The artefacts here have been excavated from a spoil heap on the site of the old Gorringe’s Auction house in Lewes. The history of this part of the town is interesting. The site is between the modern day Tanners Brook, the SE corner of the Grange Gardens, the site of the old cattle market in Garden Street, Elm Grove and St Martin’s Lane. In medieval times there was a tannery on this site. By the late 1800s the Lewes cattle market took over the site, where an old Sussex flint barn stood. After WW1 the old chapel buildings from Seaford were purchased by the market in 1920 to house auctions of meat. In the 1930s slum clearance of Elm Grove meant the closure of the Grapevine Inn, moving cattle market drinkers to the Bell Inn in Eastport Lane. In WW2 bombing in this area saw the market storage sheds on the end of St Martin's Lane destroyed and an unexploded bomb sink into deep mud in the SE corner of the Grange Gardens, where it still sits today. When the market closed in the early 2000s, Gorringe’s auction house moved in; in 2016 they moved to North Street. The site is now about to be redeveloped.
I am one of the artists working together on A Place For Everything, the arts component of The Lewes Green Huts Project.
Further information is on Instagram (@corrugated_histories_lewes)
