Little Manor Service Station
The oldest service station building in the UK?
The offices of Little Manor Service Station is a half-timbered building set back behind a contemporary forecourt canopy and modern fuel pumps. Take a more detailed look and you soon realise why it has attracted a Grade II listing which prevents structural alteration. The particularly notable features are its hipped roof with gablet, its proportionately small windows and the crown-post trusses, the structural braces, at each end of the building. Although listed in 1975, this little gem of a building looked almost ready for demolition in 1988 when its current owner acquired the site for complete renovation.
Details of its early life can only be surmised but it is likely that it was built as an agricultural workers’ home possibly with a lower, ‘basement’ level used for keeping livestock or feed. The only evidence of this latter supposition is some redundant mortices in the low-level timbers on part of the ground floor suggesting an earlier suspended floor of some type. It may also be noted that the dormer window just visible above the doorway had to be removed for structural reasons.
Core to the claim of the oldest filling station in the UK is that some of the timbers in the structure have been dated to the mid-15th Century. Surprisingly (?) it wasn’t actually built as a filling station but sort of became one in the mid- 1860s when it was subsumed into the buildings of the Cranleigh Steam Brewery.
Little Manor today, resplendent in its merchandising for a contemporary filling station. The dormer window in the centre of the roof was removed during the renovation as were a couple of windows in the end walls.
After beer and mineral waters were no longer made on the site in the 1920′s, the buildings became a motor vehicle workshop with a steel-framed structure on what is now the forecourt. It remained in this form until the current owners acquired the site and demolished its ageing frontage to reveal the sad Little Manor shown in the earlier photograph. Today things are altogether different.
