The village and Old Copthorne

Copthorne was a smallish village straddling the Surrey / Sussex border.

I lived on Copthorne Bank; the house was in Surrey, but the back garden was in Sussex!

Copthorne Bank was so called, not because it had then a money bank ( that was later ) but because was on higher ground than the Sussex side.

To confuse matters Mother would always refer to the part of the village towards Felbridge as Copthorne so I was never sure if I lived in Copthorne or Copthorne Bank.

The main areas of the collective Copthorne were Newtown, ( oddly with some of the oldest housing in the Village ) Church Lane ( photos show it as a cinder track ). Brook Hill and Copthorne Bank.

For some reason early on I thought of Copthorne Bank being “better” than Newtown, totally wrong of course.

There was also an area of “Copthorne” around Chapel Lane on the road to Felbridge.

The gaps were filled in by fields, Copthorne Golf Course and the Upper Common which was mainly gorse covered.

Further information from 'A History of Worth Parish'

At the height of the Napoleonic war, the isolated waste of Copthorne Common, partly in Surrey and partly in Sussex, and the haunt of smugglers, was designated as a hiding place for the families of the Sussex gentry in the event of an invasion, and it was that remoteness which attracted to Copthorne, a few years later, the sport of prizefighting. The nearness, both to London and to Brighton, of the common, together with that of Lowfield Heath, and particularly Crawley Down, made them popular venues in the Regency period. It was only some twenty years later that the opening of the railway to Brighton in 1841 heralded change on a massive scale. The station at Three Bridges, around which was a scattered collection of houses, became a junction, when first the line to Horsham opened in 1848, and then the branch to East Grinstead in 1855. Other stations, at Crawley, Rowfant and Crawley Down (Grange Road) were opened. Suddenly all parts of Worth were within easy reach of London and the low cost of land, some of it enclosed from commons only a few years before, attracted a new inhabitant to the Parish; the commuter. Initially it was the wealthy who built impressive mansions such as Worth Park, Paddockhurst and Crawley Down Park, but soon the effect of these large houses on local services and employment caused a swelling population, particularly in Crawley Down and Copthorne.

Development had begun in Crawley Down in advance of both the building of the railway and the enclosure of the common, with the opening of a chapel to Worth Church there in 1844 but it was not until the Station at Grange Road was opened in 1860 that house building began in earnest. Lacking a railway station of its own, Copthorne grew piecemeal following the enclosure of the Surrey common in the 1850s. Houses began to be erected along the road from Felbridge to Three Bridges, and on to Copthorne Bank where the land was better drained. The school preceded the church, which was endowed by the Lampson family of Rowfant. Elsewhere in the Parish, large estates, like Tilgate Park, made their impression on the landscape, and much of the employment in the Parish was directed towards the many aspects of the maintenance of these estates; farming, forestry, brickmaking, gamekeeping, and domestic service. Major land acquisition by the estates was accompanied by the building of numbers of cottages for estate workers and their families.