East Grinstead
East Grinstead is a town in West Sussex, England, near the East Sussex, Surrey, and Kent borders, south of London, northeast of Brighton, and northeast of the county town of Chichester. Situated in the northeast corner of the county, bordering Surrey, the civil parish has an area of. The population at the 2011 Census was 26,383.
Nearby towns include Crawley and Horley to the west, Tunbridge Wells to the east and Redhill and Reigate to the northwest. The town is contiguous with the village of Felbridge to the northwest. Until 1974 East Grinstead was in East Sussex, before joining with Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill as the Mid-Sussex district of West Sussex.
The town is on the Greenwich Meridian. It has many historic buildings, and the Weald and Ashdown Forest lie to the south-east.
The name Grinstead derives from the Old English grēnestede meaning 'green place'.
Places of interest
The High Street contains one of the longest continuous runs of 14th-century timber-framed buildings in England. Other notable buildings in the town include Sackville College, the sandstone almshouse, built in 1609. In 1853 the warden of Sackville College, John Mason Neale, wrote the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas". The college has sweeping views towards Ashdown Forest. The adjacent St Swithun's Church stands on the highest ground in the town and was rebuilt in the eighteenth century to a perpendicular design by James Wyatt. The imposing structure dominates the surrounding countryside for many miles around. In the churchyard are commemorated the East Grinstead Martyrs, and in the south-east corner is the grave of John Mason Neale.The Greenwich Meridian runs through the grounds of the historic 1769 East Court mansion, home of the Town Council, giving the visitor an opportunity to stand with a foot in both the east and west. The mansion stands in a parkland setting. In 1968, the East Grinstead Society was founded as an independent body, both to protect the historically important buildings of East Grinstead and to improve the amenities for future generations.
east of the town, in Hammerwood, is Hammerwood Park, a country house built by Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1792, and once owned by the rock band Led Zeppelin. On the outskirts of the town is Standen, a country house belonging to the National Trust, containing one of the best collections of Arts and Crafts movement furnishings and fabrics. Kidbrooke Park, a home of the Hambro family, was restored by the noted Sussex architect and antiquarian, Walter Godfrey, as was Plawhatch Hall. East Grinstead House is the headquarters of the Caravan Club.
During the Second World War, the Queen Victoria Hospital developed a specialist burns unit led by Sir Archibald McIndoe. It became world-famous for pioneering treatment of RAF and allied aircrew who were badly burned or crushed, and required reconstructive plastic surgery. In 1941 patients of McIndoe who had undergone experimental reconstructive plastic surgery formed the Guinea Pig Club, which then became a support network for the aircrew and their family members. The club remained active after the end of the war, and its annual reunion meetings at East Grinstead continued until 2007, when the club was wound down in view of the increasing frailty of its surviving members. As such, the townspeople became very supportive of the patients at the Queen Victoria Hospital. Even though many of the victims were horribly disfigured, the townspeople would go out of their way to make the men feel normal. Families invited the men to dinner, and girls asked them to go on dates. Patients of the burn units remember, and cherish, the charity received from the townspeople of East Grinstead.
During the same War, the town became a secondary target for German bombers which failed to make their primary target elsewhere. On the afternoon of Friday 9 July 1943, a Luftwaffe bomber became separated from its squadron, followed the main railway line and circled the town twice, then dropped eight bombs. Two bombs, one with a delayed-action fuse, fell on the Whitehall Theatre, a cinema on the London Road, where 184 people at the matinée show were watching a Hopalong Cassidy film before the main feature. A total of 108 people were killed in the raid, including children in the cinema, many of whom were evacuees; and some twenty Canadian servicemen stationed locally, who were either in the cinema when it was hit, or arrived minutes later to help with rescuing survivors. A further 235 were injured. This was the largest loss of life of any single air raid in Sussex.
