Burgess Hill Uncovered: Two Decades of News, Reviews and Tongue-in-Cheek Guides to a West Sussex Town
Burgess Hill Uncovered is a hyperlocal community news website covering Burgess Hill, a town of more than 30,000 residents in West Sussex, England. Published online at burgesshilluncovered.co.uk, it describes its own mission in its name: to uncover Burgess Hill, in a fun, tongue-in-cheek way, while still reporting news of public interest when it arises. On its homepage the site says that for the past 19 years it has been supplying a variety of news, reviews, guides and entertaining features about the town, inviting visitors to enjoy an education about the place some residents are lucky enough to call home. That combination — long-running local news coverage with a deliberately irreverent voice — makes Burgess Hill Uncovered one of the more distinctive independent town websites in Sussex.
Unlike a conventional local newspaper website, Burgess Hill Uncovered was not built as the digital arm of a print title. It grew as a web-first town site, organising its content around the practical questions residents ask: what jobs are available locally, what events are coming up, what is happening to the town centre, and what decisions are being made by the town and district councils in their name.
A Town Site Built Around News, Reviews, Guides and Features
The homepage structure gives a clear picture of the site's editorial mix. Its main sections include Burgess Hill Jobs, Burgess Hill Events and Burgess Hill News, alongside in-depth explainers on the town's two biggest development stories: the Martlets town centre redevelopment and the Northern Arc development. Its self-description stresses variety — news, reviews, guides and entertaining features — rather than a narrow diet of breaking stories, and that breadth has been sustained over a long publishing history. A news article on the site dated September 2009, discussing a proposed dog-fouling fine system at Bedelands Farm nature reserve, shows the title was already publishing, in its now-familiar humorous style, well over a decade and a half ago.
That 2009 piece is a useful early example of the site's approach. Faced with a council proposal, the writer worked through tongue-in-cheek enforcement ideas — CCTV operators watching dog walkers, security staff disguised as trees, and paid chaperones for walks — before concluding that no system was practical without large costs or offending responsible owners. The news peg was real, the treatment playful, and the conclusion grounded in the local place under discussion.
Editorial Voice: Uncovering, Not Just Reporting
Burgess Hill Uncovered has been explicit about its editorial stance. In an official statement published on the site, it explained that the website is designed to live up to its name — to uncover Burgess Hill in a fun, tongue-in-cheek way — but that this does not mean it will skip over news if it is of public interest. The statement was issued in response to controversy over its coverage of an internet video connected with Burgess Hill School for Girls, in which the site argued that parents of current and prospective pupils had a right to see both positive and negative aspects of a school, not only the positive image presented in much local media coverage. The site acknowledged it may have made more of the story than was strictly necessary, while maintaining that it had made no false claims about the video's content and had brought it to public attention so readers could form their own opinions.
That exchange captures the tension the site has long operated within. Its humour and willingness to amplify uncomfortable stories set it apart from more deferential local coverage, and occasionally drew criticism from the institutions it covered — including, in that case, the school's headteacher, who accused it of sensationalising the story in a local radio interview. Burgess Hill Uncovered published its response openly on its own pages rather than withdrawing the coverage.
Local News Coverage
The news section carries the staple diet of a town publication: council politics, planning disputes, policing, sport and community rows. Recent headlines listed on the homepage illustrate the range. The site published the candidates for the 2025 Franklands ward by-election for a seat on Burgess Hill Town Council. It reported public outcry over a plan for a 30-metre phone mast near Wivelsfield railway station, noting that more than 60 letters of opposition had been received. It covered Mid Sussex District Council's decision to vote through evening and Sunday car parking charges, an unpopular move the site openly questioned. It also reported, in characteristically direct language, that Burgess Hill Town Council had silenced residents at a meeting, saying locals were shocked at the council's new behaviour.
Sport is woven into the same coverage. The site urged residents to support Burgess Hill Town football club — the Hillians — ahead of a play-off semi-final against Margate, with a place in the play-off final at stake. This mixture of civic scrutiny and town-team enthusiasm is characteristic of hyperlocal publishing, where the same small audience cares about both the council chamber and the football ground.
