11/08/2026
Why are we called Clockhouse Podiatry? Well - today we’re going to look upwards - quite a long way upwards, in fact - and share the story of the rather wonderful bell tower that sits on top of our building, its history, and the fairly substantial operation that took place to save it nearly twenty years ago. A lot of this information came from the Horsham Photography blog - there's a link to their incredible page at the bottom of this post.
SO! If you’ve ever visited us and happened to look up rather than concentrating on where you parked, you’ll have seen it. Sitting on the roof is a six-legged bell tower, or cupola, complete with bell and weather vane. It’s visible from Blackhorse Way and from the car park behind us, and has been part of the building for considerably longer than any of us.
The Clockhouse building itself was originally part of Hewell’s Manor, the large house opposite. The Manor later became the headquarters of the RSPCA before eventually being converted into houses and apartments, while our building had a rather less grand but probably more interesting working life as the groom’s quarters and coach house serving the Manor’s stable block. You can still see the two original coach entrances in the building today, although they’ve long since been mostly bricked up. Horses would now find the arrangements disappointing.
And above all of this sat the bell.
By 2006, however, all was not well in the upper reaches of The Clockhouse. Local history group Hidden Horsham featured the cupola and noted that it was deteriorating and in fairly urgent need of restoration. This is one of those observations that sounds pleasantly academic until someone has to work out what to do with an enormous wooden structure containing a 200kg bell perched on top of a building.
In January 2007, the restoration began.
Scaffolding went up across the front of the bulding and the first job was to make the cupola light enough to remove. Its lead roof was stripped away, after which the whole structure was carefully lowered down the scaffolding and transported to a specialist joinery workshop.
There, it was effectively taken to pieces.
The six timber legs were replaced with newly turned versions matching the originals, but with subtle changes to help rainwater drain away - poor drainage having apparently contributed considerably to the demise of their predecessors. New timber arches were made to connect the legs, new leadwork was fitted to the roof and base, and the detailing around the feet was redesigned to stop water getting in.
They even improved the basic engineering. The old cupola had required supporting wires and had, remarkably, been held together in places rather more enthusiastically with nails than you might ideally hope for in something positioned several storeys above Horsham. The rebuilt version was securely dowelled into its base and no longer needed the supporting wires.
Meanwhile, attention turned to the bell.
It weighs somewhere around 200kg and took four men to carry it down the scaffolding - presumably one of those jobs where everyone suddenly becomes extremely interested in precisely where everyone else has put their fingers.
Years of grime and weathering were removed by specialist contractors using lime blasting, revealing the bell’s original colour and, more intriguingly, an inscription that had previously been difficult to see.
That inscription raised an interesting question: was this actually the original seventeenth-century bell, or had it been replaced at some point during the building’s long history? We still don’t know.
While the cupola was away, repairs were also carried out to the roof structure that supports it. Its clock mechanism, incidentally, still survives inside the roof space. There were plans to restore the clock face separately, but not to return the mechanism itself to working order. So somewhere above our treatment rooms remains a redundant old clock mechanism, quietly enjoying its retirement.
Then, on the morning of 15 March 2007, we got the tower back.
The restored cupola arrived in Blackhorse Way aboard a heavy-duty trailer. A crane was positioned alongside the building, lifting straps were attached and the entire structure - now weighing approximately 900kg - was hoisted into the air, swung over the scaffolding and carefully lowered back onto its repaired base.
Rather magnificently, they then discovered that a second crane lift was required simply to get the transport pallet out from underneath it.
The bell followed.
Its original hangers had failed, so a new mounting was devised using threaded steel rods through the bell’s existing holes and a substantial piece of air-dried oak sourced from woodland near Capel. The crane lifted the bell onto the roof, after which it was manoeuvred by hand back into its home inside the tower. Over the following week, the final leadwork was completed and the timberwork painted.
And that, more or less, is how the bell tower you can see above us today came to survive.
It’s quite easy to walk into Clockhouse Podatiatry without really noticing what’s sitting on the roof. We certainly spend rather more time looking at feet than rooftops. But the next time you visit, have a look upwards.
There’s a 200kg bell up there, hanging from a piece of Sussex oak, inside a 900kg restored Victorian - or possibly older - cupola, above a former coach house, containing an old clock mechanism that no longer tells anybody the time. Which is a WONDERFUL amount of history to have above us.
(the detail of this came from an amazing blog, the creators of which we've tried to make contact with. However, go follow the link below and revel in the wonder of Horsham's history - https://horshamphotography.wordpress.com )
and one for Willow Haven Crystals and Gifts and Visit Horsham of course.
