Introduction
In February 1833, an auction notice revealed the Sun room by room. Benjamin Underwood occupied a freehold public house with a large tap-room, parlour, bar, wash-house, cellar and four bedrooms. A newly built stable held six horses. The yard had a piggery and a well of good water, while a productive garden and a piece of rich meadow supplied the household. The annual land tax was thirteen shillings.
The notice describes an inn already equipped for travellers, horses and village trade. Guests could drink in the tap-room, meet in the parlour, stay overnight and continue their journey after the stable had fed and rested their horses. Historic England dates the main two-storey range to the seventeenth century or earlier and the single-storey north-eastern addition to the early nineteenth century. Local pub history records a Pullen family purchase in 1807, a tradition that begins the family’s long association with the house.
Beerhouses along Kirdford’s northern roads
Plaistow then belonged to the old parish of Kirdford, a territory of about twelve thousand acres stretching from the Surrey border towards Petworth and west through woodland, farms and scattered settlements. Kirdford village had its own public houses, while licensed houses also served Balls Cross, Strood Green and the roads towards Shillinglee and Ebernoe. Plaistow’s Sun stood at the chapel crossroads; the Fox served the Dunsfold Road; the Bush traded from Rickmans Lane.
Parliament widened the beer trade through the Beerhouse Act of 1830. A rate-paying householder could obtain an excise licence to sell beer and cider, and a farmhouse or cottage could open a drinking room beside its existing work. The Sun continued as a fully developed inn with bedrooms and stabling, while smaller beerhouses brought licensed trade to other parts of Plaistow.
George Pannell’s beerhouse, 1839
On 17 August 1839 the Petworth magistrates heard an assault case that began at a Plaistow beerhouse. The Brighton Gazette named George Pannell as the keeper and called his premises “one of those hot-beds of vice”. On Sunday 4 August, a man had left the house to confront Elizabeth Mills in the lane; when her father intervened, the man knocked him down twice and struck him while he lay on the ground. The bench fined the assailant £1 and costs, with one month’s imprisonment in default. The beerhouse sign and address remain unknown. George Pannell was keeping a Plaistow beerhouse two years before Henry Pullen entered the census as a brewer and retailer of beer.
The Fox: beer, grain and forty-seven acres
Two years after the Petworth case, Henry Pullen entered the 1841 census as a brewer and retailer of beer at Plaistow. Ten years later he farmed forty-seven acres and employed one man. His wife Sarah and their children lived in a household supported by agriculture, brewing and the sale of beer.
The 1861 census supplied the name: the Fox Beer Shop. Henry, aged sixty, kept the beerhouse and brewed its beer. His son Edwin worked as a miller and later appears in the history of Kirdford Mill; another son, Charles, worked as an agricultural labourer. A shoemaker lodged with the family. Sacks of grain, farm work, brewing and beer sales passed through the same household at the Fox.
The surviving name points strongly towards Fox Cottage at the Nell Ball corner. Historic England dates the cottage to the early nineteenth century, matching the period when Henry Pullen began brewing at Plaistow. The census gives the Fox name and household, while the later licensing record follows the business until its closure.
Fire, rebuilding and dinner at the Sun
The Sun changed hands as an investment in June 1849. The freehold, let for eighteen pounds a year, sold in London for five hundred pounds. Its tenant continued to serve Plaistow from the old rooms beside the chapel.
A fire badly damaged the medieval Chapel of St Thomas around 1850. Its remains were pulled down in 1854. Joseph Butler, a Chichester architect and surveyor, designed a new sandstone church with lancet windows and an open oak roof. The Bishop of Chichester consecrated Holy Trinity on 26 July 1856, and Loxwood Road moved from the north side of the church to the south during the rebuilding.
The Sun remained the familiar address through these changes. A sale notice for Plaistow Place Farm in April 1857 directed buyers to collect catalogues at the inn before the auction of livestock, implements, furniture and household goods.
Plaistow Friendly Society brought its twenty-ninth anniversary to the crossroads in July 1863. Friendly societies collected regular subscriptions and paid members during sickness, injury and bereavement. On the anniversary morning, sellers and confectioners arrived, spectators lined the street and the members formed behind the Petworth band. They entered Holy Trinity for a sermon by the Reverend John Francis Cole, vicar of Kirdford, then crossed to the Sun for dinner under the chairmanship of E. Wooldridge, a Plaistow bricklayer and society officer.
The society returned in 1865. G. Pullen, named as landlord, served what the newspaper called an excellent dinner. The society held funds of 395 pounds 10 shillings; one visitor lost a pair of shoes and five shillings during the crowded day, which ended with the national anthem.
Auctions, horses and a changing road trade
The Fox licence passed from Henry Pullen to Frederick Puttick in December 1877. By 1891 the census called the premises the Fox Inn, where Thomas Thorns lived with his wife Jane, their children, a stepdaughter and a lodger. Licensing proceedings still classed the house as a beerhouse.
The Sun’s parlour and public rooms continued to host property business. Six lots sold there for 972 pounds in August 1887, including cottages, gardens, a stable, cart shed and building land. Common House Farm and its cottages followed in 1906. Church Cottage, School Cottage, Back Lane cottages and three and a quarter acres of land came to auction at the Sun in May 1910.
