White Hart Inn, Crawley
White Hart Inn, CrawleyThe White Hart Inn, also known as the White Hart Hotel, is a coaching inn on the High Street in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. Built in the late 18th century to replace an older inn also under the sign of the White Hart, it also served as Crawley's main post office for most of the 19th century, and still operates as a public house in the 21st century. Its partly timber-framed structure, which incorporates part of an early 17th-century building, is characteristic of the area. It is designated a Grade II Listed building.
Crawley developed slowly as a Wealden market town and ironmaking centre, focused on its north–south High Street, from the 13th century onwards. This street formed part of the main road from the capital city, London, to the increasingly fashionable seaside resort of Brighton. After the road was turnpiked in stages between the late 17th century and the mid-18th century, Crawley's position almost exactly halfway between the two allowed it to develop a prominent new role as a convenient stop for stagecoach passengers and drivers. By the late 18th century, it had become Sussex's main staging-post for journeys to and from London, as the neighbouring towns of Horsham and East Grinstead fell out of favour.
To fulfil this role, Crawley needed plenty of venues to entertain guests for a few hours or overnight, with rooms to accommodate overnight stops and facilities for changing teams of horses. Several medieval buildings on the High Street, such as the George Hotel, the Ancient Priors and the Old Punch Bowl, met this need to some extent, but none were built for that purpose: all had been adapted from existing structures with different uses. The Ancient Priors was built as a house with a small agricultural plot; the Old Punch Bowl had been a large farmhouse; and although the George had always been an inn, it expanded gradually and haphazardly across several neighbouring buildings. The Ancient Priors in particular was too small to meet the demand for its facilities. In 1753—at which point it was operating under the name The White Hart—it was sold, and soon afterwards became a farm. The proceeds were used to build a new White Hart Inn. A site 70 yards (64 m) further north on the High Street was selected; this was large enough to provide both a bigger building and a substantial area at the rear for the stabling of horses. Most sources agree that the new White Hart Inn opened in 1770, although some identify 1790 as the date. Architectural studies made in 1995 and 2003 attributed a date of around 1600 to the southern part of the building, suggesting that the inn was built around the core of an older structure.
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