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photo: emma Chaplin
For much of the twentieth century
Maresfield was not so much a
village as a sacrificial offering to
the juggernaut of the internal
comb<strong>us</strong>tion engine. There was talk
of a by-pass as early as 1936, but it
was not until November 1989 that
it actually opened. In the interim
Maresfield had been a godsend to
those motorists temperamentally
disinclined to slow down.
Certainly I remember my father
barrelling though the village en
route from Croydon to the family
dacha at Fairlight Cove. For many
passing through, Maresfield was
reduced to a flash of battlemented
church tower, a glimpse of the
solid facade of the Georgian
Chequers Inn, a slalom round the
sharp corner, an impression of tilehung
cottages and little more.
The terse entry for Maresfield’s
St Bartholomew’s Church in
Pevsner begins with the single
word ‘overrestored’. This 1879
restoration involved replacing
the existing chancel and the
addition of two transepts. At the
same time the narrow opening
in the south wall of the nave was
rediscovered, having remained
hidden for hundreds of years. This
was the only surviving remnant
of an earlier Norman church.
Apart from some nice Victorian
stained glass in the chancel and
an interesting free-standing iron
tombstone to Robert Brooks who
‘departed this life’ in 1667, there is
little to detain the visitor, although
the monument to Edward Kidder
(1817) does feature a curio<strong>us</strong>
Turkish-looking soldier wearing
a turban and holding a shield
decorated with three crescent
moons. The Kidders were a
distinguished local family, the
most famo<strong>us</strong> of whom went on
to become Bishop of Bath and
Wells. This was Richard Kidder,
a martyr to gout so debilitating
that he often had to be carried
to ordinations and debates at the
Ho<strong>us</strong>e of Lords. He was cr<strong>us</strong>hed
to death during the Great Storm
of November 1703, when a
chimney stack collapsed through
the roof of the Bishop’s Palace.
The gargoyled lodge at the
entrance to Maresfield Park was
built in 1847 to replace the old
‘streteho<strong>us</strong>e’. Sir John Shelley had
inherited the estate in 1814. Fond
of gambling and ‘trotting races’,
the implementation of proposed
renovations and extensions to his
property were often dependent
on the performance of his horses
on the flat. So in 1818 a new
conservatory was aborted when
‘Prince Paul’, favourite for The
Derby, only came in third. In
1824, by contrast, Sir John’s horse
‘Cedric’ won The Derby, and
some of the £8,000 prize money
was spent ensuring that the
coaching road was rerouted away
from his ho<strong>us</strong>e.
In October 1819, the Shelleys
welcomed the Duke of Wellington
to Maresfield. A shooting party,
laid on as entertainment, proved
eventful when the Duke’s
assessment of what constituted
a legitimate quarry turned out
to include one of the keepers, a
retriever and ‘an old woman who
chanced to be washing her clothes
at her cottage window’. No doubt
the Duke reacted with the same
insouciance that he showed when
characterising the destruction
of the Turkish Fleet, in time of
peace, at Navarino as ‘untoward
incidents’.
V I VA V I l l A G E s
The artist Edward Wadsworth
and his wife, the violinist Fanny
Eveleigh, moved to Dairy Farm
in Maresfield Park in 1927. The
tedio<strong>us</strong> attentions of agricultural
implements salesmen necessitated
a change of name to Dairy Ho<strong>us</strong>e.
While in Maresfield Wadsworth
worked on a design for a painting
for the cafeteria at the De La Warr
Pavilion and also produced large
paintings for the Smoking Room
in the new Cunard liner Queen
Mary; for the latter the Parish
Council allowed Wadsworth the
<strong>us</strong>e of the Village Hall.
To avoid unsympathetic
development, the Wadsworths
bought the ten acre meadow
next to Dairy Ho<strong>us</strong>e. Would
that their successors had shown
similar sensitivity! A more motley
collection of ho<strong>us</strong>es than those
disfiguring Maresfield Park today
is hard to imagine. In fact the
whole of Maresfield risks being
transformed from a village into
an executive dormitory. The
church and the Village Hall are
flourishing. There is still a village
shop, although if too many people
take up the offer of ‘free computer
training’ advertised outside, with
its touted benefit of ‘J<strong>us</strong>t think!
You could order your shopping
online’ it might not last much
longer. The Chequers has borne
little resemblance to a village
pub for some time <strong>now</strong> and the
advent of Marco Pierre White
is only likely to exacerbate the
problem. In fact the whole village
seemed pretty dead when I visited
but the Deputy Editor reports
an enth<strong>us</strong>iastic stoolball contest
in progress when she did the
restaurant review so perhaps I was
j<strong>us</strong>t unlucky. David Jarman
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