Peoples Stories - Bevendean History Project
Michael Short remembers Bevendean
Michael
moved to 179 Norwich Drive in 1962. As a boy he lived in Moulsecoomb
Villas which were where the Brighton University Cockcroft Building now
stands.
Cambridge Farm was on the hill above the Bevendean valley on a line between Upper Bevendean Farm and Falmer Church, nothing on 1819 map, on 1898 & 1920 maps shown as Hill cottage.
Cambridge Farm first seen on the 1931 ordnance survey map. Thought to have been burnt down about 1951.
There were lots of Small Holdings on the north side of the Bevendean valley.
Heath Hill Farm is shown on the 1897 OS map by the side of a track that went from Bevendean Farm up to the Warren Road. Not found on any earlier maps, but still shown in 1920.
Not shown on a map of about 1985, but Brown Loaf Farm No. 1 and Brown Loaf Farm No. 2 shown somewhere nearby, but not in quite the same place. They were below the current riding stables and occupied by brothers named EDWARDS. They did not speak to each other!
Upper Bevendean Farm is first shown on an ordnance survey map of 1873. Still a working farm today.
There were ponds all the way down the valley from the area of Bodiam Close to the school site and beyond.
Earth Dams were built behind Bodiam Close in Upper Bevendean Valley (before 1958) in an attempt to stop the flooding and following the last flooding a large drainage pipe was built from Bodiam Close to Bodiam Avenue. (Now Redundant).
Flooding has been a problem at the end of the Valley and there are a number of underground streams which flow down under the valley bottom.
The football pitch at the end of Heath Hill Avenue and the school playing fields were filled in with ash from the Brighton B power station which burnt pulverised coal. This is thought to have been in the early 1960s.
The Falmer boundary was just beyond the end of the houses at Bodiam Close during the time that it came under Chailey Rural District Council.
The roads for the estate were built several years before the houses and crops were left growing between the roads until the houses were built.
One winter when there was a blizzard on the Downs the snow drifted over the far end of Norwich Drive and covered the road and reached the roof tops of the houses on the lower side of the road. A man driving home drove into the snow drift and his car was completely buried and so had to be abandoned. When he dug the car out the next morning he found that the front of his car was up against the bumper of another car. This was before there was a hedge to stop the snow drifting across the road at this point.
There were allotments on the sides of the south side of The Avenue from Southall Avenue to where the allotments are now behind Manton Road. There were also allotments up the middle of the Avenue put in during the war. There was also a Central Schools Kitchen, known as the ‘Blitz Kitchen’ for the towns schools, built half way up the Avenue by the first ‘Cinder Path’.
4 April 2014
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