From the ford to the turnpike
Before a bridge crossed the River Lox, the route through this part of Loxwood used a ford about twenty yards east of the present bridge, the far side of the Onslow Arms. From the ford the older road entered Nep Lane and climbed towards the Rudgwick road, leaving the river on a different line from the current High Street.
The Wisborough Green General Register records an unusual baptism in March 1568 ‘at loxwood brydge’, while other entries in the same register simply name Loxwood. The reason for choosing the bridge as the place of baptism is not stated, but the entry has been taken locally as a possible indication that the crossing had recently been built, and about 1568 is used as the working date for the first Loxwood Bridge; Saxton’s county map does not mark the bridge, whereas Norden’s map of 1595 and Speed’s map of 1610 do.
The same period is important in the development of the road northwards from the river. The building now known as the Onslow Arms is believed to have been constructed as a farmhouse around this time, with the new bridge providing direct access from the south; Henry Napper writing in 1883 also placed the removal of a cottage from Baldwins to ground beside Loxwood Chapel in 1568. That building is believed to be the frame of Willetts. After the bridge was constructed a more direct road developed uphill towards the chapel past existing buildings such as the Box Cottage range, with later buildings then adding to the roadside settlement.
Parliament placed this route on a different footing in 1757 by authorising a turnpike from Stoke-next-Guildford and Dapdune Wharf through Shalford, Bramley, Alfold and Loxwood towards Pulborough, Bury and Arundel. Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons and a member of the family with extensive property in Loxwood, headed the promoters named by John Charles Buckwell, although the long scheme proved too ambitious for the traffic available and was progressively reduced until the Alfold Bars and Newbridge Trust was left with about five miles and five furlongs of road and a single tollgate at Loxwood.
The Gate stood immediately north of the River Lox bridge, with Toll Gate Cottage on the east side of the road. Brian Austen’s study of the turnpike describes the cottage as a substantial three-bay, two-storey brick house with a hipped tiled roof, two large chimney stacks and small side windows from which the keeper could watch approaching traffic, and he suggested that its size may indicate an existing house acquired by the trustees rather than a small building erected solely for toll collection.
The tolls affected carts, riders and livestock using the road. A carriage drawn by six horses paid 1s 6d, one drawn by four horses paid 1s, a two-horse carriage paid 9d and a one-horse carriage 6d, while a horse was charged 2d, cattle 1d each and sheep 2d for a score of twenty; the Act also required statute labour for road maintenance until the nineteenth-century highway system replaced that obligation.
Direct employment of gatekeepers brought repeated problems for the trustees, although the wage itself was small at only 4s a week in the early nineteenth century. James Puttock was dismissed in July 1821 for ‘fraud and neglect of office’ before spending a short period in Petworth House of Correction; the wage rose to 5s in 1826, but Henry Reeves was removed for the same reason three years later, and the trustees increasingly used the alternative system of farming the tolls to a private collector for an agreed annual payment.
The sums paid for the right to collect at Loxwood varied with expectations of traffic. Henry Cuddington of Shoreham took the tolls for £121 in 1808 but forfeited the arrangement the following April after failing to comply with the payment terms, while later leases ranged from £83 5s in 1838 to as much as £120 10s; Austen calculated a twenty-one-year average of £99 15s 6d and noted that the income was barely enough to maintain the road.
The river crossing itself was rebuilt in brick in 1791, and the date remains on the western face of the bridge. The carriageway narrowed at the crossing and then approached the tollgate beside the cottage, so carts, wagons, horses, cattle, sheep and pedestrians all passed through the same short section of road before continuing uphill towards the inn and the centre of Loxwood. The date is also synonymous with Samuel Hieronymus Grimm arriving in the village in June of that year and painting Loxwood Place, Loxwood Chapel and Drungewick, the first ‘window’ into ancient Loxwood and possibly connected to the bridge being completed.
