Brighton Rocks
It’s East Sussex’s most haunted house! Absolutely riddled! Pure fear lurks within those walls! Preston Manor has reopened to visitors in 2025 after half a decade of closure when only the dead were present in the stately rooms. Hedley Swain, the CEO of Brighton and Hove Museums, confides, “The house is steeped in ghostly mystery with spinechilling hauntings and tales of eerie sightings and unexplained incidents.” There are now guided tours of the house and garden, taking in history and ghosts. A medieval nun named Sister Agnes, the White Lady and the Lady in Grey are just some of the departed who have returned. Hedley adds, “Preston Manor provides a unique opportunity to journey back in time to the grandeur of early 20th century aristocratic life, exploring the upstairs downstairs lives of the eminent Thomas-Stanford family.” The reopened house now has a tearoom serving traditional Edwardian cream tea.
The seaside city of Brighton is undeniably raucous but a mere five minute car drive inland takes one from the crazy coastline to the peaceful Preston Manor where all is leafily quiet: serenity prevails, tranquillity reigns, calmness rules, otherworldliness lingers. The house exudes more than a whiff of American Colonial architecture thanks to a generous splattering of green shutters and a liberal smattering of white verandahs. Mount Vernon-on-Sea. The area of Preston is now suburban Brighton’s answer to Belfast’s Malone, Bristol’s Clifton, Munich’s Schwabing.
Country Life covered the house in the 6 July 1935 edition just after it opened as a museum. The article rambles: “Preston Manor is the youngest in date and the most domestic of public museums. By the wish of the donors, the late Sir Charles Thomas-Stanford and his wife, their house at Brighton, with its fortuitous accumulation of household furniture and ornaments, is preserved very much as they left it, and at its opening in 1933 nothing was in the house except their possessions. It looks still a house that is lived in; most of the furniture is still in the same rooms as in the donors’ day, and even their little personal possessions, boxes and ornaments are either in their original places or preserved in cases in the actual rooms in which they were on view.”
The article includes 18 images of the gardens, the architecture and the interior. A further 15 were left unpublished: mainly photographs of individual items of furniture as well as a few alternative exterior views. The magazine goes into detail about the owners down through the centuries. “In 1925, Sir Charles Thomas-Stanford made provision that (subject to the respective life interests of himself and his wife) Preston Manor and four acres of the adjoining land should vest in the Corporation of Brighton in perpetuity, to be used for the purposes of a public museum and public park, the ‘house to be preserved as a building of historic interest to the public, and to be used exclusively as a museum … and as a reference library containing works relating to such subjects’.” Sir Charles and his wife died eight months apart in 1932.
The rendered exterior provides a visual coherence to a house that has organically grown. An 1818 sketch shows the five bay two storey over high basement entrance front with slightly lower flanking single bay wings, each with its separate hipped roof. Thomas Weston was the architect for the 1783 rebuilding of a 17th century house. About 1867 a porch faced with knapped flints in a distinctive geological nod to this East Sussex location was added to the south facing garden front. In 1905 Charles Stanley Peach (an architect better known for designing electricity generating stations) designed a two storey extension to the west end of the house (with the present dining room on its ground floor) and glazed verandahs in front of the wings on the north front. The verandahs have awning style copper roofs, a nod to Regency Brighton.
The drawing room is the grandest internal space with its coved ceiling and stucco ornament dating from the mid Georgian period. It has a later 18th century marble chimneypiece and timber pedimented door surrounds of 1923. Country Life records, “Little is known of the origin of the furniture in the house.” Masterpieces and bric-a-brac maketh the mansion. “In the entrance hall is collected walnut furniture, a bureau and cabinet veneered with oyster pieces and inlaid with circles. The fine early Georgian bookcase in the dining room holds a large collection of Dogs of Fo in Fukien ware, collected by Lady Thomas-Stanford.”
Little has changed of Preston Manor in the 90 years since it opened to the public. The ivy has gone and the entrance front render painted white. The two glazed panels in the entrance doors are now solid. That’s about it outside. Moving indoors: more Edwardian, less Georgian. More cluttered, less staged. Otherwise, it’s just a game of spot the difference. The interior is atmospherically charged: creaking sloping floorboards weighed down by history. Servants bells’ lining a basement corridor are labelled: Front Door; Front Door Steps; Back Door; Hall Right; Bedroom Number 5; Library; Dining Room; Stanford Sitting Room; Hall Left; Cleves Room; Bedroom Number 2; Bedroom Number 1; Bedroom Number 4; Drawing Room; Nurse’s Room. Ring-a-ling, ring-a-ling. Late at night, invisible hands pull the bells to beckon long deceased servants.
