During the last five years we have restored many historic photographs which capture the local history of our village. Nigel is the owner of Nutley Motor Services and he is fascinated by the history of the buildings that are now his premises. So he asked us to restore and frame many of these photographs to display in his main reception area.

This is Nigel’s story:

Well Richard, those amazing photos that we got you to restore and that you somehow managed to work your magic on have a very interesting history attached to them.

There were three key extremely wealthy people back in the late 1800’s that basically pretty much owned most of the land and properties in and around the Nutley and Sheffield Park area. Lady Castle Stewart, who owned the Old Lodge and a large chunk of the Ashdown Forest, John Nettlefold (junior), who owned the Chelwood Vachery up on the Forest, his land went right across to Chelwood Gate, and Albert Turner senior and Albert Turner junior who owned Sheffield Saw Mills, are the people where the main pieces of the jigsaw back in the day and what a rich pattern of life was to unfold.

The Turners were felling down huge areas of forest in around Sheffield Park and the surrounding area, preparing the timber and transporting it to London by rail from Sheffield Park, now known as the Bluebell Railway. As time went by, they found that they had to go further afield to find more timber, which added to the cost of transporting it back to Sheffield Park to send on to London.

That’s where these photographs, that you kindly did for Nutley Motor Services reception area display come into play.

Albert Turner junior, being young and enthusiastic, with grand ideas, stumbles across a large pond in Nutley, Perfect he thought for running his newly acquired steam engines for sawing up the timber in and around the Nutley area, so he acquired the land for a small fee, but would have been a reasonable amount of money back then. He purchased which is now the A22, the land from the A22 and out to Nether Lane and down to Fords Green Nutley, the A22 was just a dirt/mud track back then.

He then built the buildings, now know has Nutley Motor Services on the edge of the pond, as the photographs now show in NMS reception. Hence it was from then on known as the Timber Yard.

Over the years he built his managers and some of his senior employees, foresters’ cottages on the surrounding land around the Timber yard.

Then came his biggest hurdle, his grand idea!

Which is one of the main reasons that he purchased the Timber Yard land and was to apply to have a railway line run across the Ashdown Forest to Edenbridge, so as to ship his freshly cut and sawn timber from the rich forests of Nutley to London.

It’s amazing when you think about it, people come and go, buildings and business disappear, or the buildings are altered, like Nutley Motor Services, Mid Sussex Garage of Chelwood Gate, not to mention how many pubs have been turned into dwellings over the years.

If it wasn’t for photographs, this history would be lost for good!