The History of 13 Arundel Terrace

This house can lay claim to being the first completed building on the Estate. Thomas Read Kemp envisioned his development as a complete ‘new town’ that would be self-sufficient, and for this it needed both a hotel and a church. The hotel was to be at 13 Arundel Terrace – now Arundel House, then the Bush Inn – and was licenced in September 1824, less than 18 months after work first started on the site.

The first licensee was William Bush, and the hotel was completed and functioning by 1826, when the kitchen supplied the food for a dinner provided by Kemp for his workmen. In 1828 the hotel was also the venue for the first meeting of the Kemp Town Proprietors; this group’s successor, the Kemp Town Enclosures, still manages the Estate’s communal gardens.

While William Bush was the first licensee, street directories suggest that the hotel was actually run by Henry Bell, who is recorded as resident in 1824. For the next 25 years Bell, Elizabeth Jones and Ann Bell are variously recorded as the hotel’s proprietor. Ann Bell is listed in the 1841 census along with four others, but with no other details to suggest whether these were hotel staff or residents.

The hotel closed around 1848 and relocated on a much smaller scale to the nearby corner of Arundel Road and Arundel Place, where it continues as a pub to this day. By the time of the 1851 census the house was a private home with a servant family inn residence on census night.

By 1859 the house was a Ladies School run by the Misses Simmons and Wilson, later named the Arundel House Ladies School. In the 1871 census thirty ‘scholars’ are recorded, from the ages of 12 to 19, around a quarter of who were born in India doubtless to civil servants of Empire. The school closed at the turn of the century and became a Baptist Home of Rest by 1901. The building continued as a home of rest for many decades.

Arundel House continued as guesthouse until at least 1970, before being converted to flats.