Peacehaven did not exist prior to 1916, although there was a small initial development a decade earlier. The story goes that in 1915, Charles Neville saw an expanse of derelict land that to him was ripe for development. Within a year he had bought a number of acres of land in the Parish of Piddinghoe and set up a company to develop it. Mr Neville came from a showman family; his late father had been involved in exhibitions around the world. In addition Charles who, born in Darlington, County Durham, had spent some time in both Canada and Australia learning how to deal in land.
It was, however, the showman side that made the difference, for he thought of a new way of promoting his new estate. He did not advertise it, but thought about how he could promote a new Town using a competition. As far as is known, no one had done this before. Using most of the national newspapers, he asked the public to name his new Town. The winner won a plot of land worth £100, plus for the runners up, 50 prizes of plots of land in the new Town worth £50, and a fee of three guineas (£3. 15p in today’s money) to cover the cost of the conveyance.
Such a competition was exceptionally popular in fact some 80,000 people entered. With so many entries Charles, in the name of his Company the South Coast Land & Resort Company, increased the runner up prizes to over 2,400. It is thought that Mr Neville saw that this was a way of selling a large part of his holding without costing anything. The purchasers paid for the conveyance transferring the land to them, and the South Coast Land & Resort Company would supply the new owners with either a house or the materials to build one.
To cut a long story short, The Daily Express saw the scheme as a fraud and took Mr Neville to court, and a counter claim for libel was brought by Mr Neville. Although the legal proceedings went as high as the House of Lords, Charles Neville in the end lost the case. But by then the publicity of the case had done the trick every one by now knew of Peacehaven. And so, in time, out of barren farm land in the Parish of Piddinghoe, the Town of Peacehaven was to grow into a Town larger than the County Town of Lewes!
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