Tom Hasson on Sussex’s hidden treasures #4: The ruin of Laughton Place

In the meadows east of Lewes a red-brick tower stands alone in a field. It seems to have no reason to be there – no house, no village, just reeds, sky, and silence – an ordinary landscape concealing an extraordinary story.

This is Laughton Place, a Tudor remnant on the edge of the Low Weald. At first glance, it looks like a folly, but this tower was once the proud centre of a great estate. The land belonged to the Pelhams, one of Sussex’s most powerful families, whose history stretches deep into the English past. But here, in the quiet of the Weald, it is reduced to a single striking fragment: a four-storey tower mirrored in a still moat. The contrast between the grandeur of what was and the modesty of what remains is part of its strange, magnetic beauty.

The tower we see today was built around 1534 by Sir William Pelham, who transformed a medieval moated manor into a fashionable Tudor residence. Brick, the chosen material, was a bold statement – expensive, modern, and associated with the royal and the ambitious. The design of Laughton Place, with its battlements, tall chimneys and carved symbols, was an assertion of confidence, declaring that the Pelhams were people of standing, with a past worth celebrating and a future worth securing.

Their emblem, the buckle, can still be seen carved into the stonework as a visual echo of the Pelham family legend, also found elsewhere in Sussex, chiseled into church walls. This legend – that in 1356 a Pelham ancestor captured a French King – tied this Wealden family to the grand narrative of England, making the tower both a home and a monument to identity.

But power fades. Over the centuries, the Pelhams’ focus shifted elsewhere, and the grand house declined. By the 18th century, only the tower remained – now simply a monument to impermanence. Standing solitary in a flat Sussex field, it became part of another kind of history: the romantic history of ruins. Artists and writers came to love such places for their melancholy charm, for the way they captured the slow passage of time. Laughton’s tower, weathered and red against the wide southern sky, seemed to embody that poetry of decay.

Its survival into the modern age is itself a quiet miracle. In 1979, the Landmark Trust purchased Laughton Place and began a careful restoration. The work was craftsmanship at its most delicate – brick by brick, window by window – the tower was made habitable again without losing the dignity of its ruin. For decades afterwards, it stood as one of the Trust’s most atmospheric properties, a place where guests could stay and sense the solitude of centuries.

Now, the Pelhams’ former home is being renewed once again. The Landmark Trust’s Laughton Place ‘Renaissance’ project will see it reopen some time in 2026, its fragile Tudor fabric repaired by skilled hands using traditional techniques close to those of its original builders. Its rebirth is as much an act of artistry as preservation – a continuation of the creative dialogue between past and present that defines the Trust’s work.

When it reopens, Laughton Place will once again invite visitors to climb its narrow stairs, look out across the meadows, and listen to the wind sifting through the reeds. It will not feel like a museum piece, but something alive: a meeting point of history, architecture, nature, and the enduring imagination of those who built and restored it.

To stand at Laughton Place is to understand what makes the South’s quiet landscapes so deceptive. The Weald seems gentle, even uneventful, yet its fields and rivers hold the weight of centuries: of families who rose and fell, of craftsmanship that endures, of art made not for galleries but for the land itself. Laughton Place distills all of that into one red tower: a building born of ambition, abandoned to ruin, and now patiently restored to life. Its story of loss and renewal captures the rhythm of this part of England, where history never truly disappears but becomes a part of the scenery.