Pease Pottage
| Pease Pottage | |
|---|---|
 The Black Swan Inn in the centre of the village |
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 Pease Pottage
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| Pease Pottage shown within West Sussex | |
| OS grid reference | TQ255325 |
| Civil parish | |
| District | |
| Shire county | |
| Region | |
| Country | England |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Post town | Crawley |
| Postcode district | RH11 |
| Dialling code | 01293 |
| Police | Sussex |
| Fire | West Sussex |
| Ambulance | South East Coast |
| EU Parliament | South East England |
| UK Parliament | |
For the pudding dish of the same name, see Pease pudding
Pease Pottage is a small village in the Mid Sussex District of West Sussex, England. It lies on the southern edge of the Crawley built up area, in the civil parish of Slaugham.
Pease Pottage is familiar to many drivers for its motorway service station, named after the village, which also serves as a local shop (Marks and Spencer Simply Food and W H Smith) for the residents of the village (a footpath was constructed to allow pedestrian access from the village). It is located at the junction of the M23 and the A23 on the London to Brighton road, where the A264 to Horsham joins.
The village itself has a florist's shop, a pub, a car breaker's yard, playing fields, a golf driving range (currently closed) and course (also closed), some small industrial units and offices. The Church of the Ascension, a chapel of ease to St Mary's Church in Slaugham, opened in 1875 but is no longer in use.
The Pease Pottage Radar is located around half a mile west of Pease Pottage, and is visible from much of the village. It is an Air Traffic Control Radar for NATS and takes advantage of a position 460 feet (140 m) above sea level, some 250 feet (76 m) above the nearby Gatwick Airport.
Pease Pottage is also an old name for pease pudding. It has been said that the village name came from serving Pease Pottage to convicts either on their way from London to the South Coast or from East Grinstead to Horsham although this seems implausible and it is not clear why convicts would travel along either route. The name Pease Pottage Gate first appears on Budgen's Map of Sussex made in 1724 at the southern end of a road from Crawley where it met the Ridgeway, and is on the border of the parishes of Slaugham and Worth. This is prior to the turnpikes (1771), and so was not a toll gate. It was probably a gate between St Leonard's Forest and Tilgate Forest (part of Worth Forest), and probably a reference to soft muddy ground. Many local villages have Gate as part of the name (Tilgate, Colgate, Faygate etc.). The name is not on Speed's map of 1610 (surveyed in the 1590s). Gate was dropped from the name when the tollgate was removed in 1877.
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