{"id":173441,"date":"2021-02-11T10:40:20","date_gmt":"2021-02-11T10:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/travel\/?p=173441"},"modified":"2021-05-25T11:49:43","modified_gmt":"2021-05-25T10:49:43","slug":"crawley-the-five-minutes-spare-guide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveminutesspare.com\/travel\/crawley-the-five-minutes-spare-guide\/","title":{"rendered":"Crawley The Five Minutes Spare Guide"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Five Minutes Spare Tour of Crawley, The Town With That Airport!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here at Five Minutes Spare<\/a>, we often review towns and cities in Britain with the aim of highlighting their best points and showing you that there are worthy staycation destinations everywhere. Sometimes it’s not that easy to get the good across, but not with Crawley.<\/p>\n

This old but recently expanded market town is more rainbow coloured than drab grey and it even has a decent football club, who are no strangers to pulling off Cup upsets. It’s also quite handy for Brighton and the coast if you want to add a seaside day to your visit.<\/p>\n

Situated in West Sussex, this English town is about 30 miles from London and can boast of having the internationally renowned Gatwick Airport within its bounds. This puts it in the demographic of English residents that still get the potholes fixed in the roads and that those north of Watford are envious of.<\/p>\n

\"Gatwick

Image: Rich Higgins\/Shutterstock.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyway joking aside Crawley has been inhabited since the Stone Age, which seems like a good place to start with, in terms of history anyway. Let\u2019s turn the clock back to when the dinosaurs had only just died out and the first \u2018men\u2019 were walking the earth and begin our Five Minute tour…<\/p>\n

Stone Age Crawley<\/h2>\n

Although now with a thriving population of around 106,000 people, early Crawley would have started as a few Stone Age families living in caves or holes in the ground. Flint shards shaped into arrowheads and other tools have been found to the south of town, indicating the presence of people as long ago as the Mesolithic period<\/a>. That\u2019s so old we had to go and look it up. It\u2019s the mid-Stone Age, a few decades after the post-glacial period where Britain warmed up.<\/p>\n

Later, after the temperature fluctuation had settled down a bit, we had the Neolithic inhabitants of Crawley, after which the Bronze Age saw even more people gathering here. This whole area of England is one of the most densely populated and it has been for a long, long time. They are perfectly situated between London and the sea crossings. Besides anything else, this area was packed with iron which made it vastly popular during the Iron Age.<\/p>\n

Here Come The Romans<\/h3>\n

So, fast forward a few thousand years and the Romans arrive, around 40AD. When they get to Britain, Sussex is one of the first places they arrive in. While there, they realise there are lots of minerals in the ground and they start extracting, too. Before you know it, furnaces for smelting spring up all over the area. They are close enough to the shores that the resources can be shipped back to Rome, yet far enough inland that they are protected from the Vikings, who are only a few centuries away.<\/p>\n

The Romans retreated sometime around the 3rd<\/sup> century. The Saxon\u2019s who lived there afterwards were probably a mix of Roman and native breeding. In the 5th<\/sup> century, these Saxons named the place Crow\u2019s Leah \u2013 as in a wood that is infested with crows \u2013 and the name stuck<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When the Vikings were raiding in the 9th<\/sup> and 10th<\/sup> centuries, Crawley would have been largely untouched. It may have been raided by the landed Vikings. In the 1086 Domesday Survey, Crawley has three different listings, none of which are in the correct area. We can only assume that the settlement was therefore too small to be of any notice. It is strange, however, that this patch of land so close to London is unaccounted for.<\/p>\n

The Market Is Open<\/h3>\n

In the 13th<\/sup> century, Crawley was given a town charter granting them permission to have a market there every week. This allowed the town new powers of trade, letting them run a fayre every year. Traders would have come from London and from the ports in the south, to meet in Crawley as a halfway point.<\/p>\n

This was reaffirmed in 1770 when a turnpike was added to the roads to make travel easier. For the next hundred years, the town operated as a centre of trade made prosperous by providing a meeting place for traders. They had a large coaching inn, saw plenty of tourists heading to the coast, and had a bit of a reputation as being a quaint little stopping point in the country.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll pause in the history a moment. As fascinating as it is, it\u2019s time for some trivia, instead.<\/p>\n

 
\n