The Town That Didn't Stare

<p>East Grinstead, the home of Scientologists, Mormons, Rosicrucians and more; a nexus for ley lines, a perfect Prime Meridian settlement and Britain's most haunted town. But why?</p><br><p>Why is East Grinstead, this little town in Sussex, so strange? What happened to make East Grinstead this unstaring town? Is this a question that can ever be truly answered? And do we really want to know the answer?</p><br><p>The Town That Didn’t Stare is written, produced and presented by Nick Hilton.</p><p>&

<p>In 1556, three martyrs are burned at the stake. In 1812, the Prime Minister is gunned down in the House of Commons. And in 1996 a businessman is shot returning to his mansion.</p><br><p>This is the story of East Grinstead, its violent history and its ghosts.</p><br><p>The Town That Didn’t Stare is written, produced and presented by Nick Hilton.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Intro and incidental music by George Jennings.</p><p>End credits music by Matt Payne and Ollie Lloyd at Shipyard Audio.</p><p>Podca

<p>What is the Guinea Pig Club?</p><br><p>At the height of the Second World War, the sleepy Sussex town of East Grinstead played host to one of the most remarkable and revolutionary medical facilities of the 20th Century. The town's famous Guinea Pigs were severely burned airmen who had come to the Queen Victoria hospital for treatment under the scalpel of the great Archibald McIndoe. What happened from there has become the stuff of local legend and earned East Grinstead its nickname: the town t

<p>There is something that makes East Grinstead special, and has drawn extraordinary people to what looks, on the surface, like a very ordinary town. Amongst those who read the land like a book – like a religious text – there are those who say that the town marks the confluence of ley lines, the invisible underground energy currents that, for millennia, have silently and secretly governed the fate of mankind. Could it be that the town that didn't stare is Britain's most unusual town because of t

<p>In 1959, L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, one of the world's most controversial religions, bought a manor house in the sleepy Sussex town of East Grinstead. In doing so, he changed everything for that town. East Grinstead was now world famous, not as a middle class commuter town with a beautiful timber-clad high street, but as the focus point of global concerns about abuses and corruption in alternative religion. How did it happen? What is life like for British Scientologists? And

<p>From the early humans of the Middle Pleistocene era through to the Norman conquest, the history of Sussex is a tale for the ages. East Grinstead, the town that didn't stare, is nestled in this landscape, but what do we know of the thousands of years before the bricks, houses and churches of the town sprang up? What do we know of this wild land where rhinoceros once roamed free? What emerged from the malaria filled marshland of the Sussex coast?</p><br><p>The Town That Didn’t Stare is written,