The canal, the wharf and the fields opposite the Onslow Arms
Parliament authorised the Wey and Arun Junction Canal in 1813, and the navigation opened through Loxwood in 1816, cutting across the turnpike immediately uphill from the Onslow Arms. A road bridge carried the High Street over the canal, and although no photograph of that structure has been found, the bridge is treated as hump-backed because comparable road crossings on the Wey and Arun used that form; a traveller coming downhill from the village would have crossed the canal before reaching the inn, Toll Gate Cottage and the River Lox bridge.
From 6 April 1843 the turnpike trustees took no toll from a horse going to or returning from Loxwood Wharf with chalk or lime, while gravel and flints needed for the road were also brought through the wharves at Loxwood and Newbridge, including gravel carried by barge from Littlehampton.
The tollgate itself changed ownership before the turnpike trust ended. In September 1867 the ‘Loxwood Turnpike Gate-House and Garden’ was advertised for auction at the Onslow Arms, and a West Sussex Record Office conveyance dated 30 October records the trustees selling the cottage for £84 to James Overington of Loxwood, described as a labourer; the statutory powers of the Alfold Bars and Newbridge Trust continued until 1 November 1876.
Canal traffic was already declining sharply when the tollhouse was sold. The 1871 census records sixty-one-year-old James Cox at Chapel Green as a bargeman, with his eighteen-year-old son William in the household, but the local canal chronology gives 1869 as the last year in which a boat passed beneath the old Loxwood road bridge and formal abandonment followed in 1871 after railway competition had taken much of the carrying trade.
The fields and open ground around the Onslow Arms were traditionally the place for Loxwood’s fairs, agricultural shows and large village gatherings. John Buckwell author of Stories of Loxwood recorded the annual fair on the second Thursday in May, having previously been held on the fixed date of 6 May until 1869. Loxwood History has records of agricultural shows in the fields opposite the Onslow Arms since 1788.
A Sussex Agricultural Express report headed ‘Loxwood Agricultural Show’ records a prize given by the Reverend John Davies Trigge, Loxwood’s first vicar, for the best dairy cow exhibited by a tenant farmer in the Loxwood district; James Penfold won that class, and the same report continued with horse classes.
An 1883 newspaper report records the Onslow Arms Benefit Society holding its anniversary after a church service preached by the Reverend Trigge, after which the members walked to a meadow close to the inn where a large tent had been erected; Thomas Knowles, then associated with the Onslow Arms, supplied the dinner, the Alfold Brass Band played under John Tate, and the society was reported to have 121 members.
John Arthur Garton’s annual visits brought another large crowd through the same stretch of road. In 1883 his party travelled from Rudgwick Station with the Alfold band, local men removed the horses and drew his carriage through Loxwood, and after passing Garton House, where the newspaper noted that he had been born in 1829, the procession continued downhill over the canal bridge to the Onslow Arms; five years later the West Surrey Times recorded the schoolchildren assembling at the school and being led by the band to the field opposite the inn, where food had been prepared for the village gathering.
A dispute reported by the Sussex Agricultural Express on 15 October 1889 gives unusually detailed evidence for the open ground opposite the Onslow Arms. Thomas Knowles had occupied waste land adjoining the main road, placed a railway carriage on it and later built a house there, while the case heard evidence that people bringing roundabouts and other attractions to the club and fair had paid for the use of the ground; Henry Frederick Napper of Lakers Lodge told the court that, before Knowles enclosed it, the same land had been used as a wharf for goods, and that both he and his father had placed hoops there while the canal was working.
The Loxwood Show continued beyond the nineteenth century, although the showground was not always on the same plot. Maurice Botting, the Brewhurst miller and farmer, was remembered at his death in 1916 as chairman of the Loxwood Show committee, while later accounts place the twentieth-century show in the field behind Lakers Lodge, with sales of fat and store cattle, sheep and pigs, classes for carthorses, hunters and hacks, chestnut-wattle livestock pens, a gymkhana and a funfair held in early May; another recollection described Loxwood Fair as an important spring fair at which farmers could sell young stock kept in yards over the winter without making a long drive to market.
