The beginning and end of the Mackie Estate. Ladies’ Mile clock tower was one of the first buildings to be completed, and sticks up like a sore thumb. There have been no clock towers built on Brighton’s estates since!
The photograph below, taken at the end of Mackie Avenue, shows the typical suburban road metalling of the period
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My parents bought 246 Mackie Avenue in 1972. I lived there until 1993, when I moved up to London. The old roundabout here is where my friends and I would play football. One summer we made a barricade across the road and tried to charge people 10p to move it for them. We never got any money as our barricade was rubbish. It was a fantastic place to grow up in as we had the Downs all around us, and a big cow field to explore. I remember in the mornings hearing the sound of the factory estate over the hill, with the siren going off for the start of the day’s work. So good to see the photos of my old stomping ground.
I grew up in 199 Mackie and played on the roundabout and on the Downs from when I was born 1979 to 1996 ish. I loved it, I remember the cowfield and the big gate that my mum very coolly vaulted over! There was a badger set in that field and me and my friends were sure there was badger baiting going on, so we kept watch and reported anything to our parents! I have lovely memories of playing in the summer evenings on the roundabout!
About 1947, when many of the fields in that area were recovering from the war, us kids from Hollingbury made the Mackie Avenue barn our ‘secret meeting place’. We got in by simply crawling through the gap beneath the barn doors. It was then full of woven wooden hurdles for sheep and bales of straw that we built into castles. Totally unaware of any danger, it was also where many kids hardly into their teens, had their first cigarette. Had an accident occurred, not only would the area have been a few kids short, but the barn would have been totally destroyed, and could never have become the impressive period residence it now is.
I read somewhere that the roundabout at the north end of Mackie Avenue was the site of an old dew pond where cattle and sheep on the old drove road to Lewes market would stop for water.
Early 20th century maps of the area show the dew pond at the roundabout site, then known as Eastwick Bottom; it was probably still there until 1935 when that end of the Ladies Mile Estate was completed.
When I was researching this area for my doctorate on Patcham many years ago, the older interviewees referred to that site as The Dew Pond.
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