Michael Hall (school)

Forest Row is a village and a large civil parish in the Wealden District of East Sussex, England. The village is located three miles (5 km) south-east of East Grinstead. In January 2023, it ranked as Britain’s 3rd poshest village.

Forest Row was a railway station on the Three Bridges to Tunbridge Wells Central Line which closed in 1967, a casualty of the Beeching Axe.The station opened on 1 October 1866 and the buildings were designed by Charles Henry Driver.The station was one of the busiest of the intermediate stations on the line and was enlarged in 1897 with the addition of a new platform on the Down side, connected to the main station side via a footbridge. The station also had a goods shed and two sidings. Ironically, the station's final years saw an increased number of passengers using it as residential development took place around the old Forest Row village. In recognition of the increased patronage, commuter trains from London were extended from East Grinstead to terminate here. At the time of closure, Forest Row was taking over £5,000 per annum in revenue and 200 commuters were using the station to travel to London each day.After the station closed, it was used for the filming of an episode of the children's television programme Do Not Adjust Your Set in August/September 1967 featuring a young David Jason.[1] The site was then sold to a club for over £4,000 and the station buildings were quickly swept away. Nevertheless, a short section of the station platforms can still be found, and the goods shed stands together with other light industrial units. A brick-built coal merchant's office can also be found on Station Road.

Brambletye School is a coeducational day and boarding preparatory school in East Grinstead, West Sussex. It was founded as a small boys' boarding school in Kent between the world wars. The school moved to West Sussex and has since become coeducational.

Ashurst Wood is a village and civil parish in the Mid Sussex District of West Sussex, within the historic county of Sussex, England. It is 1 mile (2 km) to the southeast of East Grinstead, just off the A22 arterial road. In 2001, the population was 1,771, increasing to 1,833 at the 2011 Census. Ashurst Wood is within the High Weald Area of Natural Beauty and has an SSSI inside its boundaries. The village has a history of agriculture and farming, and contains a church, village hall, primary school, two public houses, a general shop, post office and several small business premises. There is an independent school on the boundary of the village, called Brambletye School, and a former one, Stoke Brunswick School (the former junior school of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill), which closed in 2009. Bus routes run through the village with destinations of East Grinstead, Crawley , Haywards Heath , Tunbridge Wells and Brighton.

Wych Cross is a location in Ashdown Forest, in the Wealden district of East Sussex. It lies on the sandstone forest ridge of the High Weald on the principal road from London to the east Sussex county town of Lewes at an elevated crossroads where it meets a road running east to west along the High Weald forest ridge. Wych Cross is situated about 36 miles south of London, roughly midway between London and the English Channel. The etymology of the place name (also spelt 'Wytch Cross' and 'Witch Cross' in documents of the early 19th century and earlier) is uncertain. "Wych" could be a variant of the common Old English placename "wic", denoting a homestead or settlement, it could possibly refer to a tree, the wych-elm, or it could refer to St. Richard de Wych, Bishop of Chichester.In the late 19th century a church dedicated to St. Richard de Wych was built east of Wych Cross by the then owner of the Ashdown Park estate, Thomas Charles Thompson, but it was never consecrated, and it was demolished in the 1970s. The Ashdown Forest Centre, the head office of the Conservators of Ashdown Forest, is situated at Wych Cross just half a mile east of the crossroads. It is housed in three historic Wealden barns—an Administration Barn, Information Barn (visitor centre) and Education Barn—that were conveyed to the site and rebuilt there in the early 1980s. Notable buildings at Wych Cross include the present hotel building (including a deconsecrated chapel containing eight Harry Clarke stained glass windows ) at Ashdown Park, and Wych Cross Place, built around 1900. A hymn tune named "WYCH CROSS" was composed by Erik Routley, who was born in Brighton, about 20 miles south of Wych Cross. In various DC Comics (notably Neil Gaiman's The Sandman) Wych Cross was the location of Fawney Rig, the Sussex manor house originally owned by John Constantine's ancestor Lady Johanna, and later by Roderick Burgess; and in which Dream was imprisoned for decades, along with the nearby old people's home in which Burgess's son, Alex, becomes a resident.

The Three Bridges–Tunbridge Wells line is a mostly disused railway line running from Three Bridges (on the Brighton Main Line) in West Sussex to Tunbridge Wells Central in Kent via East Grinstead in West Sussex (East Sussex pre-1974), a distance of 20 miles 74 chains (33.7 km). Opened in 1855, the main section of the line was a casualty of the Beeching Axe – the last train ran on 1 January 1967. The remaining section to Tunbridge Wells closed on 6 July 1985, although the section between Groombridge and Tunbridge Wells West was reopened in 1997 under the auspices of the Spa Valley Railway.