The original canal bridge was removed in the opening years of the twentieth century, probably around 1900-05. The Ordnance Survey map published in 1898 still shows the canal crossing the High Street, whereas the later revision published in 1914 shows the waterway interrupted at the road, placing the change between the two mapped surveys.
Toll Gate Cottage remained after both the turnpike and the canal bridge had gone. A photograph from about 1904 shows the Onslow Arms and the cottage close to the carriageway, later photographs from the 1930s record the same narrow approach from the river, and the South of England Advertiser printed a photograph on 13 July 1933 under the heading ‘Loxwood Tollgate House’.
The River Lox bridge in the motor age
The 1791 River Lox bridge continued to carry the High Street as motor traffic increased, although the road still narrowed sharply beside Toll Gate Cottage and bent past the Onslow Arms. Early twentieth-century photographs record brick parapets, the cottage close to the eastern edge of the carriageway and a restricted view through the bend, leaving little room when two vehicles met near the bridge.
By 1955 the problem had reached the Parish Council and the local press. The West Sussex County Times reported on 1 April that the council was particularly concerned about children walking to school and the restricted view at Loxwood Bridge, where two vehicles had recently collided, and it proposed asking for a ‘Dangerous Corner’ or ‘Narrow Bridge’ warning sign.
A fatal accident followed in 1957 when Thomas William Noakes, aged fifty-one and living at Willow Brook, North Heath, Pulborough, died after his motorcycle crashed at Loxwood Bridge. At the inquest the coroner said that Noakes appeared to have taken the acute corner too fast, after which the motorcycle footrest touched the road and the machine went out of control; later that summer the West Sussex County Times reported that campaigning by the Loxwood and Alfold Women’s Institute had resulted in the word ‘Slow’ being painted on the carriageway.
Pressure for a permanent alteration continued through 1958, when a petition signed by ninety-three residents called for improvements and drew particular attention to children using the bridge on their route to school. A widening scheme estimated at about £15,000 was reported later that year, but the work did not proceed immediately, and West Sussex County Council was still inviting tenders in September 1961 for brick-faced mass-concrete walls, a thirty-foot prestressed-concrete bridge deck and the realignment and regrading of about 400 yards of approach road.
The scheme was carried out in 1963 and altered both the crossing and its approaches. Toll Gate Cottage was demolished as the road was widened, the eastern side of the river bridge was rebuilt on the enlarged alignment and the approaches were regraded, while archive photographs taken in May record the works and a photograph dated 31 May shows Loxwood schoolchildren standing beside the construction site; the western brick face still carries the 1791 date.
The canal returns beneath the High Street
When restoration of the Wey and Arun reached the High Street, the former hump-backed road profile could not be recreated under modern highway requirements, so the carriageway remained close to its existing level while the canal was taken lower beneath it. About 400 metres of navigation had to be altered to obtain sufficient headroom for boats at the new crossing.
The canal bed was lowered by about 4.5 feet, or 1.4 metres, and the banks were supported with piling. Brewhurst Lock was reconstructed with its fall reduced from about eight feet to two feet, while the new Loxwood Lock north of the road took the remaining six-foot difference in level and a winding hole was formed so that boats could turn within the restored section.
Because the new bridge crosses the canal on a skew, the opening beneath the B2133 forms a tunnel about 23 metres, or 25 yards, long. The towpath continues beside the water through the same opening for pedestrians, while the restricted headroom means that horse riders using the bridleway cross the road at surface level rather than passing beneath it.
The road bridge, canal lowering, Loxwood Lock and associated works cost about £1.9 million, with the scheme financed through charitable support for the Wey and Arun Canal Trust. The first boat passed beneath the High Street bridge and entered Loxwood Lock in April 2009.
