The John Abel Smith Memorial Chapel

The John Abel Smith Memorial Chapel is a small mortuary chapel built around 1872, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. It features a richly detailed Early English style, with walls faced in ashlar and a partly plain tile roof that has ashlar coping and cruciform finials at the gable ends. The chapel has two bay side elevations, each with gabled corner and central buttresses. Each bay is subdivided by a three-bay double arcade of coupled columns above a panelled base. The columns have capitals adorned with stiff-leaf foliage, supporting pointed arches with trefoiled heads and labels with foliaged corbels. Wrought-iron grilles are set within the arcade openings, and there is a trefoiled corbel-table beneath the string course and parapet with coping. The entrance is richly moulded and carved, featuring a trefoiled arch set within a moulded pointed arch, above column shafts with foliage. Wrought iron gates are positioned within the entrance, topped by a hexafoiled panel. The John Abel Papers, which include documents related to the Mortuary Chapel, are held at the Sussex County Records Office.