal reported the second of a series of Penny Readings at Loxwood Place. For a penny admission, audiences could hear readings, recitations, music and comic pieces in an evening programme.
The room at Loxwood Place was crowded. Songs and readings followed one another through the evening, and the report ended by thanking Mr and Mrs Churchman for allowing the gathering to use the house.
The Manor of Loxwood and 174 acres in 1879
A much larger property sale followed after the death of Denzil Onslow. The Surrey Gazette and West Surrey Times advertised about 1,437 acres of manorial estate in June 1879. Lot 2 was headed ‘The Manor of Loxwood, with Loxwood Place Farmhouse and Homestead’ and contained 174 acres in a ring fence. The sale particulars also drew attention to the elevated ground as a possible mansion site overlooking the valley.
John Arthur Garton’s village festivals
John Arthur Garton had been born at Garton House in Loxwood in 1829, the son of master butcher Josiah Garton. In 1839, when John was ten, the family moved to Tooley Street near London Bridge, where Josiah’s butchery gained access to the expanding London market. Garton returned to his native village in 1879 for the first of the celebrations later remembered as the Garton Festival.
John Arthur Garton followed the family trade, became a successful London butcher and held senior office in the Worshipful Company of Butchers. In July 1879, aged fifty, he returned by train to Rudgwick with family and friends and paid for a village feast. The first celebration took place near the Onslow Arms and developed into an annual summer visit.
Loxwood Place became one of the principal settings from 1882. John and his wife Sarah stayed there as guests of Sydney Botting, and schoolchildren assembled at the house to sing. In 1883 a triumphal arch at the entrance carried the words ‘Welcome to your native village’ as Garton’s party approached from Rudgwick Station with carriages and the Alfold band.
The following day’s gathering at Loxwood Place included gifts for the children: books, cricket bats, balls, stumps and games. John Cooper, described in the newspaper as the oldest man in the village, told the gathering that he had lived in Loxwood for almost eighty years and praised the annual visits for the enjoyment they brought.
The 1889 festival marked fifty years since Garton had left Loxwood. John and Sarah again stayed with Sydney Botting, while tents spread across the fields behind Loxwood Place. Food, speeches, music and dancing continued through the day and into the evening.
The final festival came in 1893. Garton recalled the Bible he had won at Alfold Sunday School as a boy and promised money towards the proposed new Loxwood church, saying that he wanted ‘a brick in the wall’. After tea at Loxwood Place, his party returned to Rudgwick Station, where their saloon carriage was attached to the eight o’clock train for London.
John Arthur Garton died on 8 April 1894. Sarah Garton later ensured that the family contributed towards the new Church of St John the Baptist as John Garton had promised
The 1903 estate
The acreage attached to Loxwood Place had fallen by the beginning of the twentieth century. An advertisement in the London Evening Standard on 28 May 1903 offered the freehold estate with about 120 acres. The farmhouse then contained eight bedrooms, a hall, three sitting rooms and service accommodation, with gardens, orchards and modern farm buildings around it.
The advertisement described the estate as lying mainly in a ring fence and sloping towards the River Arun.
Harold Morphew opens the old house in 1913
By 1913 Harold Morphew owned Loxwood Place and was carrying out extensive alterations. Buckwell visited while the work was under way and recorded features that had been hidden behind later partitions and plaster. Morphew joined two rooms to restore the hall to a larger form and uncovered an open fireplace about ten feet wide with herringbone work at the back.
The ceiling joists across the front part of the hall showed about two feet six inches of weathering. Buckwell interpreted this as the line of an earlier recessed ground floor with the first storey projecting above it. Old oak posts appeared at the back of the hall, and another large open fireplace was uncovered in the southern drawing room, back-to-back with the hall fireplace.
Main beams in the drawing room measured about fourteen inches square. Upstairs, Buckwell saw moulded oak tie beams with Gothic braces and king-post roof work above the ceiling, together with a cupboard entered through a Gothic doorway. He also recorded an oak-and-elm staircase beneath later deal work.
