Town in West Sussex, England
Horsham
Horsham gave the world the poet who wrote Ozymandias, a school where boys still march in Tudor uniform, and roofs made of stone slabs so heavy they can bend a building.
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Key information
- County
- West Sussex
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Horsham stone roofs, the Carfax, Christ's Hospital school, and Shelley
- What locals are called
- Horshamites
- Famous people
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Barnes Wallis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Football clubs
- Horsham FC (the Hornets)
About Horsham
The poet who started out down the road
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place in Warnham, a short walk from Horsham, and the town has never let him go. He grew up here, was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism, and went on to write Ozymandias, the sonnet about a ruined statue in the desert. Horsham Museum keeps his story alive. A modern fountain sculpture named for him, the Shelley Fountain (also called Rising Universe), stood in West Street until it was removed in 2016. Local lore says the young Shelley liked to scare his younger siblings with tales of a monstrous serpent lurking in the water near the family home. His family were well known in the area, and his father sat as an MP for the district. The poet turned out to be the rebellious one.
Roofs made of slabs of stone
Look up in the old streets and you will see Horsham's real signature. Horsham stone is a sandstone that splits into big, thick slabs, and for centuries it was used to roof local houses, barns and churches. The slabs are astonishingly heavy. Roofs built from them needed strong oak frames underneath, which is partly why so many old Horsham buildings have such sturdy timbers. Over the years the weight can make those timbers sag, giving rooflines their soft, undulating, mossy, lived-in look. The stone also helped shape Horsham's appearance and its trade. This was Wealden country, with iron-working in the nearby woods, and Horsham grew as a market town where the products of farm, forest and furnace changed hands.
A street that museums are made of
The Causeway is the town's prettiest street. It is a quiet, tree-lined approach to St Mary's Church, with timber-framed houses on one side, some of them medieval in origin. One of the best, Causeway House, is home to Horsham Museum, a place full of local oddities. At the other end sits the Carfax, the open square that has long been the heart of the town. It has a bandstand and a lot of café tables. This was the market place and the town's gathering point, and it still is. The church itself is large and old, with a spire that dominates the skyline for miles around.
Boys in Tudor uniform on the Sussex edge
In 1902 the famous school Christ's Hospital moved from London to a huge new site just outside Horsham. Its pupils still wear a long blue coat and yellow socks, a uniform based on the Tudor dress of the school's original boys when it was founded in 1552. The school's alumni include the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the engineer Barnes Wallis, the man behind the bouncing bomb of the Dambusters raid. Coleridge went to the original London school, while Wallis was among the pupils who attended later. The school even has its own railway station, Christ's Hospital, on the line south of Horsham. It is a rare thing for a school to have its own stop.
Beer, Hornets and cricket on the green
Horsham was once a serious brewing town. King & Barnes was formed in 1906 by the merger of King & Sons, whose business dated from 1850, and G. H. Barnes & Co. It made its Sussex Ale here until the brewery closed in 2000, and the name has been kept alive since by others. The town's main football club is Horsham FC, nicknamed the Hornets. Horsham also has a reputation for summer cricket, and Sussex County Cricket Club has played matches at the town's cricket ground. Locals, known as Horshamites, also enjoy Horsham Park, a big green space close to the centre, which makes the town feel less like a commuter hub and more like a market town that never quite stopped being one.