Lewes History Group

A live talk at King’s Church

Chris Grove : The battle for a railway to Lewes and eastwards, 1838 to 1844

Much has been written about the discovery by the railway navvies, of the graves of the founders of St Pancras Priory in 1845. Little has been written about the years leading up to this, when supporters of the current coastal railway were battling four alternative routes, for Government approval.

Two of these, preferred by residents in the far east of the county, would have avoided Lewes altogether. The other two, passing further north through Lewes, would have saved the Priory site from the damage inflicted by the construction.

This talk covers the remarkable events that were reported in the press at the time.

Aerial view of the railway at Lewes. Drone photograph by Mark Dobson

Venue: The King’s Church building on Brooks Road, Lewes, BN7 2BY. (Between Tesco car park and Homebase). Please don’t park in Homebase’s car park: they take deliveries in the evenings.

Entry: Entry is FREE for LHG members, and £4 for non-members. Due to limited seating, admission will be by advance ticketing only – no payments on the door. Please book in advance at https://ticketsource.co.uk/lhg. Tickets available until 5:30pm of the day of the talk. We will have lists of ticket-holders at the door and will check you in.

Covid precautions: Limited seating to allow for some spacing; no refreshments.

Please see the Talks page for a list of  forthcoming monthly events organised by the Lewes History Group.

A selection of Virginia Woolf’s reading and research notebooks that are in The Keep’s Special Collections can now be accessed online.

WoolfNotes.com provides images of Virginia Woolf’s lifetime reading and research notes. At the core of the project is the presentation of 67 Reading Notebooks – 33 from The Keep, 33 from the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and one from the Beinecke Library at Yale – accompanied by the text of Brenda Silver’s summary of each one.

It also includes research notecards from the Leonard Woolf papers compiled for his book ‘Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920)’.

According to the website: “This large collection of reading and research notes corrects the myth (partly generated by Woolf herself) that she was uneducated. It shows how her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, was indebted to extensive and rigorous research on social, historical, economic, political, and imperial issues.”

Access to East Sussex probate records just got easier with their launch online on Ancestry. As well as wills, these fascinating records include inventories and other associated records which give an insight into the social status of the testator, their property, and details of other family members.

Ancestry scanned The Keep’s probate records as part of a wider digitisation project with West Sussex Records Office. These records have now gone live online.

Access to Ancestry is free at The Keep and all libraries across East and West Sussex. You can also find Ancestry online at www.ancestry.co.uk.