Ancient Priors

The George Hotel, also known as the George Inn and now marketed as the Ramada Crawley Gatwick, is a hotel and former coaching inn on the High Street in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. The George was one of the country's most famous and successful coaching inns, and the most important in Sussex, because of its location halfway between the capital city, London, and the fashionable seaside resort of Brighton. Cited as "Crawley's most celebrated building", it has Grade II* listed status. It is known that a building called the George has existed on the site since the 16th century or earlier, and many sources date the core of the existing inn to 1615. The George Hotel has three principal sections, facing east and running from south to north parallel with Crawley High Street. Nothing of the exterior is original, except perhaps for parts of the tiled roof. The hotel contains 84 rooms and 6 meeting rooms with a capacity of up to 150, regularly used for conferences, weddings, exhibitions, seminars and training sessions. The present structure is made up of disparate parts of various dates: the inn expanded to take in adjacent buildings as its success grew in the 18th and 19th centuries. Major changes took place in the 1930s, and the annex was knocked down in 1933. The inn has been associated with royalty, bareknuckle prizefighting, smuggling among other things, and has been the subject of novels and paintings. It was central to the plot of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mystery novel Rodney Stone, written in 1896. John George Haigh, a notorious serial killer in the 1940s known for his "acid bath" murders, stayed at the hotel on numerous occasions, and dined there on the day he killed one of his victims. The hotel is also reputedly haunted by the ghost of a nightwatchman, Mark Hurston (or Hewton) and other curious figures.

The White Hart Inn, also known as the White Hart Hotel, is a coaching inn on the High Street in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. Built in the late 18th century to replace an older inn also under the sign of the White Hart, it also served as Crawley's main post office for most of the 19th century, and still operates as a public house in the 21st century. Its partly timber-framed structure, which incorporates part of an early 17th-century building, is characteristic of the area. It is designated a Grade II Listed building.

St John the Baptist's Church is an Anglican church in Crawley, West Sussex, England. It is the parish church of Crawley, and is the oldest building in the town centre, dating from the 1250—although many alterations have been made since, and only one wall remains of the ancient building. In September 2017, a team from St Peter's Brighton began a new phase in the life of St John's Crawley. St John's offer a variety of services, traditional and informal, contemporary services. St John's is a Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB) network church.

The Brewery Shades is a public house on the High Street in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. The building, which stands on a corner site at the point where the town's ancient High Street meets the commercial developments of the postwar New Town, has been altered and extended several times; but at its centre is a 15th-century timber-framed open hall-house of a type common in the Crawley area in the Middle Ages. Few now survive, and the Brewery Shades has been protected as a Grade II listed building.

The Old Punch Bowl is a medieval timber-framed Wealden hall-house on the High Street in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. Built in the early 15th century, it was used as a farmhouse by about 1600, passing through various owners and sometimes being used for other purposes. Since 1929 it has been in commercial use—firstly as a tearoom, then as a bank, and since 1994 as a public house. When built, it was one of at least five similar hall-houses in the ancient parish of Crawley; it is now one of the oldest and best-preserved buildings in Crawley town centre.

The Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony is a Roman Catholic church in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. The town's first permanent place of Roman Catholic worship was founded in 1861 next to a friary whose members, from the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, had been invited to the area by a wealthy local family of Catholic converts. Crawley's transformation from a modest market town to a rapidly growing postwar New Town in the mid-20th century made a larger church necessary, and in the late 1950s the ecclesiastical architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel was commissioned to build a new church. The friary closed in 1980 and has been demolished, but the large brick church still stands in a commanding position facing the town centre. English Heritage has listed the building at Grade II for its architectural and historical importance.

Tree House, also known as The Tree, is a medieval timber-framed house on the High Street in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. It is the original manor house of Crawley, and was built in the early 15th century and rebuilt in the mid-16th century. It now has a modern exterior, but the old structure is still in place inside. Situated in a prominent position facing both the High Street and The Boulevard, two of Crawley town centre's main roads, its name commemorates an ancient elm tree which stood outside for hundreds of years and was one of Crawley's landmarks.Tree House is currently occupied by the Crawley Museum.

Crawley railway station is a railway station serving the town of Crawley in West Sussex, England. It is 30 miles 49 chains (49.3 km) down the line from London Bridge, measured via Redhill. It is operated by Southern. The station is the last stop on the Arun Valley Line before it joins the Brighton Main Line.

The Dyers Almshouses are a group of 30 almshouses belonging to the Worshipful Company of Dyers, a London Livery Company. Built in three stages between 1939 and 1971, they are located close to the town centre of Crawley, a New Town and borough in West Sussex, England. The distinctive Arts and Crafts-influenced buildings are arranged around a courtyard on a street close to Crawley town centre, and have been granted conservation area and locally listed building status.

Crawley (pronunciation ) is a large town and borough in West Sussex, England. It is 28 miles (45 km) south of London, 18 miles (29 km) north of Brighton and Hove, and 32 miles (51 km) north-east of the county town of Chichester. Crawley covers an area of 17.36 square miles (44.96 km2) and had a population of 106,597 at the time of the 2011 Census. The area has been inhabited since the Stone Age, and was a centre of ironworking in Roman times. Crawley developed slowly as a market town from the 13th century, serving the surrounding villages in the Weald. Its location on the main road from London to Brighton brought passing trade, which encouraged the development of coaching inns. A rail link to London opened in 1841. Gatwick Airport, nowadays one of Britain's busiest international airports, opened on the edge of the town in the 1940s, encouraging commercial and industrial growth. After the Second World War, the British Government planned to move large numbers of people and jobs out of London and into new towns around South East England. The New Towns Act 1946 designated Crawley as the site of one of these. A master plan was developed for the establishment of new residential, commercial, industrial and civic areas, and rapid development greatly increased the size and population of the town over a few decades. The town contains 14 residential neighbourhoods radiating out from the core of the old market town, and separated by main roads and railway lines. The nearby communities of Ifield, Pound Hill and Three Bridges were absorbed into the new town at various stages in its development. In 2009, expansion was being planned in the west and north-west of the town, in cooperation with Horsham District Council, which has now become a new neighbourhood named Kilnwood Vale, but it is not in Crawley. Economically, the town has developed into the main centre of industry and employment between London and the south coast. Its large industrial area supports manufacturing and service companies, many of them connected with the airport. The commercial and retail sectors continue to expand.

Southgate & Crawley Central is an electoral division of West Sussex in the United Kingdom, and returns one member to sit on West Sussex County Council.

Southgate is one of the 14 residential neighbourhoods in Crawley, a town and borough in West Sussex, England. Crawley was planned and laid out as a New Town after the Second World War, based on the principle of self-contained neighbourhoods surrounding a town centre of civic and commercial buildings. Southgate was one of the four in the "inner ring" closest to the town centre, and was intended to be the largest of the nine designed in the original master plan. It was built in two stages between the 1950s and the 1970s, but retains some older buildings from before the New Town era and has "significant areas of pre-New Town character".The area was settled by pre-Roman people, and industrial and other artefacts from that era were found during construction of the neighbourhood. In the 19th century, after Crawley was connected to the national railway network, housing developed south of the line around the Brighton Road, which divides the modern neighbourhood in two. New Town-era expansion produced a large residential area with a high proportion of terraced houses and a range of schools, places of worship and community facilities; but some historic buildings and areas of open space remain, including an award-winning park. The population at the time of the United Kingdom Census 2011 was 8,533.