You wouldn’t think so looking at it now but once Hangleton, a large suburb of Hove, was quiet and almost empty.

There was a church which was not used very much, a run-down manor and a few historic barns in this windy spot at the foot of the Downs.

Hangleton was almost a ghost village, with many people having migrated either west to Portslade or east to Hove. No one went there very much for there was little to see.

But in the 1930s, Hove started to spread north from the Old Shoreham Road which had previously been an unofficial line for development.

Hundreds of new houses were built, both by private developers and Hove Council which had an intractable housing problem.

They started to engulf the tiny village of Hangleton as homes were built close to both the church and the manor.

Hangleton Road was designed as a dual carriageway to act as a kind of bypass but houses started to be built on formerly open downland north of it.

Building only stopped when homes had gone a long way up the Downs and the beauty of the rolling hills was being steadily eroded.

By this time about 50 years ago, St Helen’s Church was thriving because of all the new homes but the manor was in a dreadful state.

The oldest secular building in Brighton and Hove, it was empty and soon became a target for vandals, who broke all of its 1,077 windows.

But by some lucky chance, nobody attacked or damaged the words of the Ten Command-ments which were inscribed in a downstairs room several centuries ago.

Hove Tory councillor Cyril Shephard bought the derelict 16th-century building and gained planning permission to build homes in much of the large, lovely gardens.

He offered to sell it to Hove Council, which was simply not interested, but then sold it to developers who converted the historic manor into a pub.

After some difficult years, the manor has become a favourite watering place for many people in Hove. It is a little bit of the countryside left in town.

Other amenities were needed to serve an estate which now had more than 10,000 people. The main shopping area was built near the Grenadier pub in Hangleton Road.

A library second only in size to the central library in Church Road was built in the 1960s and visited by the Queen.

Its site was formerly part of the Dyke Railway, which ran through Hangleton until 1938. Flats, a park, housing and a clinic were also built on the route of the old line.

But the biggest change of all was the building of the Brighton bypass in the 1990s. It was close enough to homes in the north for them to be affected by traffic noise but it also took away many cars from Hangleton Road.

Unlike many other suburbs, Hangleton had direct access to the downland dual carriageway on a new link road.

Once these roads had been built, no one could claim Hangleton was quiet any more.