In the winter of 2010, Claque Theatre produced the East Grinstead Community Play, which focussed on the bombing of the town in 1943, the work of Archibald McIndoe and his team at the hospital, and the Guinea Pig Club and its members. It was performed by local residents. On 9 June 2014 The Princess Royal unveiled a monument to Sir Archibald McIndoe and the Guinea Pigs. It stands in front of Sackville College at the east end of the High Street. It was funded by a public appeal and sculpted by Martin Jennings, whose own father was a Guinea Pig. It depicts a burned airman looking to the sky, with McIndoe placing reassuring hands on his shoulders. The stone ring around the statue is for visitors to sit and reflect and in doing so become part of the story representing "The town that did not stare".
In 2006, the East Grinstead Town Museum was moved to new custom-built premises in the historic centre of the town, and successfully re-opened to the public as the East Grinstead Museum. Chequer Mead Theatre includes a modern 336-seat] purpose-built auditorium, which stages professional and amateur plays/musicals and music, opera, ballet, folk music, tribute bands, film, event cinema and talks. The venue also has a popular spacious cafe with outdoor seating.
In addition to the nearby Ashdown Forest, East Grinstead is served by the Forest Way and Worth Way linear Country Parks which follow the disused railway line from Three Bridges all the way through to Groombridge and which are part of the Sustrans national cycle network.
Places of worship
East Grinstead has an unusually diverse range of religious and spiritual organisations for a town of its size.A broad range of mainstream Christian denominations have places of worship in the town. Protestant Nonconformism has featured especially prominently for the last two centuries, in common with other parts of northern Sussex. Several other religious groups have connections with the town, from merely owning property to having national headquarters there.
Church of England
The Church of England has four places of worship in the town. St Swithun's Church was founded in the 11th century. Architect James Wyatt rebuilt it in local stone in 1789 after it became derelict and collapsed. Near the entrance to the church, three stones mark the supposed ashes of Anne Tree, Thomas Dunngate and John Forman who were burned as martyrs on 18 July 1556 because they would not renounce the Protestant faith. John Foxe wrote about them in his 1,800-page Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Two other churches are in St Swithun's parish.St Luke's Church, in Holtye Avenue on the Stone Quarry estate, was built in 1954 to serve the northeast of the town. The church was demolished around 2014 and flats have been built at the location. St Barnabas' Church in Dunnings Road serves the south of the town. The present wooden structure of 1975 replaced an older church built in 1912. The fourth church, in the northwest of the town, is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin. Built by W.T. Lowdell over a 21-year period beginning in 1891, the Decorated Gothic Revival church was consecrated in 1905 and has its own parish. It was established by adherents of the Oxford Movement, and services still follow a more Anglo-Catholic style than East Grinstead's other Anglican churches.
Non-Conformist
East Grinstead's first Nonconformist church was the Zion Chapel, built in 1810 for the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion. The small evangelical Calvinistic group owned the church until 1980; it is now used by Baptists and is called West Street Baptist Church. Trinity Methodist Church is the much-expanded successor to older places of Methodist worship in the town; the community dates back to 1868. The United Reformed Church community meets in the Moat Church, a former Congregational chapel built in the Early English Gothic Revival style in 1870.A 2007 book also noted the New Life Church—a Newfrontiers evangelical charismatic church—the Kingdom Faith Church, another independent charismatic congregation, and the Full Gospel Church.
Other places of worship
worship at the Church of Our Lady and St Peter, founded in 1898 by Edward Blount of the Blount baronetcy, a resident of nearby Worth. Opus Dei has a conference centre at Wickenden Manor near the town, and Rosicrucians also have a presence in nearby Greenwood Gate.Jehovah's Witnesses worship at a modern Kingdom Hall. The community, established in 1967, previously used a former Salvation Army building.
The meetinghouse of the LDS Church on Ship Street was built in 1985. The London England Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is just over the Surrey border at Newchapel.
The United Kingdom headquarters of the Church of Scientology is at Saint Hill Manor on the southwestern edge of East Grinstead. Scientology's founder L. Ron Hubbard bought the Georgian mansion and its of grounds from the Maharaja of Jaipur in 1959 and lived in the town until 1967.