Sedlescombe Village
| Published: 28th June 2007 10:16 |
Sedlescombe is a small village comprising of one main street which houses a post office and tea room and of course the village pub The Queen's Head. Around the corner from the pub is the Doctor's Surgery and Sedlescombe Primary School. Things have changed for the village in the last hundred years or so. For instance I came across this article on the internet on the shops and small industry that used to be here which I found fascinating.
Extract from Sedlescombe 1900 - Shops
The village was very self-contained. There were grocers, the bakers, the drapers selling clothes, shoemakers where you could have boots, shoes and leggings made, a coal, coke and corn merchant, blacksmiths where you could have your horses shoed, locks or gates made, stoves and ranges repaired and any type of iron working carried out. The wheelwright and the smithy at the Bridge Garage would turn out complete farm wagons They did the whole thing and even sawed their planks by hand in a saw-pit. Have you been to the Weald and Downland Museum at Singleton where there is one? One man standing on top with a long saw and the one underneath got all the sawdust. The children used to delight in going to watch them doing the wheels with the red-hot tyres, pouring water on them, cooling them down. There was a butcher, a dairy with 2 deliveries of milk a day - a man used to trundle them round on a barrow, with cans on hooks, and dish the milk out into your jug with a pint measure. You could buy food for cattle and poultry. Tools of all descriptions, wire netting and anything they didn't have they would get in for you. There was also of course a Post office where stamps were postmarked "Sedlescombe".
Can you imagine what it must have been like. I am sure that they had a very strong community sprit as they do today. I used to live in Sedlescombe and I remember the winter of 1986 when we had a lot of snow and the milkman coming up the road with chains on his float. Or in 1987 when we had the famous storm. People were knocking at each other's door to make sure they were okay. That of course may not seem strange to you but having moved down from London, to me it was something special.
