Haywards Heath is the archetypical railway town of BR Southern Region, Metroland in Sussex, but without John Betjeman’s poetic endorsement. Haywards Heath has a bustling main street where Arts and Crafts, Deco and Modernist buildings mingle with more recent offices. I see references to both London Town and Sussex Village architecture.
The railway to London reached Haywards Heath in 1841, the town has since grown outwards from the railway station on its embankment. Street names are memorials to a mill, a quarry, the road to the South and landowners whose farm estates became housing estates. The large cattle market adjoining the railway was built over with a supermarket in 1989.