falmer Threatened by seagulls
Photo by alex Leith I meet Melanie Cutress, the Chair of Falmer’s Parish Council, at Falmer station’s car park. She’s agreed to give me a guided tour of the village. It’s Friday 15th July, the day before the first match at the 22,000-capacity Amex Stadium, and the vast structure, a kind of shiny Frank Gehry-like affair with wild curves, looms over us as we shake hands. Melanie has lived in Falmer for 30 years, and almost exactly that period of time has passed since my previous visit to the village proper. That was a trip to The Swan, very soon after the A27 was widened and Falmer was effectively split in two: Falmer North, where the pub is; and Falmer South, where you can find the church and village pond. “The road widening was in 1978, before I came to live here, so it wasn’t my fight,” says Melanie, who was part of the team which contested the location of the stadium in the village, over a period of six or seven years. There have been plenty of other fights, for Falmer residents, over the last fifty-odd years, what with the construction of the teacher training college (now Brighton Uni) in the 50s, the arrival of the University of Sussex in 1961, the increase in traffic due to the construction of the Brighton by-pass in 1988, and finally the stadium, first mooted in 2001, and subject to two national-level public enquiries. We cross the bridge over the roaring road, and stop by Falmer’s pond and church. ‘Falemere’ is recorded in the Domesday Book, I learn, and as ‘mere’ means ‘dark pool’ it’s probable that the pond has been there at least since Saxon times. It’s a beautiful sight, reflecting the crenellated 19th-century church in its rippled surface, and dominated by an enormous willow sitting on an island in the middle. It attracts a surprising number of visitors, I’m told. We watch an old couple attempting to feed a graceful family of geese with bread out of a Tesco bag, but only succeeding in sating the appetites of a determined mob of seagulls. The scene somehow encapsulates the village’s current predicament. I was brought up in Kingston, where my parents still live, so Falmer is an old next-door neighbour, of sorts. I’m rather shocked, then, to realise that I’ve never visited this spot before, and know next to nothing about the village. Over the next half hour, I learn a lot. The population of Falmer is about 120, I’m told, in 70 houses, of which half are rented. 26 of these buildings are listed, and you can see why: there’s a fine array of sturdy flint affairs, handsome rather than pretty, in an L-shape either side of the church. There is also a magnificent medieval thatched barn, hidden from view, tucked behind the church and reputed to be the largest in Sussex. We move to a bench in Melanie’s front garden, and she tells me, over tea and biscuits, about the long, drawn-out battle against the football club, which cost the parish council £60,000 (on top of the £250,000 spent by <strong>Lewes</strong> District Council). She’s fairly sanguine about the whole affair, now, and seems to have come to terms with her new neighbours, v i v a v i l l a g e s though she remains apprehensive about what life will be like when the matches start. She’s worried about the noise, and the traffic. She thinks the stadium to be an ‘attractive modern building of very good design’, though, and doesn’t think it jars with its environment, except from one stretch of the Woodingdean Road, where it ‘looks like a spaceship that’s been dumped in some fields’. We say goodbye, and I wander round taking pictures, and have lunch in the pub, where I chat to mother-and-son owners Linda and Martin, who were gobsmacked last year when they were told, after the death of the pub’s long-term landlord, that he had given it to them in his will. They are determined to make a good go of it, but unsure as to how much the pub will be affected by the arrival of the stadium, and the home and away fans it will attract, from as far afield as Leeds, Cardiff and Middlesbrough. “We can’t make it go away,” says Linda. “So we’ve got to make the most of the situation.” I walk to the station, over the Woodingdean Road, a process made much easier than it would have been a few weeks back by the installation of a new set of traffic lights, to facilitate traffic flow to the stadium. On the way I make two purchases, one of which makes me feel rather guilty: four shiny apples from the farm shop of the edge of the village, and, dropping down the valley to the bustling-with-workmen stadium, two tickets for the next day’s match. Alex Leith 8 7