5.1.2 Guild workshops – The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic

Over the period 1918-1920 land was acquired for the Guild Workshops which were then built by Gill and Pepler, supplemented by army huts. Only one building of these buildings was not in place when Gill left in 1924. When the buildings were damaged in the storms of 1987, this precipitated the closure of the Guild 1989 and the sale of the lean with the remaining workshops being demolished and two modern houses built.

Several of the photos on this page were taken when demolition was imminent.

^{This photograph facing South (inverted from the map on the Guild Properties page), was taken during the later days of the Guild, perhaps 1970. The early allotment gardens have long since been taken over by trees.}

^{This diagram acts as an approximate key to the photograph. Shaded building are made of brick, others of wood. In the final days of the Guild, the only buildings serving as workshops were the brick ones : 6 (Eager), 7 (Jenny KilBride) and 8 (Winefride Pruden).}

Number	Building	Comments
1	St Peter’s	Cribb family home (1920-21), Maxwell workshop (1922-1969). This was one of the Army huts acquired in the opening days of the guild.

^{A view trough the Cloister Arch, showing the wood-store on the left (door facing), the main entrance to the workshops straight ahead and the woodwork building on the right. c 1930.}

2	Adjoining rooms	Rooms joining the two Army huts. Served as accommodation for David Jones when he arrived in 1920; It was later the library and social room and eventually, George Maxwell’s office. This is where David Jones painted ‘Christ Mocked’, ‘St Thomas Aquinas’ and ‘Crucifixion’ on the wooden walls, paintings now owned by the National Museum of Wales.
3	St Joseph’s	Home for, Shute, Brocklehurst, later Dunstan Pruden’s son, Anton. Another Army hut.
4	Accommodation hut	Home for Brocklehurst, Pruden. Outside the main quadrangle. Seems to have collapsed on the above photograph.
5	Cribb’s Original Workshop	Cribb (1924 -1934) , later Edgar Holloway.
6	The Gill Building	Built by Gill, 1920. Gill’s workshop (1920-24), KilBride (1925-34), Cribb (1934-67), Eager (1967- 89).

^{Stone workshop, seen from the orchard area}

^{Inside the stone workshop, see how the multiplicity of windows floods the space with light}

Pepler Building East

Initially the Print workshop, later the weaving workshop

^{Weaving workshop (and back of stone workshop)}

Pepler Building West

Initially part of the Print workshop, later Dunstan Pruden’s workshop

^{Pruden’s workshop, with dormer windows.
The rooms which these windows opened onto were the administrative offices of the Ditchling Press}

^{‘Cloister’ behind Peper’s building. The bracket for the bell used to summon people to chapel can clearly be seen on the stone workshop.}

9	Pruden’s original workshop	Pruden (1930-34), John Hagreen (1937-39)
10	Guild school building	Guild School (1924-32), Hagreen (1932-48) Holloway (1948-79). This building had originally been sited on top of the Spoil bank, next to the crucifix, where Gill had originally planed to build a chapel. When the young children grew up and needed secondary education elsewhere, the school-room fell into disuse and was re-sited in the main quadrangle. Here it served as Philip Hagreen’s studio, a laundry and briefly, accommodation for Edgar Holloway and his wife.

^{Dunstan Pruden outside the former Guild School, later Hagreen’s studio taken around 1932. The building behind is the wood store}

New building

This was erected in 1962 to house the universal woodworker which was the machine purchased by John Maxwell to do the planeing and sawing for the carpentry workshop. It occupied the space behind Dunstan Pruden in the photograph above.

^{The Guild workshops and Chapel from the South, 1939. Note the Spoil Bank crucifix is still in place, also David Jones’ wooden figures either side of the Chapel door.}

Unfulfilled plans

The original vision was to create a quadrangle of brick buildings, linking Pepler’s building, Gill’s Building and the Chapel, presumably with an inner cloister, and then demolishing the wooden structures. No progress on this scheme was made after Gill’s departure