The Old Vicarage
To the right of the church lychgate as you view it from the road is a brick and flint cottage with a stone bust set into the façade. The cottage is thought to date from the first half of the 19th century, but attached behind is a more ancient, rambling building that housed Shoreham’s vicars for several centuries.
The Old Vicarage dates from the 1530s and is a “hall house” with a crown-post roof – or perhaps the remnant of a larger hall house, in the view of one expert. It was a vicarage by at most a century later: a will made by Sir Thomas Polley in 1629 bequeathed to his daughter Jane “all that my lease of the rectory or parsonage of Shoreham”. This was an era when new beamed ceilings and a cross-wing at the back appeared, and a fine bread oven survives from a century after that. The 1700s were the time of Vincent Perronet, the Methodist pioneer and friend of the Wesleys who served as Shoreham’s vicar for 57 years. John Wesley was allocated a room in the vicarage for his many visits. You can read more about Perronet in the People section of this website.
Two wings were added to the vicarage in the 19th century – one of ragstone on the south-east corner in 1844 and a matching one in yellow brick to the north-east in 1873. It’s thought the cottage at the front may date from the 1844 improvements, and it was used as a coach-house later in the century. It has been speculated that the carved stone bust at first-floor level may have come from the remains of New House – the 18th-century mansion of the Borrett family next to the river that was still standing in at least 1828, though long abandoned.
A Voluntary Aid Detachment hospital was based at the vicarage in the First World War and a soup kitchen carried on afterwards. The cottage section continued to be let out to tenants and the church sexton (caretaker) lived here in the late 1920s. Rather surprisingly, he was a “good Roman Catholic” in the words of the vicar, Augustus Payne, who noted that it was quite normal for English parish churches to be “lit by many lamps of holiness”. In the 1950s, several tenant families were in residence and sharing the kitchen of the vicar, Victor Edwards. In the mid-1960s, however, they had to leave when the Church of England sold the vicarage for £11,600 and built a new home for the vicar, Canon Benbow, a short distance up Station Road. The first private owner of the old building was John Freeman, who became British ambassador in Washington. A former MP, he was well known for presenting the interview programme Face to Face on BBC Television.