Haywards Heath; Saturday, 20 April, 2024

Along with being a commuter town, it’s also a quite well-off and car rich commuter town, which means that the public transport connections on a Saturday aren’t the greatest (and even worse on a Sunday). To get to my first destination of the morning I had two options. I could wait for the first direct bus of the morning, and get there not much before midday, or I could catch a bus into the main town for this part of Sussex, Crawley, and change there for another bus that would get me to my first stop just after it opened at 10am, so just before 9am I was on a bus for the start of a 20 mile and 80 minute journey to go what should have been a 7 mile and 25 minute journey!

After a quick change of bus in Crawley I hopped off the second bus in Handcross and walked the short distance to the National Trust Gardens at Nymans. This large park, garden and ruined house was gifted to the trust in 1953.

The site was originally a country estate and passed through various hands until 1947 when, whilst owned by Colonel Leonard Messel, a devastating fire ripped through the house reducing it to a romantic ruin. Leonards daughter and son-in-law helped build a small single storey property within the ruins, but on Leonards death in 1953 everything was left to the National Trust. The building has been kept as it was in 1953 as a large ruin with a small cosy bungalow inside it.

The main draw of the site, though, are the gardens which cover about 600 acres of rolling Sussex Weald and have several different areas to explore including an impressive rock garden, a very pretty main lawn which benefits from the romantic ruin of the house, as well as walled gardens, a rose garden and a large wildflower meadow.

Also, being a National Trust site it benefits from an excellent café which I visited before it was time to head back to the bus stop and start retracing my steps. Once again the public transport infrastructure of Northeast West Sussex not helping. A 10 mile 20 minute cross country journey instead turned into a 2 hour journey having to head back into Crawley, wait over an hour for the connecting bus and then continuing on to Wakehurst Place Estate.

Wakehurst Place is a much older site than Nymans, being home to a grand Elizabethan mansion house in 490 acres of land. The land and house eventually passed to Sir Henry Price a man who had made his money by bringing affordable tailoring to the masses through his Fifty Shilling Suits (£2.50, but closer to £70 in 2024 when adjusted for purchasing power over the intervening years.) When he died in 1963 he left the house and gardens to the nation and it passed into the ownership of the National Trust. However, just two years later the National Trust leased the site to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, to create a home away from London for wild gardens and some of the national tree collections.

It means that whilst the house (albeit closed and undergoing major renovation when I visited) and grounds are technically part of Kew, National Trust members get free entry as it’s still an NT property.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the site, and could have spent longer if it wasn’t for the fact that the site was due to close at 18:00, and the last bus back to Haywards Heath was at 17:41

I hopped off that bus in Lindfield, a small settlement around a very picturesque village pond about a mile and a half out of Haywards Heath to have a look around and take some photos. I was prepared to walk back to the hotel as it was all downhill, but it turned out that Lindfield has an enhanced bus service, with two later busses than Ardingly where Wakehurst is located, so I was able to catch the bus back into Haywards Heath. I stayed on the bus to go up the hill from the station to the main part of town sitting on a hill that the railway tunnels under to have a look around the area up here, but apart from a pretty church and a large park there wasn’t much more to see.

It did give me a few more options for dinner before I walked back down the hill to the station and my hotel before turning in for the night.