The History of 15 Lewes Crescent

Sale Particulars

LEWES CRESCENT, KEMP TOWN. NOBLE MANSION. MESSRS. CREASY AND WILKINSON have been favoured with instructions to LET or SELL the spacious MANSION, No. 15, LEWES CRESCENT. KEMP TOWN,containing large Entrance and Inner Halls, noble Dining Room and Ante Room,
Breakfast Room and Library, suite of four lofty Drawing Rooms, numerous Bed Chambers, principal and secondary Stone Staircases, extensive Basement, with every desideratum for a Nobleman’s or Gentleman’s Family.—May be viewed and every particular obtained at the Offices of Messrs. Creasy and Wilkinson, Auctioneers, House and Estate Agents, &c., No. 168, North Street, Brighton.

Brighton Gazette and Lewes Observer, 27 February 1851

In 1829 Thomas Goodall, Builder, is recorded in the street directory as living in this house. Goodall was one of the quartet of local builders who worked with Thomas Read Kemp on the early construction of the Estate and in May 1828 he had convened the first meeting of the Kemp Town Proprietors which subsequently established a Committee of Management which included Kemp and Thomas Cubitt. Kemp Town Enclosures, the successor of this committee, still manages the Estate’s gardens to this day.

However Goodall’s residence appears only for a single year, and for the remainder of the Victorian era the occupation of this house remains something of a mystery. Census records for this entire period only once record a single occupant – Harriet Saxby, Servant, in 1851 – and it may be that the house was let as a furnished house on a seasonal basis. In 1898 the street directory records Lord Henry Thynne (1832-1904) as occupant, although only for a single year, which might support the argument for a house let on a seasonal basis each year.