Postcard of the Month: February 2025
/The Railway Hotel, Pulborough
This printed postcard, publisher unidentified, was probably produced around or just after WW1. The vehicle on the right indicates this era. The railway bridge in the background crosses the main road and leads to the station. The building faced Station Approach where cattle markets were held every fortnight until the 1950s.
The proprietor Percy Kitchin (wrongly spelt on the card) ran the hotel with his wife for 25 years. Percy was also an enthusiastic garage owner, an early Austin dealer, and responsible for the Swan Garage in Pulborough. He died in 1935. A press obituary recalled how the hotel was a meeting place for farmers from the district attending the markets, and that his interests extended to the garage which was purchased from the family in 1935 to become part of the Dreadnought group of Brighton.
In 1945 the building was renamed The Pulborough Hotel and then became the Water’s Edge in 1966, reflecting the presence of a small inlet from the Arun behind it. This served as a haven for small craft, as shown in the two different views from postcards of the 1960s.
There was also a field between the hotel and the river which, by the 1980s, possessed a rudimentary slipway. This was the original venue for launching boat rallies up the river to Pallingham, organised by the Solent and Arun branch of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA). Those rallies provided the opportunity for my early trips up the Arun in my folding dinghy Frog, starting in 1982. These eventually led to much of the groundwork for this website. More information about Frog can be found here.
The hotel was closed in 1995 and the building demolished in 1997 to be replaced by a housing complex. The remnants of the inlet became a small lagoon within this complex.