Pound Hill - History

History

Pound Hill was originally a hamlet within the parish of Worth. In 1809 an Act of Parliament created a turnpike between Horley and Balcombe, this road (now called the Balcombe Road) entered the parish from the North and at the top of Pound Hill it turned east and followed the Crawley to Turners Hill road, after a few hundred yards the road then turned south along Church Lane in Worth. The houses and farms around the Pound Hill junction became known as Pound Hill. Due to the close proximity of Worth Church, Pound Hill did not develop into a village. The turnpike was busy and the hill leading down Church Lane became difficult for wheeled vehicles. Church Lane was bypassed when a new road was made directly south from Pound Hill junction to join the old road at the bottom of the hill near Frogshole Farm. A public house the Kings Head became a popular stopping place for coaches between London and Brighton. But by the 1830s the Kings Head had become a private house and most of the coaches used the new turnpike through Crawley.

By 1916 a telephone exchange had been built in Pound Hill.

In the 1920s and 1930s a number of large estates in the area were sold and land became available for development. In Pound Hill 102 houses were built along St Mary's Drive. Although further land was cleared the development in the area was stopped by the Second World War. Post-war further houses were built around St Mary's Drive.

With the creation of Crawley New Town in 1947 the Pound Hill area was proposed as a neighbourhood. It not only included the original area of Pound Hill but all the land between the London-Brighton railway and the Balcombe Road, and south from Crawley Avenue to the Three Bridges-East Grinstead Railway. And later it included the area around Worth church. Work began and building new houses around 1953 and the southern part of Pound Hill was completed in 1956. Development of the northern part continued into the 1970s. Also in the 1970s the area to the east between the Balcombe Road and the M23 motorway was developed and other areas were infilled. In 1981 Pound Hill had 11,617 inhabitants. A school in the area collapsed under the weight of a severe storm that hit Britain on 25 January 1990, but all pupils had been evacuated just minutes before the building collapsed.