The Nursery House in the 1940-50s

Mike Glazier’s notes (HERE) on number 27 brought back a few memories as I used to live in the laundry house next door in the 1940’s & 1950’s. Number 27 was owned and lived in by Mr & Mrs Spiers who ran the nursery behind which has now been totally taken over by Tates Garage. A quiet couple – I remember him as a hard working, short and wiry man with black curly hair, a thick Sussex accent and inevitably wearing a waistcoat and brown cavalry twill trouser tucked into wellington boots.

No unusual experiences
Although they seemed to me at the time to be a little introvert they were mostly always pleasant (except, understandably, when my football kept going over the wall into their back garden) and I never heard or knew of anything strange or untoward that might account for the strange experiences that Mike may have known when he lived there. The only unusual incident I recall was early one morning when a stray cow (the countryside and farmland were closer then) somehow found it’s way into the Spier’s front garden eating all their flowers and trampling on his lovely lawn!

A magnet for kids
Incidentally, I see that my cousin Rick Green in Australia, added a few notes about the land between the laundry and the twitten on the boundary with Southwick. The waste land between the shops there once held a huge, dried up water tank originally built to store water in case of fires caused by bombing during the war. Inevitably it was used to dump rubbish and became a magnet for us kids to play in but was eventually filled in by the council after a number of us contracted scarlet fever from it.