Summersdale Neighbourhood Character Appraisal - west lavant

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To the west of the Lavant Road, Warren Farm consisted of 67 acres
bounded to the north by Lavant Common, and to the south by Brandy Hole
Lane. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners, having taken the land over in
January 1870, sold it freehold a few months later to Robert Dendy, a local
banker, for £1,137.7s. He revitalised the farm and completed a period of re-
building by the early 1880s when the farm had to support six families.

The farm changed hands twice through widow Matilda Bagot in 1882 and
Charles Ormerod, who inherited when Matilda died in 1889, before Henry
Halsted bought it in 1894. Halsted was the owner of a local ironmongers,
and iron and brass foundry in South Pallant. He died in 1911 followed by his
wife Margaret in 1919.

The farm was auctioned in October 1919 but remained unsold. The 1920s
was still not a good time for farming, but Chichester was expanding and
there was demand for good quality housing. The property was divided into
individual but generous building plots along the Lavant Road, Brandy Hole
Lane, Warren Farm Lane, and what became known as Hunters Way. The
Warren, its drive, buildings, grounds and Warren Lodge were excluded, as
were fields on either side of the Chichester-Midhurst railway. The building
plots, all with the same Restrictive Covenants, were sold off in the 1920s
and 30s. (Stride’s plots on the other side of the Lavant Road, with similar
covenants, were sold a few years earlier).

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In the 1860s, the Chichester to Midhurst railway was planned to cross under
Brandy Hole Lane and bisect Warren Farm on its way to Lavant, Midhurst
and Haslemere. It was to be a ‘contractors’ line, built by a group of
speculators for sale to an established railway company. The first sod was
turned by Lord Henry Lennox (MP for Chichester) in April 1865, but the
Haslemere section was officially abandoned in 1868. Financial and legal
wrangles continued to create severe delays and a second Parliamentary Bill

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