Town Centre Redevelopment and the Northern Arc
Two long-running development sagas receive dedicated treatment. The Martlets shopping centre redevelopment in the town centre has been one of Burgess Hill's defining stories for years, and Burgess Hill Uncovered maintains an explainer under the banner of Martlets Redevelopment Plans Explained, promising readers that the team has read all the documents so they do not have to. The second is the Northern Arc, the major housing development on the northern edge of the town — a scheme for which Homes England secured land in 2018 to deliver around 3,080 homes, working with Mid Sussex District Council and landowners after the site had spent a decade in the making. For a town of just over 30,000 people, growth on that scale reshapes schools, roads and services, and the site treats both schemes as standing subjects rather than one-off stories.
The site's video work shows the same focus on the town centre's fortunes. Its round-up of its top five most-viewed videos of 2024 was dominated by retail change: a B&M store opening in the Market Place Shopping Centre in April 2024 drew 114,000 views, a tip-off video about which business would replace Wilko drew 83,000, and videos about a removed barrier in the shopping centre and the triggering of the Martlets planning application also made the list.
Jobs and Events: The Practical Sections
Two sections distinguish Burgess Hill Uncovered from a pure news site. Its jobs section is described by the site itself as hugely popular and packed with named employers in the local area looking to hire — a service function that gives residents a reason to return between news stories and gives local employers a direct route to local applicants. Its events section, covering what is on in Burgess Hill, lists everything from sporting events and concerts to school fetes and car boot sales. Together, jobs and events make the website a piece of town infrastructure as much as a news outlet: a place residents check to find work, plan a weekend and follow the arguments about their town's future, all in one visit.
Video and Social Media
The 2024 video round-up also documents how far the site's output now extends beyond written articles. Burgess Hill Uncovered publishes short videos to Instagram and Facebook, and its most popular clips reached audiences far larger than the town's population: 114,000 views for the B&M opening, filmed as the mayor officially opened the store, and 83,000 for a video in which its cameraman tipped off viewers about Wilko's replacement. Even a simple video celebrating the removal of a barrier that had blocked passage through the shopping centre drew 34,000 views, and a staged stunt in which a member of the team took a kayak onto floodwater at the former Martlets Hall site drew 28,000, proving particularly popular with viewers aged 11 to 16, according to the site. The round-up, published at the end of December 2024, reads as both entertainment and evidence: video had become a significant part of how the title reaches Burgess Hill residents.
Burgess Hill: The Town Behind the Site
Burgess Hill is a town in the Mid Sussex district of West Sussex, just north of Brighton, with a population the site puts at more than 30,000. It grew historically around brick and tile making and its railway, and today it functions largely as a commuter and family town within reach of Brighton and London, while retaining its own town council, Burgess Hill Town Council, beneath Mid Sussex District Council. Places that recur in the site's coverage give a sense of its patch: St John's Park, Bedelands Farm and nature reserve, Wivelsfield station, the Market Place and Martlets shopping centres, and the Leylands and Franklands wards. Burgess Hill Uncovered's coverage maps closely onto that geography, concentrating on the streets, estates and institutions its readers use daily.
Place in the Local Media Landscape
Burgess Hill is also served by regional media, including Sussex-wide radio news and the county press, but Burgess Hill Uncovered occupies a different niche: independent, web-native, town-only and written in a voice no regional publisher would use. Its 19-year run, as stated on its homepage, places its origins in the mid-2000s wave of independent local websites, and its survival since then — through the decline of many contemporaries — rests on that combination of utility and personality. It scrutinises the town and district councils, explains major planning documents in plain terms, lists jobs and events, supports the local football club, and is prepared to defend its editorial choices publicly when challenged.
For readers beyond West Sussex, Burgess Hill Uncovered is a clear example of what a mature hyperlocal looks like: not a shrunken newspaper, but a town website that blends news, services, humour and campaigning scrutiny, and that has made itself part of the civic life of the community it covers.
