Post-war
The year of the Queen's coronation, 1952, makes a natural starting point for looking back at how Leigh has changed, and this comparison between the village then and the village fifty years later appeared in the June 2002 Parish Magazine.
In 1952 Britain was emerging at last from years of rationing, and a post-war boom was getting under way. Car ownership grew steadily from that point onwards, and over the following half century a housing boom transformed the village, with the number of homes rising sharply. That growth was not confined to one type of building: private houses multiplied, and so did Council houses.
The Leigh of 1952 was well supplied with everyday services. Two main grocers served the village, alongside a butcher, a shop selling bicycles and a cobbler mending shoes. The post was remarkably frequent by modern standards, with deliveries three or four times a day, and a doctor actually lived in the village itself. There was even a factory making bats and balls. Many men cycled to Hildenborough station for the journey to work, doing so in bowler hats, while farming, once the great employer of village labour, now occupied only a handful of local workers.
Above all this everyday life stood one dominant figure. Lord Hollenden, whose family had effectively governed Leigh for eighty years, owned a hundred properties in the village. His reach extended into every corner of local affairs: the doctor's house belonged to him, as did the two village halls and the village green. Villagers addressed him as Milord, and he responded with gifts and donations to those around him. His influence was such that he would even object if the wrong hymns were chosen. Only when he died in 1977 did this long era come to an end. His heirs, who lived at Hall Place, sold virtually the whole of the family's holdings in Leigh, and in a remarkable act of generosity the village green and the village halls were given to the village itself.
By 2002 much had changed, yet much had endured. The school continued to flourish. A village shop with a post office still traded, a rarity in communities of Leigh's size. Perhaps most strikingly, attendance at church was higher than it had been, and the number of clubs and societies meeting in the village had grown over the decades. Leigh had also held on to something many villages have lost: a wide social mix, with people of very different backgrounds living side by side.
There were worries, of course. Young people who had grown up in the village found it hard to afford a house there, a familiar tension between popularity and affordability. Yet when a planning survey asked households to sum up the village in a single word, the answer was overwhelmingly positive: eight in every ten households chose to describe Leigh as friendly.
Half a century after the coronation, then, the shops, the squire and the daily post of 1952 had largely gone, but the character of the place, in the eyes of its own residents, remained as warm as ever.