Crawley Photos “26”
At our AGM in May 2026, the Crawley Village Hall Trustees announced this exciting project – which is being led by our enthusiastic historian/archivist Tessa Campbell!
In our Village Library (based in the Village Hall) there is a fascinating section devoted to memorabilia of the village including Ernest Philippi’s ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs of the Crawley houses he had renovated in the early 1900’s, and a picture album created in the year 2000 with photographs of over 130 houses in Crawley Parish.
This album, together with a questionnaire covering a range of subjects, formed part of the analysis at the end of David Dunbar’s excellent history of Crawley Parish, published in 2000, a few copies of which are still available in the Church.
We decided we couldn’t wait another 100 years, so we are proposing to create our own pictorial record of Crawley Parish as it is in 2026, and we hope that many of you will be willing to participate in this project. We’d love to have at least 50% of residents to come on board to make it really worthwhile.
Over the summer we’ll be collating the information provided with a view to having a finished portfolio by early autumn. This will then be stored with the rest of the village memorabilia in the Library for the pleasure of our residents. We are sure Alison and Angie (the Village Hall librarians) will be very happy to show you where it is!
Click here for an example of what a page will look like, in the case of a house which, for the 2000 picture album, had both a historic photo and a personal comment from the owners at the time.
And click here for a list of all the properties for which photos were included in the 2000 album – indicating for each house whether there was a historic photo and/or a personal comment. (A few properties may have changed name since 2000 – for these we have used the names in the 2000 album.)
If you are interested in taking part in this project, please complete a very short online form to say so, including indicating whether you’d like to take your own photo of your house (we’ll email you a copy of what’s in the 2000 album so you can take a similar image) or have it taken by one of the project team – and whether you’d like to include a comment and/or take part in a short survey for the album.
The form can be accessed using this link: https://tinyurl.com/Crawley26 or by scanning the QR code below.
