Geography
At 51°6′33″N 0°11′14″W / 51.10917°N 0.18722°W / 51.10917; -0.18722 (51.1092, -0.1872), Crawley is in the northeastern corner of West Sussex in South East England, 28 miles (45 km) south of London and 18 miles (29 km) north of Brighton and Hove. It is surrounded by smaller towns including Horley, Redhill, Reigate, Dorking, Horsham, Haywards Heath and East Grinstead. The borough of Crawley is bordered by the West Sussex local authority areas of Mid Sussex and Horsham districts, and the Mole Valley and Tandridge districts and the Borough of Reigate and Banstead in the county of Surrey.
Crawley lies in the Weald between the North and South Downs. Two beds of sedimentary rock meet beneath the town: the eastern neighbourhoods and the town centre lie largely on the sandstone Hastings Beds, while the rest of the town is based on Weald Clay. A geological fault running from east to west has left an area of Weald Clay (with a ridge of limestone) jutting into the Hastings Beds around Tilgate. The town has no major waterways, although a number of smaller brooks and streams are tributaries for the River Mole which rises near Gatwick Airport and flows northwards to the River Thames near Hampton Court Palace. There are several lakes at Tilgate Park and a mill pond at Ifield which was stopped to feed the Ifield Water Mill.
In 1822 Gideon Mantell, an amateur fossil collector and palaeontologist, discovered teeth, bones and other remains of what he described as "an animal of the lizard tribe of enormous magnitude", in Tilgate Forest on the edge of Crawley. He announced his discovery in an 1825 scientific paper, giving the creature the name Iguanodon. In 1832 he discovered and named the Hylaeosaurus genus of dinosaurs after finding a fossil in the same forest.
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