Darce Pullen advertised the Sun as “Ye Old Free House” on a surviving postcard. The painted wording offered board and apartments, accommodation for motorists and cyclists, hunters for hire, riding lessons, Sussex cider and home-made wines. Darcy Ayling, a Plaistow resident whose recollections appeared in the Petworth Society Magazine in 1992, remembered Pullen as a quartermaster in the Sussex Yeomanry who kept two horses at the pub and made parsnip wine and cider there.
The Fox closes as the Bush grows
The Licensing Act of 1904 allowed licensing authorities to close houses judged surplus to local needs, with compensation paid from a levy on the licensed trade. In 1912 renewal of the Fox Inn beerhouse licence was opposed on the ground of redundancy. Compensation had been paid, and the Fox’s licensed history ended after about seventy years in the census and magistrates’ records.
On 29 October 1912, C. H. Burstow, a Horsham architect, invited builders to tender for alterations and additions to the Bush Inn. King and Barnes Limited, the Horsham brewery based at the Carfax, owned the property and paid for the work. The Bush entered the twentieth century as a brewery house just as the Fox closed.
Charles Walter Hadderton kept the Bush by 1938. He applied for permission to sell wine for consumption on or off the premises and described himself as a Sussex beerhouse-keeper. In January 1952, after Plaistow had become a separate civil parish, Hadderton applied for a full licence to sell intoxicating liquor on or off the premises. King and Barnes still owned the Bush at 15 Carfax, Horsham.
Newspaper notices catch the pub in ordinary village life. Greenford Cycling Club chose the Bush as the destination of a Sunday run and returned through Dorking. Its darts team drew the Crown Inn “A” at Midhurst in a national competition. A Plaistow harvest supper began at the Bush at eight o’clock.
Fire badly damaged the Bush in 1972. A photograph records flames and smoke around the Rickmans Lane building. The pub reopened after refurbishment and traded until the early 1990s, when the building began a new life as a restaurant and later a private house.
One public house remains
The Sun was sold again in 1951, followed by an auction of its furniture and effects. The catalogue listed bedsteads, bedding, oak chests, dining furniture, a longcase clock, china, glass, kitchen fittings and outside equipment. Four bedrooms had appeared in the 1833 sale notice; more than a century later, beds and household goods still filled the old inn.
The Department of the Environment listed Ye Olde Sun Inn at Grade II on 5 November 1973. Fred and Ann Butterfield kept it during the 1990s, when newspaper features described the Sun as Plaistow’s remaining pub. The Campaign for Real Ale’s North Sussex branch recorded it as open in 2026, with two small bars, brick floors, exposed beams and an inglenook beneath the hipped tiled roof.
The Mystery at the Northern Edge of the Diocese
The clue begins at Loxwood, another settlement near the northern boundary of the Diocese of Chichester. Its inhabitants belonged to Wisborough Green parish, while the church at Alfold was one mile to the north and just inside the county line in the Diocese of Winchester.
The journey to Wisborough Green crossed woodland and deep Wealden clay, and the villagers of Loxwood were worshiping at Alfold. In 1404 Robert Rede, Bishop of Chichester authorised an oratory at Loxwood. The new building brought worship to the northern edge of his diocese while tithes, offerings, burial rights and attendance at the principal festivals remained with Wisborough Green.
Tree-ring dating links the main timbers of Church Cottage at Loxwood to the winters of 1404 and 1407. The building runs east to west, it is twice as long as its width 2:1 and its three bays follow progression towards the eastern end. In 1447 Adam Moleyns, Bishop of Chichester confirmed a separate chapel could be built beside it and the oratory building became the priest’s house.
Plaistow faced the same border geography within Kirdford parish. Kirdford church lay about three miles south, while Dunsfold Church stood just inside Winchester diocese. The Chapel of St Thomas served Plaistow by 1520 and probably dated from the later fifteenth century, carrying Kirdford’s worship to the northern farms of Chichester diocese, close to Dunsfold.
The Building Beside St Thomas
W Sharpe drew the old Plaistow chapel in 1805. His picture records a timber-framed church with a small belfry and a large hipped range projecting from the south wall, towards the side where the Sun stands. The room could have served the priest for books, vestments, meetings and preparation for services.
The north range of the Sun runs east to west, parallel with Holy Trinity and was also parallel with the medieval chapel of St Thomas that preceded it. Its plan appears roughly twice as long as it is wide 2:1, close to the proportions of the former Loxwood oratory at Church Cottage. Historic England dates the Sun Inn to the seventeenth century or earlier; rebuilding and repairs may have replaced parts of an older frame.
The Loxwood sequence offers a possible key to Plaistow: a small oratory near the diocesan boundary, followed by a larger chapel in the later fifteenth century, with the first building retained for the priest. The hipped room against the south wall of St Thomas could have served as an office, vestry or chapel-side chamber, while the east-west building now within the Sun Inn became the priest’s house.
The theory remains unproved, and the answer lies inside the building. A measured survey could trace the original bays, joints, blocked openings and inserted floors; dendrochronology could date any surviving primary timbers. Until that work is carried out, Plaistow’s last public house keeps a question older than its licence, older than the Fox and the Bush, and perhaps older than the Chapel of St Thomas. Does the roof above the bar preserve Plaistow’s first place of worship, an intriguing thought?
