Crawley Old Town: SEVEN PICTURES: The Tree

Tree House, also known as The Tree, is a medieval timber-framed house on the High Street. It is the original manor house of Crawley, and was built in the early 15th century and rebuilt in the mid-16th century. It now has a modern exterior and is disused, but the old structure is still in place inside.

In the mid-16th century, in the midst of a period of rapid construction in Crawley, the building was substantially extended. Around this time, brick started to replace timber as the predominant building material in the area; the extension used timber, but soon afterwards a brick "skin" was added around the exterior. This remains in place today.

By the 18th century, Tree House lost its original use and passed into private ownership as part of the Worth Park estate, a country estate which covered large parts of Crawley (which was by this time a small town). By 1780 the building had started its long association with the medical profession: it was home to a family of doctors for about 130 years!

Externally, Tree House has no pre-19th century features, but the original hall house remains inside the external brickwork. It occupies an L-shaped corner plot and consists of a Great hall (south to north, facing High Street) and a solar (west to east, facing the Boulevard). There is a Sussex stone chimney breast at the corner. The solar is in better condition, and has three bays and substantial exposed roof trusses with king-posts and tie-beams. The roofline is lower than that of the Great hall section, which is partly covered with slabs of Horsham stone, a material used often in the area. The 18th-century work added a new wing on the west side; changes were made at the northern end in the following century; and the most recent remodelling in 1936 resulted in more changes on this side. The windows are now boarded up, but most were modern.

Until the late 20th century, a large barn-style hall stood in the gardens behind Tree House. It was built in the early 15th century as a moot hall—a mediaeval meeting place for villagers to discuss issues. The two-storey timber-framed building had four bays on the ground floor and a long room on the first floor. Threatened with demolition and replacement by an office block extension in the 1970s, it was instead dismantled, transported to the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum at Singleton and rebuilt there. At the museum, the building is now called the "Upper Hall".

The building's name, which seems to have been used from early in its history, refers to one of Crawley's oldest and most longstanding landmarks. The "Crawley Elm" stood immediately opposite; an ancient, substantial tree, it predated the building. A historical work about the county of Sussex published in 1835 devoted almost all of its summary of Crawley to a discussion of the tree. Another 19th-century author of a work about trees described its "tall, straight stem which ascends to a height of 70 feet ... [and] the fantastic ruggedness of its roots". At that time its trunk had been partly hollowed out to form a small room which was used for various purposes: as a temporary lodging place for travellers to stay overnight; as a meeting room; and as a billet. The room had a circumference of about 35 feet, a door and some brickwork. Although the tree was already dying at this stage, parts of it remained until the New Town started to be built in the 1940s.