West Horsham
What: Barn, cottages, railway station and trackbeds
Where: Christ's Hospital, West Sussex
Built: Barn unknown; cottages 1860s; station 1902.
Architect: Unknown
Abandoned: station 1965; cottages 1990s; barn unknown
Listed: No
Visited: 2003-2013
Last Known Condition: Derelict
Page Updated: March 2014
The first railway to reach Stammerham arrived in 1859 and passed through without stopping. At this time, the settlement was a smallish hamlet between the market town of Horsham and the village of Southwater. In 1865, however, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (L.B. & S.C.R.) opened a branch line to Guildford which joined the Arun Valley Line to the east of the hamlet; the resulting junction was called Stammerham Junction and at about this time two Stammerham Cottages were erected to the west, possibly for railway workers to oversee its efficient running. In 1884 the Stammerham estate on which the hamlet stood was bought by the Southern Counties Dairy Farm Association who opened a siding on the site of the present station so that milk for London could be collected by rail. In 1885, the estate was sold to the Aylesbury Dairy Co Ltd, which invested heavily in the estate, injecting thousands of pounds into improving the Home Farm and grazing lands. Unfortunately, these expensive works did not see significant returns in productivity and by 1890 the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. The estate was offered for sale at a reduced price and in 1891 was bought by Christ's Hospital, the London Bluecoat School, which relocated there between 1897 and 1902 in impressive redbrick buildings designed by Aston Webb and Ingress Bell.
A large station was opened at Stammerham Junction with platforms on both the Arun and Guildford Lines. Named Christ's Hospital (West Horsham), the L.B. & S.C.R. hoped that a new town would grow up there and invested a great deal in a large polychrome brick station building and extensive sidings. Unfortunately for the railway, however, the new town never materialised, in large part due to the School's reluctance to sacrifice its new-found rural idyll. In the 1960s the elegant station building was demolished and the Arun Valley platforms reduced in number to two. The Guildford Line closed in 1965 and after the destruction by fire of the manned signal box at the end of the Guildford Platforms in the 1980s, the western half of the station was abandoned. Stammerham Cottages, by now named Lowerbarn Cottages were abandoned around a decade later.
Close to the cottages is Lower Barn, deserted by all but the occasional herd of moping cows and filled with all manner of domestic and agricultural paraphenalia such as mole traps, air rifle pellets, tea chests and carding combs. The Barn is divided into three rooms, and attatched to it is an L-shaped cow shed. The buildings are clad in steel sheet but the timber frame underneath reveals that they older than their outer appearance would suggest.
West Horsham was my first true 'urban exploration' discovered by chance in 2003. The account below was my first 'write-up', an account of that first exploration written before I thought to take photographs:
Once inside the cottages we begin in the parlour. As in many former workers' houses there is no front hall; the door simply opened onto the front room. The huge slabs of stone which made up the floor are all in disarray, rocking and see-sawing as we tread on them. A door leads to a dining room with a cupboard full of paint and old beer tops on one wall. Beneath out feet, the flagstone floor has been transformed into a sea of wall plaster and glass mixed with typical domestic odds and ends - a box of razor blades, a crushed Silver Jubilee biscuit tin and an empty picture frame with the cottages' address written on it in thick black marker. Another door straight ahead leads to a dark kitchen with an antiquated iron range and copper washtub on the back wall. On the floor are about five gas fires, (what they're doing here is anyone's guess), and the rusty skeleton of a chopper bike. A ledge along the back wall holds a range of bottles and jars, including two packs of soggy wallpaper paste (now leaking down the wall), one full bottle of 'Meltonian Suede cleaner' and a thick black glass bottle with 'RADIUM' ominously stamped into the cap. Finally there is a ramshackle extension strewn with shoes and all manner of other clutter and festooned with cobwebs and ivy.
Back in the parlour, a narrow door leads to a staircase: stripped of carpet, the stairs creak sharply as we climb them. At the top is an empty bedroom, the floor strewn with plastic cider bottles and gaudy magazines. Out in the passage again there is a hatch leading to the loft, where a brief inspection reveals a large nest of wasps. A hole smashed in the plasterboard partition opposite the bedroom leads into the bathroom of the second cottage.
It is just possible to squeeze through the hole in the plasterboard. This room, though it belongs now to the second cottage, seems to have been converted out of the back bedroom of the first. We leave it and walk into a bedroom in which a toppled wardrobe is reclining on a blue sheeted bed. Another door leads onto a small landing: ahead is a damp little bedroom with a well-secured board covering the curtained window. Two beds and a second reclining wardrobe make up the furniture.
We descend the stairs to the right into almost total darkness. The torchlight reveals a parlour whose floor is covered with polystyrene tiles come unstuck from the ceiling. A chair stands in the corner and Something illegible is scrawled on a mirror standing against one wall. We exit this room and enter an empty dining room and then a kitchen with a rusting Rayburn stove and a bank of shelving along one wall. A blocked door looks like it once led to the extension. Having hit a dead end, we double back on ourselves, descending into the dank cellar then hauling ourselves up out of the hatch in front of the house.
Epilogue
Since these photographs were taken, the railway trackbed behind the cottages has been opened to the public as a right of way. Access to the cottages has been stopped by tall spiked fences but old platforms may now be freely visited.
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