East Grinstead

A number of important religious sites are located in East Grinstead.
L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, lived at Saint Hill, to the south of the town, and the manor is the British headquarters of the Church of Scientology.
To the north of the town is the Mormon London England Temple.
Opus Dei and the Rosicrucians both […]

The Greenwich Meridian passes through East Grinstead. You can see a marker in stone on a wall at the Chequer Mead Theatre and Arts centre.
The Prime Meridian, also known as the International Meridian or Greenwich Meridian, is the meridian (line of longitude) passing through the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Greenwich, England — it is the meridian […]

The High Street contains the longest continuous run of 14th-century timber-framed buildings in England.
A walk along the historic High Street will take you back through 800 years of Sussex heritage, it boasts many historic half timbered buildings and open hall houses in the UK. Some buildings date from the 15th and 16th […]

Anne Tree, Thomas Dunngate and John Forman were burned as Martyrs on 18 July 1556 because they would not renounce the Protestant Faith.
It should be remembered that the inscribed slabs in the churchyard of St. Swithun’s are only a memorial and that the ashes of the martyrs do not […]

Not sure when this map is from but if anyone has a date, leave a message below.

When war was declared in August 1914, there were only 750,000 men in the British Army. Lord Kitchener, Britain’s War Minister, decided that the the British Army needed another 500,000 men. By the end of August over 300,000 men had answered the call in army recruitment centres in Britain’s main towns and cities.
The first recruitment […]

After men joined the army they were sent to local army camps to be turned into soldiers. As experienced officers were needed in France to organise the war against the Germans, elderly people were bought out of retirement to train the men. These men were often over the age of sixty. One sixty five year […]

In February 1919 a German machine-gun was sent to East Grinstead in recognition of the town’s success in raising War Loans on behalf of the British government. At a meeting of the East Grinstead Urban Council, Joseph Rice and Alfred Burt complained that the town deserved something that could be placed on public exhibition in […]

Lord Kitchener was appointed Secretary for War in August 1914. His main task was to persuade men to join the British Army. At a meeting on the 19th August it was suggested by Sir Henry Rawlinson that men would be more willing to enlist if they knew they would serve with people they knew. Lord […]

On 9th July 1943, ten German aircraft crossed the Sussex coast at Hastings and headed for London. At 5.05 pm the air raid sirens sounded in East Grinstead. At the time 184 people were watching a film featuring Hopalong Cassidy in the Whitehall Cinema. A warning appeared on the screen that a German air raid […]