Ashdown Forest, a former royal hunting forest situated some 30 miles south-east of London, is a large area of lowland heathland whose ecological importance has been recognised by its designation as a UK Site of Special Scientific Interest and by the European Union as a Special Protection Area for birds and a Special Area of Conservation for its heathland habitats, and by its membership of Natura 2000, which brings together Europe's most important and threatened wildlife areas. Ashdown Forest lies within the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, "...one of the best surviving, intact medieval landscapes in Northern Europe", characterised by rolling hills, steep-sided ghyll streams, sandstone outcrops, nationally high woodland cover, many interconnected ancient woods, narrow sunken lanes, scattered farmsteads and hamlets, small irregular-shaped fields, and open heaths, of which Ashdown is the greatest example. The forest's distinctive open heathland landscape with its hilltop clumps of conifer trees has been immortalised in the illustrations provided by EH Shepard for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories of A. A. Milne, who lived on the northern edge of the forest at Chuck Hatch.

Ashdown Forest is an ancient area of open heathland occupying the highest sandy ridge-top of the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is situated some 30 miles (48 km) south of London in the county of East Sussex, England. Rising to an elevation of 732 feet (223 m) above sea level, its heights provide expansive vistas across the heavily wooded hills of the Weald to the chalk escarpments of the North Downs and South Downs on the horizon. Ashdown Forest's origins lie as a medieval hunting forest created soon after the Norman conquest of England. By 1283 the forest was fenced in by a 23 miles (37 km) pale enclosing an area of some 20 square miles (52 km2; 13,000 acres; 5,200 ha). Thirty-four gates and hatches in the pale, still remembered in place names such as Chuck Hatch and Chelwood Gate, allowed local people to enter to graze their livestock, collect firewood, and cut heather and bracken for animal bedding. The forest continued to be used by the monarchy and nobility for hunting into Tudor times, including notably Henry VIII, who had a hunting lodge at Bolebroke Castle, Hartfield and who courted Anne Boleyn at nearby Hever Castle. Ashdown Forest has a rich archaeological heritage. It contains much evidence of prehistoric human activity, with the earliest evidence of human occupation dating back to 50,000 years ago. There are important Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Romano-British remains. The forest was the centre of a nationally important iron industry on two occasions, during the Roman occupation of Britain and in the Tudor period when, in 1496, England's first blast furnace was built at Newbridge, near Coleman's Hatch, marking the beginning of Britain's modern iron and steel industry. In 1693, more than half the forest was taken into private hands, with the remainder set aside as common land. The latter today covers 9.5 square miles (25 km2; 6,100 acres; 2,500 ha) and is the largest area with open public access in South East England. The ecological importance of Ashdown Forest's heathlands is reflected by its designation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, as a Special Protection Area for birds, and as a Special Area of Conservation for its heathland habitats. It is part of the European Natura 2000 network as it hosts some of Europe's most threatened species and habitats.Ashdown Forest is famous for serving as inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood, the setting for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories written by A. A. Milne. Milne lived on the northern edge of the forest and took his son, Christopher Robin, walking there. The artist E. H. Shepard drew on the landscapes of Ashdown Forest as inspiration for many of the illustrations he provided for the Pooh books.

Stoke Brunswick School was a small co-educational day and boarding independent school for children aged 3 to 13 years, situated in Ashurst Wood, West Sussex, near the town of East Grinstead. It was the former junior school (after St. George's School in Ascot, Berkshire), of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (then known as Brunswick School and located in Hove, neighbouring Brighton). The last headmaster was Richard Taylor. who took over from Mark Ellerton in 2005. Before closing, the school had 138 pupils. Stoke Brunswick School closed in the summer of 2009 because the forecast pupil intake for September was "not adequate". Despite their best efforts to secure the school's future, including a six figure financial pledge, the parents fell just short of numbers for it to continue.

Emerson College, UK was founded in 1962 by Francis Edmunds. It is now situated on Pixton Hill, Forest Row in East Sussex, UK. It was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and transcendentalist. For the past c.60 years there has been an international community of students, teachers, and researchers living and studying on the site inspired by the philosophy and teachings of Rudolf Steiner—which he called Anthroposophy. A book on the history of Emerson College was published in 2013.

Weir Wood Reservoir is a 153.5-hectare (379-acre) biological Site of Special Scientific Interest west of Forest Row in East Sussex. It is in High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and an area of 32.6 hectares (81 acres) is a Local Nature Reserve which is owned by Southern Water and managed by East Sussex County Council and Southern Water.This is one of the largest bodies of open water in the county and it has rich and diverse communities of breeding, wintering and passage birds. Breeding birds include great crested grebe, teal, mute swan, tufted duck, little grebe, reed warbler, sedge warbler, coot and moorhen.Weir Wood is also home to a sailing club and a fishing lodge.

Birch Grove, Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, England is a country house dating from 1926. It was the family home of the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, Earl of Stockton, who died there in 1986. During Macmillan's time, Charles De Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nikita Khrushchev, Jawaharlal Nehru and John F. Kennedy stayed as guests at Birch Grove. The house is now owned by the Scottish entrepreneur James Hay. Birch Grove is a Grade II listed building.