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Shoreham Airport Station

Bungalow Town Halt was opened in 1910 to serve the growing community of Shoreham Beach and the holiday camps at the Saltings. Latterly it was to serve the aerodrome immediately to the North, and station signage reflected this. The station was located 30 feet to the East of the rail bridge spanning New Salts Farm Road. It comprised two simple wooden platforms North and South of the tracks and wooden shelter. These were accessed by a steep footpath up the embankment from New Salts Farm Road. The station closed in 1933.

The station reopened as Shoreham Airport station in July 1935, principally to serve the new terminal building of Shoreham Airport. However after only 5 years the station was closed in July 1940.

C1930 looking East
The re-opened station c1939
Shoreham Airport station c1940 looking East
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Toon Ghose – Shoreham Airport Painting

This is the history of a local Shoreham painting with its backstory. The painting is of Toon Ghose flying his De Havilland Chipmunk “Lillibet” over Shoreham Airport in the late 1970’s. This painting has for some time been present on the shorehambysea.com “Paintings” section, numbered B63. It was written with the aim of providing a provenance for the painting:

I remember seeing Toon at Shoreham Airport during the late 1970’s, just before my teenage years, where I was introduced to him by my cousin, Ashley (Ash) Roote. Ash learnt to fly at Shoreham and was a member of Toon’s flying club, where Toon also flew as an instructor. The Flying Club was called Toon Ghose Aviation, or TGA, and I well remember the TGA window stickers that were a ‘must have’ for ‘anybody who was anybody’ at the airport at the time!

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Rights

All imagery and text is copyright www.Shorehambysea.com unless stated otherwise. You are permitted to share by posting url links to the original www.shorehambysea.com content, but copying material from this website and re-publishing in other media is not permitted. Much of the text, photographs and illustrations on this site originate from large private collections that have permitted publication on www.shorehambysea.com under the express condition that they are not re-published elsewhere – hence the watermarks on imagery.  Without such assurance these collections may not have been made available to a wider online audience for free. We know of many collections of unique Shoreham photographs that will never be seen by the public for fear of it ending up in someone else’s book for sale or copied ad infinitum on Facebook.

Copyright?

You may say that copyright of an old postcard, or old painting will have lapsed – correct, but a recent photograph or scan of the original does have rights of the photographer.

We have noted how a few people have copy and pasted images from this website onto social media. This breaks the agreement that we have with the image owners and it also takes the images out of context, reduces the image quality and hands control over to whoever wants to nick it off Facebook probably claiming ‘everyone does it’. The irony is that every photo posted to the wild west platforms like Facebook becomes free for Meta to use commercially as they wish – a clause hidden in their legal terms.

The danger of AI

In 2025 we have seen the widespread copying of most of the internet to train the AI tools of the tech giants Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Alphabet, Apple. Generative AI ‘re-imagined content’, photographs or text is not allowed on this website. The widespread use of AI to indiscriminately alter, misquote, and deceive will ultimately lead to the rapid loss of trust of all online content, whether human created or not. This is particularly damaging for history research. We discourage the automated copying of content to train AI tools. Sadly the race to steal everything has largely been completed and there is not much we can do about it.

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The Clocks of St Mary’s

The church records show that the wooden, diamond shaped clock was first fixed to the south wall of the tower in 1828. However there is earlier evidence of a clockface on St Mary’s tower in the John Butler Sketch of 1786 and a watercolour of 1782. It is recorded that that face was moved and installed higher up in 1862. The East and West faces were added in 1898 – they are differentiated by their slightly convex blue faces. The South face had disappeared between 1898 and 1937 when it and the North face were installed – flat but thicker clockfaces. So it is only post-1937 that all four faces were evident.

1786 Sketch with the church tower with, inset, an enlargement of the shape at the belfry window and detail from a 1782 watercolour
Note the South face diamond shape clock. Watercolour painting by F. Nash (1782-1856) 
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Tally Ho Launch – 6 years project

Many of you will know of the monumental project to rebuild “Tally Ho”, who’s origins were at the old Stow’s shipbuilding yard at the bottom of East Street. She was built in Shoreham in 1910 as the “Betty” and had a varied career including completing the Fastnet race in 1927, traversing the globe, being wrecked in the Americas and eventually laying as a hulk for decades in the US. In 2018 she was rescued by Leo Goolden who set about rebuilding her to sail again. That project became a 6 year YouTube sensation that culminated this month with the re-launch of Tally Ho.

https://www.youtube.com/@SampsonBoatCo/videos

The history of Tally Ho (Betty)

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From Garden Close to Downside

The first part of Shoreham Garden City at Greenways Crescent

From Garden Close to Downside

Alan Lambourne has kindly allowed us to publish his memoirs of growing up in Shoreham in the 40’s 50’s and 60’s. He recounts the stories of his family running Lambourne’s Butchers in Upper Shoreham Road, and of his early years at Garden Close (Kingston by Sea) and Downside. A witty and lively style of writing illuminates the stories during an idyllic time when family came first and only the best sausages were on the table.

Glad and Bill

Click above to view the PDF on mobiles.