The upper rooms had already been altered by inserted ceilings. Above them Buckwell found evidence that the original rooms had risen much higher into the roof, towards the collars and exposed king posts.
The Dependant Brethren at Loxwood Place
By about 1920 Loxwood Place was being farmed by Loxwood’s Dependant Brethren, commonly called the Cokelers. Their commercial affairs were managed through Aylward, Smith & Co at the Combination Stores; the community also held other farms and property around Loxwood.
A “Unique Sussex Manor House” in 1935
Loxwood Place returned to the market in 1935. The sale particulars promoted it as a ‘Unique 16th Century Sussex Manor House’ and described mellowed brick, weather-tiling, a Horsham stone slab roof, exposed oak beams and large inglenook fireplaces.
The ground floor included a lounge hall about twenty-five by twenty feet, a dining room about twenty-four by seventeen feet and a drawing room about twenty-five feet six inches by fifteen feet six inches. There were also two kitchens, a scullery, larder and dairy.
Upstairs were six bedrooms, a dressing room, two maids’ rooms and a bathroom with hot and cold water. A brick-and-tiled wash house and garage stood outside. The water supply still came from a well, while lawn, kitchen garden, orchard and paddock brought the immediate holding to about seven acres. The asking price was £4,700.
The fire of 28 June 1948
In the early hours of Monday 28 June 1948 fire broke out at Loxwood Place. The occupants were mining engineer Arthur Michael Carlos Robinson and his wife Diana, who had recently returned from West Africa. Contemporary newspapers still described their home as an old timber-and-plaster mansion.
Neighbours raised the alarm while the household was asleep. Mrs Turrell, whose husband had been caretaking at the property, escaped by jumping from a window and was injured. Village postmaster Frederick Muggeridge was among the first at the scene and later described the building as a roaring inferno in which the heat made rescue impossible.
The fire ran rapidly through the timber structure. Newspaper reports said the house was a ruin in less than two hours, and photographs taken after the blaze expose heavy oak framing amid collapsed brickwork and roof timbers.
A new farmhouse after the fire
Aylward, Smith & Co acquired the burnt-out property after the fire. Loxwood History archive notes record the purchase of the remains of the house, the Granary, a warehouse and about ten acres for £11,400. A new farmhouse was then built on the site, and photographs in the archive record the replacement building by 1950.
Archive photographs show the replacement farmhouse by 1950 as a low, broad brick building with a tiled roof. The Granary remained in the adjoining farmyard.
Loxwood Place and Pawlies Farms in 1957
On 29 March 1957 Loxwood Place and Pawlies were advertised together as two ‘Attested Dairy and Arable Farms’. The Loxwood Place farmhouse was described as recently reconstructed and modernised, with a hall, three reception rooms, three bedrooms and a bathroom. Mains electricity and water served the farms.
The advertisement also included the smallholding at Tokens Farm. Loxwood Place, Pawlies and Tokens together covered 360 acres and were offered with vacant possession, either as a whole or separately.
The 1990s redevelopment and excavation
Chichester District Council planning application 96/01836/FUL allowed demolition of later farm buildings and redevelopment during the 1990s. Archaeological work was required because an earthwork beside the farm was believed to be part of the moat, and the 1997 excavation followed after the buildings were removed.
Those trenches produced the medieval pottery, post-holes, glazed roof tile and ironworking slag that now supply the earliest firm dates for activity at Loxwood Place. Simon Stevens published the results in 2006, taking the documented history of the farmstead back into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The Granary survives
The listed Granary remains from the working farmyard beside the later development. Historic England records its half-hipped tiled roof, weatherboarded frame, boarded walls and queen-post roof, and the raised building still stands on its brick piers and circular stones. At the end reached by the wooden steps, the plank door retains the old pintle hinges noted when the building was listed on 23 April 1996.
