The Village Hall in the 1930s (courtesy of Michael Miller) Cranleigh’s old Village Hall, built in 1891, was proving inadequate in size and facilities by the First World War. So it was decided to build a new one in memory of those who had died. There was a small surplus from the money raised for the war memorial to ...
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The High Street, outside what is now Burns & Webber. Ironically, the sign on the right is headed ‘Swimming Pool Site’ (Surrey Advertiser) 'Does the date September 15th, 1968 mean anything to you?' a friend asked me. It didn’t, but there must be many Cranleigh people who would immediately reply, ‘The Great ...
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The War Memorial unveiling ceremony (photo by Walter Corin, courtesy of Michael Miller) During the previous year – 1919 – controversy raged in Cranleigh about the form of a memorial to the village men who had died in the Great War. There were over 200 of them, buried in around 67 different cemeteries in Europe and ...
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School photo 1971, taken in front of the hedge backing on to Bridge Road (courtesy of Old Boy Hugo Simms, then aged 6, the blond boy in the back row, 4th from the right, behind the girl with the Alice band) Stephen Rowland, who laid out the Woodlands Estate between Ewhurst and Horsham Roads around 1900, aimed to ...
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Cheesman’s workshop and Smallridge’s shop, about 1932 (courtesy of David Cragg) What does a skilled craftsman do, when mechanisation and technological advances make his skill redundant? The Cranleigh wheelwrights faced this situation around 1920. It had come about in a surprisingly short time. Cars took over from ...
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Vine Cottage, before 1885 A newly-married couple came to Cranleigh from Wisborough Green in 1851. Jesse and Sabina Mann moved into Vine Cottage, a dairy farm that stood near the south-west side of the Common, off what was then Elmbridge (or even Eldenbridge) Lane. Fourteen years later the railway was built ...
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George Pirie’s delivery man is setting off on his round, with his basket to carry loaves from the van to his customers’ houses Around 1900 bread formed the main item in Cranleigh people’s diet. Many of our farm labourers, brick-makers and builders ate bread at breakfast, a chunk of bread with cheese for their ...
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Nanhurst about 1990 (courtesy of Pam Leeke) Nanhurst is the large, red-brick mansion next to the public rubbish dump at the far end of Elmbridge Road. Built in 1891, it was a very substantial house, with fifteen principal bedrooms and dressing rooms, and twelve servants’ bedrooms, its own electric light, stabling ...
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Cobbler’s hut under the tree, facing the Cricket Ground and a stone’s throw from the windmill, in 1908 Cranleigh’s beautiful common is surrounded by buildings of every century from the sixteenth to the twenty-first. Buildings from earlier centuries, being made of wood, have decayed and been replaced. This is the ...
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Village Hall and Rowlands Corner, 1904, with the Brewery on the right Modern Cranleigh owes a great deal to Stephen Rowland. Among his many projects to modernise Cranleigh, in 1891 he built a Village Hall in Ewhurst Road, adjacent to his home, Yew Tree House, and the area became known as Rowland’s Corner. The ...
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