Central Mart, No 1 High Street
This striking, gentry-style house at the junction of Church Street and the High Street – now divided in two – dates from the 1700s when it was owned by Thomas Waring, a farmer and shopkeeper. The Warings were a wealthy merchant family that accumulated property in Shoreham and Chelsfield. Thomas’s mother, Catherine, was the daughter of the Shoreham vicar, William Wall: she had 17 children. A Thomas Waring is also recorded in the parish Vestry Book in 1783 as “apothecary and surgeon”, for which he was paid about £5 (excluding midwifery cases).
Inside No.1 are timbers from an older dwelling that was perhaps on the same site. This was the location of Oxbourne Farm until it moved to the other end of the High Street in the 19th century, and there are references to a Henry de Okebourne going all the way back to 1275. A hop garden and malthouse were once nearby.
The right-hand side of the building was a focal point of village life for much of the 20th century. Here stood the Central Mart, a shop run by George and Alice Bell from the 1910s to the 1940s. George, who had previously run the Village Stores north along the High Street with his brother Fred, never sold himself short, declaring that wares in the Central Mart ranged “from a pin to an elephant”. (Officially it sold “Grocery, Confectionary, Cartridges and Seeds”.) One day, it was said, a pheasant was hung up outside for sale, looking suspiciously like it had been poached from shooting enclosures on the western hill. George attached a notice saying it had been “Killed by Lightning”, at which point village wags dubbed a boy who worked at the shop “Dick Lightning”.
George died in 1939 and Alice made the shop a key hub in the Second World War, offering a phone for people to use. It’s thought that a cellar in the building was also an air-raid shelter. A trained nurse and midwife, Alice helped run a wartime first aid post at Myrtle Cottage, down Church Street past the school. She left the shop in 1945 and it closed a few years later after it was run for a time by Frank Finch, who also offered antiques there. The attractive bow windows on the right-hand side date from after the war.
Text by James Saynor