Data copyright © Sussex Archaeological Society unless otherwise stated
This work is licensed under the ADS Terms of Use and Access.
Jaime
Kaminski
Sussex Archaeological Society
Barbican House
169 High Street
Lewes
BN8 1YE
For some time Steyning’s missing market-house posed a problem: it seemed strange that a town with a market history that reached back before the Norman Conquest had no apparent trace, in physical or documentary terms, of the centrally-placed market hall so typical of other English towns. A Catalogue of the Horsham Museum Mss., however, intriguingly contained a reference to late-eighteenth-century papers containing ‘much detail about Steyning Town Hall’. Since a Town Hall at 38 High Street was built in 1886, in the late-nineteenth century it was not clear what this other building could be. Thus Steyning’s ‘lost’ market-house or ‘Town Hall’ was revealed. Anna Butler had referred to it briefly in her book on Steyning published c. 1913 with no sources listed, but her statement had later been discounted as an error.