10 - Viva Lewes

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 Lewes
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
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