The Joy of Cranleigh – Celebrating Cranleigh Shops – Outlying Shops

by Joy Horn // Main Photo: The shop at Common House Farm

Cranleigh once had many more shops than we have today. Many of them were a mile or more from the High Street. Some were merely the workshop of a craftsman, the adapted front room of a cottage or a hut in front of it. Others were more purpose-built and substantial. They began before car-ownership became general and they served a vital local role. As cars and bus services proliferated, the High Street shops with their variety of choice and lower prices exerted an irresistible attraction, and outlying shops could not compete with them.

Windibank’s grocer’s shop is on the left (courtesy of Michael Miller)

The Common, for example, once had a butcher’s shop at Common House Farm, near to the pond. When Thomas Smallridge, the farmer, died at an early age, his widow sold the whole farm to Cranleigh School for playing fields and staff houses. She moved the farm shop into the Village in 1925 (with its new building designed by local architect Thomas Wade), where it is flourishing today as Rawlings.

Charles H. Croxford (1896 – 1977) outside his shop

Further round the Common anticlockwise was a grocer’s shop, and at times a baker’s too, known in the 20th century as Cricketfield Stores (now Taylor’s Farmhouse). Hobnail Cottage is on the site of a cobbler’s cottage and workshop which existed from at least 1881 to 1938, and later became a second-hand bookshop. Apple Tree Cottage was for a time a tearoom. The Old Bakery, at the Guildford Road roundabout, was originally run by relatives of the miller at the nearby Windmill, who supplied the flour for the bread-making. It was still a bakery until the middle of the 20th century. Bread used to be eaten at virtually every meal, but few cottages boasted their own bread oven, so the baker was an essential person in a village. Next to The-Cranley-on-the-Common, at a house now called Shepherd’s Crook, a laundry, employing about 20 women flourished for some years in the early 20th century. It boasted rooms for sorting, preparing, ironing and packing the laundry while drying was done on the Common in front of Park Gate Cottages. The nearby Laundry Cottages are named after the laundry business, though they are much older.

Croxford’s advert, 1933
This operated from what is now Shepherds Crook in Guildford Road (advert, Parish Magazine, 1912)

The everyday needs of people living at this end of Cranleigh were well provided for, with butcher’s, baker’s, grocer’s and cobbler’s shops. In those almost unimaginable days when refrigerators were unknown (let alone freezers), and frequent trips to the shops were needed, these local shops were essential.

Mrs Elsey’s general shop, now ‘Cherries’, Horsham Road (courtesy of Michael Miller)

Horsham Road once boasted Mrs Elsey’s grocery store, a few houses beyond Brookmead, now the Vets.  Ewhurst Road had the Corner Cash Store, with a surprisingly extensive stock of goods arranged in one of the curious attachments at the front of the original Village Hall. It was here for more than 20 years. Beyond the White Hart was Lade’s the butcher’s, a very successful concern for most of the last century.

Lade’s the butcher’s, now Cranleigh Memorials, Ewhurst Road, in the 1930s (courtesy of Cranleigh Voices)

Further down Ewhurst Road, a row of old agricultural buildings became successively Spindle Tree Antiques shop (1958), Ye Olde Barn Gifts and coffee shop (by 1965) and The Old Barn Restaurant. The food critic Egon Ronay visited it in December 1983, and gave it a favourable entry in his Good Food Guide of 1984. He was too late to save it, though, and in that year it became Cranleigh’s first Indian restaurant. The restaurant opened here just a few months before the Curry House started up in the High Street.  However, whereas the Curry House still exists in 2025, business conditions were much harder away from the Village centre. The Old Barn Indian Restaurant later became a computer business, before being turned into attractive houses.

Advert, December 1983
Advert, August 1968
Advert, August 1984

At Parkhouse Green (junction of Ewhurst Road and Barhatch Road), there was a small grocery shop at Rye Cottage, long before the Summerlands and Parkmead estates were dreamt of. This was a convenience shop for the personnel of Barhatch, Parkhouse and Park Hatch farms, and the residents of Bedlam (now Bedlow) Lane. After the First World War, a teashop was opened in the cottage garden, known as The Rye.

The Corner Cash Store, now Moooh!, Ewhurst Road, in the 1930s

Nearly all Cranleigh’s outlying shops have disappeared now, mostly without trace, though a few are remembered in house names. Widespread ownership of cars, fridges and freezers has contributed to this, as has the fact that small shops cannot compete for choice and price with the central shops, and certainly not with the supermarkets. Internet shopping in recent years has been a further devastating factor.

Rye Cottage, Parkhouse Green, 1920 (courtesy of Mike Rackley)

All the more credit, then, to the One Stop Shop in Elmbridge Road, Cranleigh Food and Wine in Ewhurst Road and Londis on Park Mead, beside the takeaways Spice and Forbidden City, who continue to buck the trend and usefully serve their surrounding areas.

The Rye Tea Garden in the 1920s (courtesy of Mike Rackley)

The Cranleigh History Society meets on the second Thursday of each month at 8pm in the Band Room. The next meeting is on Thursday February 13th, when Richard Morgan will speak on ‘The Iron Industry in the Weald’.

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