Brewery Shades

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.

Crawley was granted a charter for a weekly market in 1202. Thereafter, what had been a village, on the London–Brighton road halfway between the two places, slowly grew into a market town and a centre for agriculture and ironworking. As the area became more prosperous, several timber-framed open hall-houses were built on both sides of the High Street . These "Wealden hall-houses"—the design of which allowed smoke from open fires to rise through the hall and disperse readily—were common in the Weald of Kent and Sussex, and five have been documented in Crawley. One such building was the Shades , which was built in the 15th century. Estimates of the date range from "1450 or a little earlier" to c. 1500.

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