The history of Swiss Gardens.

In 2008, our school changed its name. It had been Shoreham First School. The children proposed a new name — Swiss Gardens Primary School — to honour the place that had stood here long before.

The school sits on land that was once part of a Victorian pleasure garden so popular that visitors travelled from Brighton and Worthing for an afternoon out. By the time the school was built, the gardens had fallen out of fashion, the buildings dismantled, the lake nearly gone. But the name remembers them.

Here's what was here.

The land had once been a marsh. In 1782 it belonged to a shipbuilder called John Edwards, who knew it as David's Marsh. It later passed to his son-in-law, James Britton Balley — also a shipbuilder.

In 1838 — the same year as Queen Victoria's coronation — Balley turned the marshy plot into a pleasure ground with a Swiss-Alpine theme. Chalet-style timber buildings, a striking entrance lodge, and the name everyone knew it by: the Swiss Gardens.

It was an immediate hit. Local people gathered there for dinners, luncheons, anniversaries, anything worth marking. It became usual to round off a day of festivities with a gala-ball in the Gardens' magnificent ballroom — over eight thousand square feet of dance floor, which the local historian Henry Cheal considered probably the finest on the South Coast.

Some years before his death in 1863, Balley sold the Gardens to Edward Goodchild, for what Cheal records as "a very large sum". Goodchild and his family ran them through their busiest years — the railway-tourist era — when as many as five thousand visitors a day would step off the train at Shoreham, twice the resident population of the town.

By the late 1890s, the Gardens had begun to fall out of fashion. Seaside resorts were drawing the day-trippers away, the entertainment was getting rougher, and the buildings had begun to decay. The Swiss Gardens closed to the public in 1905. By 1910 (around 1909) most of the remaining structures had been pulled down and the overgrown site cleared.

Part of the cleared ground was sold to the local council for a school. More went for housing. Children who had once trespassed through the abandoned grounds now found themselves studying on top of where the lake, ballroom and theatre had stood.

Around 1928 the Swiss Cottage public house was built — and rebuilt — on what had been one of the gardens' main entrances. The chalet-style timberwork of the new entrance lodge, set on the Old Shoreham Road frontage, deliberately echoed the Alpine theme Balley had given the gardens nearly a century earlier. The pub still stands.

A fragment of the original boating lake survives behind it. Mature trees on the school's boundary date from the gardens era. Beyond those, what's really left of the original Swiss Gardens is the school building itself — and, since 2008, the school's name.