Crawley, the town built from three counties

In all the years I have been knocking doors, I don’t think I’ve ever found a resident with anything good to say about West Sussex County Council. The most obvious reason for this antipathy is that the council really isn’t very good, something league tables of county-tier services regularly highlight.

Of course, a lack of identification with West Sussex might also stem from Crawley’s New Town heritage, leaving residents looking more towards London than Chichester, and all-too-aware of the attitudes towards the town felt amongst the Tory shires which surround us.

Yet, I think there’s a third factor at play here as well, that much of the town today was never part of West Sussex to start with.

Last Summer I read Rodney Stone, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s lesser known works (available for free on Kindle), with a fair chunk of the book set in Crawley and its surroundings. The book is a Gothic mystery/boxing novel, focusing on the area as an early centre of boxing in the UK.

Boxing at the time was illegal and magistrates would intervene in any match they became aware of, one solution to this was to locate matches where the jurisdiction was unclear such as in fields along those county boundaries, with Crawley being the ideal town for people to locate themselves before a fight. Why? Because we sat on the boundaries of West Sussex, East Sussex, and Surrey.

When the New Town was first proposed, it was planned that Crawley would be predominently formed from Horsham district, but a section of Cuckfield district also developed out as part of the town. Cuckfield would go on to be merged with other small rural districts, forming the new district of Mid sussex, with the Crawley’s eastern extension brought into the borough. Here’s the crucial bit for those of you wondering how this relates to a different county: until that restructure, Cuckfield, along with the rest of Mid Sussex, was actually a part of East Sussex.

This all took place under the 1972 Local Government Act, the last major restructure of councils across England and the document which continues for provide the majority of our legal basis (something I will go into greater detail about in another post).

Crawley’s eastern boundary wasn’t the only one affected by the Act, we also extended northwards. Have a guess where the original boundary between the counties of West Sussex and Surrey were? It’s kind of obvious when you think about it, but I only realised two years back when discussing the history of Lowfield Heath with some chaps. Got it? It’s at County Oak. So called, as there was an oak tree–now gone–which denoted the location of the boundary.

There had been an argument that all of Gatwick Airport and its associated land should fall into a single authority and the Act relocated all the land we now have north of County Oak into the borough. Oh, and they also merged the town with Horley.

Wait…what? Yes, you heard me right. The argument had been made, by Horley’s representatives, that Gatwick should stay with the town because the town and airport were so thoroughly integrated, to which the Government said ‘fair enough’ and moved the whole lot into Crawley.

It’s fair to say that Horley residents weren’t expecting this, nor were they happy about it and suddenly were at pains to explain how actually the town and airport were completely different and could they stay in Surrey (not in their original district, as these had been restructured), please?

Fortunately for those residents, the changes set out in the Local Government Act were postdated, giving them two years to make their case and utterly remarkably they secured their own Act of Parliament for the town to be merged into a Surrey district. Kind of hard to top that for anti-Crawley sneering.
So, here we are today. A town based in West Sussex, but formed from three counties and filled by residents who have come across the length and breadth of the country (and much further afield). Is it any wonder most residents would much rather the town became its own thing, separate from the county?