The Westgate suburb contains not just the main street but a collection of side streets that lead off the main road. This is part one of a series designed to present each of these in their own right. You can read about Henty Gardens and The Maltings here. It does re-use some material from earlier articles that risks being missed since it is scattered other postings.
The early history of Mount Lane is hard to identify. It is probable that there has always been a series of tracks leading from the Portsmouth Road into the Westgate Fields and of which the modern Mount Lane is a survivor. Perhaps because a church stood on the corner and the distant memory of a wayside Roman temple persisted.
The Tithe map of 1846 shows Mount Lane as more than a pathway, leaving the Portsmouth Road past the church and into the fields (WSRO)
The Name
Some names for this lane remain in the record and seem to support this view of a historical religious connection. Working backwards through time, running as it does besides the former St Bartholomew’s Church, Mount Lane is its most recent renaming. This dates from the early C20th after Canon Francis John Mount, who was Archdeacon of Chichester from 1887 to 1903. Previous to that it seems to have been known as Church Lane.
In a legal document of 1726, in the period in between built churches when there was just a “burying ground” on the site, the church reference has been dropped and the lane is referred to as “a little cartway” (see below).
The Croft
Earlier than that – in a document dated from 1227 – it was called Cherchescroft.
A croft in 13th century Sussex was typically a small agricultural plot or enclosure associated with a farm, often used for growing crops or keeping livestock. These crofts were part of the rural landscape and contributed to the local economy, particularly in areas with valuable arable land such as the coastal plain on which Chichester is built. The soils on the edge of the Downs rising north of Chichester was shunned by arable farmers as ‘shravey’ (light, stony soils in local parlance), preferring the climate and the “Brickearths” soil of the southwesterly plains which greatly favoured large-scale cereal growing.
“By the early fourteenth century only parts of Kent among all the provinces of England exceeded the wealth of coastal Sussex. The prosperity of this tract was derived from many sources but its primary basis lay in its sheep-and-corn farming which rested upon exceptionally favourable physical conditions, easy access to tide-water, and close proximity to markets in maritime England and on the Continent. The quality of its flock management, the widespread substitution of a legume course for bare fallow, and densely sown fields producing grain yields higher than the medieval norm, placed it firmly in the vanguard of the agricultural development of its day.”
“The ecclesiastical ‘grain factories’ of the Sussex Coastal Plain made the area one of the most valuable arable districts in all of medieval England. Despite this fact, study of the origins and adaptation of the area’s field systems has been relatively neglected. Fragmentary remains of a probable 13th- to 15th-century croft [has been discovered] at Oldlands Farm, Bognor Regis.”
The Buildings
C13th – The first solid piece of evidence we can confirm is that, on the site of the graveyard at St Bartholomew’s on the corner of Mount Lane and Westgate, stood a church that was probably built in the 12th century.
This was a round wooden church dedicated to St Sepulchre, although the administrative parish was St Bartholomew’s. There must have also been a number of dwellings on the street at this time to justify the building of a church and some are indeed visible in the print above. An archaeological evaluation of Mount Lane in 2010 may have identified only a single medieval pit, but first evidence of at least one residence on the lane in this period.
Now round churches are usually taken as a sign that the Knights Templar had something to do with it but no evidence has been found of their involvement in the site. There is a theory, which is maybe no more than wish, that at the western exit from the Roman city a roadside temple was built which in all probability would have been round. Quite whether the memory of it would have lasted 7 centuries until the erection of St Sepulchre’s is a matter of connection.
The mound on which St Sepulchre’s was built is still apparent on the site today, although there will be graves underneath, including the Shippam mausoleum, so an architectural dig to determine quite what was on this site seems forever unlikely.
Gardner’s town map 1769 (WSRO)
1769. St Sepulchre’s was destroyed by the Parliamentarians in December 1642 and 100 years later, Gardner’s town map shows only a burial ground remaining.
The Parsonage
We can see from this map that, on the opposite side of the lane, the site had not yet been built up by the Shippams and there is only a narrow building at an angle to the road. This is probably the original St Sepulchre’s ‘parsonage’.
An indenture (conveyance) of 9 Mar 1726 refers to the ‘parsonage’ between the Tannery and the ‘little cartway’ (Mount Lane), where there is at least one watermill, presumably on the Lavant: “situated outside the Westgate adjoining the “Kings Highway’ on the north, a little cartway belonging to the Dean leading out of the said street through the Lavant course into the parsonage close on the south”.
In 1888, there was a plan to build a road that used Mount Lane to link the railway station station across the Westgate Fields to the Portsmouth Road, and a house on Westgate was demolished to widen the road, but the link was never built.
If we take a closer look at the tithe map of 1846, this house can be seen as a narrow property attached to no.27 and whose empty site indeed still exists, situated between 27 Westgate and the church today, as a vacant plot with mature trees. Significantly this was also the year when George Shippam moved his business away from Westgate and plans were submitted to build a new parsonage at what is now 74 Westgate. This absent house would have been no.25 Westgate had it survived.
It is also known that there was access to the Deanery Fram down this lane and on the map we can see a bridge over the Lavant for access. Little bridges across the tributaries of the Lavant that ran through the Westgate Fields were still in evidence in the 1940s.
1911. The great Arts and Craft architect, Edward Schroeder Prior, having moved his family to Chichester in 1907, initially lived in an early 18th-century house at 7 East Pallant. He bought the 18th-century Shippam house on the corner of Mount Lane (current no 27) with its adjacent warehouse (current 29 and called it Prior House).
1950 Shortly after Powell & Moya had overseen the alterations to the Cottage behind no 15 Westgate, they started a commission on the west side of Mount Lane to design and build two minimum impact flat-roofed bungalows in concrete. This was in the context of very severe restrictions on private residential development floorspace after the Second World War. One was built for Philip Powell’s father, who was a Canon at the cathedral and the other for his sister and her naval officer husband.
2008 These bungalows, by then owned by the County Council, were demolished and a series of modern properties built to replace them. New nos. 1-4 Mount Lane have received a conservation award, and these new homes have succeeded in gaining status as part of the Chichester Conservation Area. Not that such a nomination prevented the previous dwellings from being demolished! Built by the 26 year-old son of a local Canon – and British domestic architecture that was a good decade ahead of its time – they were even praised in the Pevsner by Ian Nairn, but to no avail.
Sources
The early section of this article has borrowed liberally from two technical articles:
Demesne arable farming in Coastal Sussex during the Later Middle Ages by P. F. BRANDON, published in an Agricultural History Review
Fragmentary remains of a probable 13th- to 15th-century croft at Oldlands Farm, Bognor Regis, West Sussex in SUSSEX ARCHAEOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS 157 (2019), 139–147