10th
January 2018 (Wednesday)
..... 11.00 Yessss .... we have a
bonnie Sussex morning; bright and sunny
with very little wind.
Janice found a
site on FB called ‘Memories of Uckfield’, which, like Elie and
 |
| Uckfield church spire. |
Earlsferry
History Society, is loaded with photographs, and personal memories of the
Uckfield of older times: there’s even a
photo of Uckfield House which was
demolished to make way for a huge housing
estate. It appears that planners and
architects have never loved Uckfield .... unlike the developers, who must have
made a lot of profit from the housing estates that surround, what remains of
the old part of town. Thankfully there
are photographs to let us see the Uckfield of ‘yesterday’; I say 'yesterday' because the Rev Edward Turner of
Maresfield, and Vice-President of the Sussex Archaeological Society, wrote 170
years ago: “in truth, this place
(Uckfield) is singularly modern, with almost everything of antiquarian value
having fast disappeared over recent years”. Uckfield
is an historic place, and The Rev Turner was referring to the fact that it’s
medieval history had been torn down to make way for a modern, Victorian
Uckfield. Since then much of that ‘Victorian
Uckfield’ has also been torn down to make way for the Uckfield we have today. What would the Rev Turner think of Uckfield today?
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| Interior of Uckfield church. |
20.00 Janice
and I went downtown and had a ‘lite lunch’ in ‘Hartfields’, a Cafe on the High
Street. It’s in one of the buildings
that were built in the 1960’s, you can see that by the lack of design....but that didn’t detract
from the food served up in Cafe.... the soup I had was delicious.
After
our ‘break’ Janice bumbled off downtown to do some shopping, while I went uptown
to the kirk and had a restful 10 minutes.
I got round to thinking of the Rev Turner, who, would you believe, was
not overly impressed with the, then ‘new’ Uckfield Church, that I was sitting
in. At a meeting of the Sussex Archaeological
Society in 1859 the following introduction was read out to the company: “In the absence of a baronial castle, or a
ruined monastery, a Roman station, or an Elizabethan mansion,
 |
| Uckfield church altar. |
we have,
generally, in the places selected for our meetings, a church of more or less
archaeological interest to fall back upon;
but this is not the case here.
The church of Uckfield is a structure of some fifteen to twenty years
existence only; and, for a modern built church,
by no means a very happy specimen of ecclesiastical architecture and
arrangement”. And there’s me thinking
that the Uckfield Church was interesting!
I suppose, comparing it to other churches in the area, it may appear
less ‘grand’: what it does show is, that
every generation yearns for their ‘yesterday’.
