Industrial Archaeology

[poliphilo]

Digging down into the lawn to plant a gorse bush (I've planted 15 in all) I hit a large obstruction that turned out to be a slab of asphalt with a long iron nail attached. It set me wondering about the history of the site.

This morning I've been looking at what the Internet has to offer. There's more that I thought there would be- old maps, photographs, the odd paragraph here and there. So far as I can make out the story goes something like this...

The land was developed for housing in the 1930s. Before then it had been an area of allotments, market gardens and small industrial premises, centred on the Eastbourne Gasworks. A railway ran through it- a branch-line for carrying coke etc to the works. The street called The Sidings, just round the corner from here, memorialises this vanished line. Our house could well have been built on what used to be railway property.

I'd like to go over the garden with a metal detector, only the one I used on the farm was one of a handful of fanciable, easily overlooked objects (the most valuable being a Dyson Shark) that disappeared during the move...

Comments

[heleninwales]

That all sounds very interesting. Our house is relatively new (1983), one of a row built on a field at the edge of town. The site isn't very interesting, though it was probably the site of some lime kilns in the past because all the old rows of cottages in this immediate area have the Welsh word for "kiln" in their name and they continued this tradition when naming our new row.