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LEWES STREET NAMES #26
About noon on 8th September, 1908, a Corporation
carter gave the alarm that Malling Mill
was on fire. Although the fire brigade raced to
the scene, the lack of a sufficient water supply
meant the whole mill became a furnace and was
gutted. Th<strong>us</strong> came to an end the windmill after
which this road was named. But the miller’s
ho<strong>us</strong>e remains as well as the base of the mill,
<strong>now</strong> converted into a ho<strong>us</strong>e.
Lewes was once ringed with windmills. From the site of the old windmill (burnt down in 1760) on Cliffe Hill
near the golf clubho<strong>us</strong>e, the line stretched to Malling Mill and across the O<strong>us</strong>e Valley to Steere’s Mill (demolished
1901) on Race Hill. Then southward to Spital Mill (burnt down 1885) and across the Brighton road to the
Ashcombe Smock Mill at Juggs Road, which collapsed in a storm in 1890. In 2010 a new ‘windmill’, actually a
ho<strong>us</strong>e, has been built on the site.
At the annual beating of the bounds, the miller would allow beaters to walk through Malling Mill, since the
boundary line passed through the middle. Early maps depict Malling Mill standing on the west side of the main
road and overlooking the lane down to South Malling Church. The geography was altered in 1830 when the
present main road from the Prince of Wales Inn was cut to bypass the steepness of the former road which ran
under the hill and behind the development called The Lynchets. The new road bisected the old lane, and the
portion which led up to the windmill came to be k<strong>now</strong>n as Mill Road, and the lower section, Church Lane.
From Kim Clark’s revision of L.S. Davey’s Street Names of Lewes, available at the Tourist Information Centre
Photo courtesy of Joe Knight, and our apologies to Joe for neglecting to credit him for his weathervane and streetname
pics in our Aug<strong>us</strong>t issue.
ANGEL DELIGHT
With all the Artwave art shows around town in the first
fortnight of the month, we nearly missed a couple of
shows going on after the last festival enth<strong>us</strong>iast has
been booted out of the last venue to shut up shop. Both
shows are collaborations between family members.
Brothers Chris and Frank McHugh have an exhibition
in St Anne’s Gallery (18th-26th September) called
‘Los Angeles’, referring not to the Californian city, but
to the angels both of them have been diligently painting
as a foil to their
other artwork. Meanwhile,
Mary Smythe,
an abstract painter,
is sharing the Hop
Gallery space with
her daughter Helen,
a semi-abstract watercolour
artist, from
Wednesday 15th to
Thursday 23rd.