I spent a lovely, blue-skied morning walking around Shoreham-by-Sea yesterday, conducting a survey for OpenStreetMap. The purpose of the survey was mainly to look at the shops and businesses in the centre, with a definite side quest to sit with a coffee and almond croissant and do some people-watching, if the opportunity should present itself.
I parked up in the Shoreham beach area, the finger of land beneath the town ‘proper’ that ends in the hard nail of Shoreham fort. I did this to avoid time pressures in town centre car parks and cost, while also noting that I could whip out StreetComplete on the walk into town and note some house numbers.
Many of the houses along the river have beach gardens, by which I mean those kinds of garden that are curated rather than grown. You start with a base of gravel instead of a lawn, and you arrange larger stones and rockery plants. The top layer is accumulated ‘findings,’ the treasure you gather from long walks along the beach, such as driftwood, colourful stones and maybe an old fisherman’s float.
When you walk north across the Adur Ferry Bridge, you come into Shoreham town and here, you note that nearly everything you see is so old that most of what you observe has changed in both name and purpose over the last several hundred years.
None of the streets have their original names, as a second sign on each street will cheerfully proclaim. Church Street was originally Star Lane, named for the pub, West Street was formerly White Lion Street, named for the pub, and so on. Even the High Street, which you’d imagine had been that since time immemorial, was originally Procession Street, after the pub (well, maybe not in that case!)
This re-purposing extends to the buildings. The oldest buildings along the High Street seem to be two old cottages from 1706, which are now the Indian Cottage Tandoori. The brightly-painted Ferry Inn, established 1731, seems to be the exception to the rule here, as even the Town Hall has become the Funky Dragon Chinese restaurant.
One of the joys of this change of use is spotting the history in the bones of the buildings, which generally involves looking up at the rooflines instead of down at the pavement. Up on the second or third storeys, along the gables or inter-window plaster work, you’ll see ghost signs and old house names, hidden from those who are simply seeking shop signs.
Further up East Street, we come across the church of St. Mary de Haura. I have no idea how to pronounce this, so I always have a schoolboy snigger at the imagined etymology, much worse than the ‘Mary at the Harbour’ reality.
Just north-east of here we have St Mary’s House, where a blue plaque informs us that this was the original school of St. Mary and St. Nicolas that would later grow and move up the road to become Lancing College.
To the east, down St. Mary’s Road, we see the Methodist Church, which I photographed in an attempt to make sense of the single building blob that currently appears on OpenStreetMap. It looks, for all the world, as if they have a very modern and sophisticated method of talking to God but this impression is dispelled when you walk behind and see that the various antennas are actually plomped on the Telephone Exchange. A friend of mind used to work for BT and he always said “Look for the ugliest building in any town; that’s the Telephone Exchange.” The irony of this is that we both used to live in Crawley, where applying this rule would lead you to the conclusion that the entire bloody town is a Telephone Exchange.
I had my coffee and almond croissant at the River Cafe in the High Street. I took 230 photographs over the course of three hours and had 151 of them rejected by Panoramax as being too close to each other. I guess that’s the penalty of walking pace. However, the photos informed six hours of editing OpenStreetMap yesterday evening and this morning, so I rate that as a grand day.