THE DERELICT MISCELLANY

Pharmaceutical production started at Horsham in 1939 and continued throughout the war. In 1950 CIBA established a medical department here, followed by a research and development division opened in 1965 in new brutalist buildings to the north of the main drive. In 1970 the company merged with another Swiss pharmaceutical company, J. R. Geigy S.A. to form CIBA-Geigy. The conglomerate had its UK headquarters at Horsham, and the site continued to be an important centre of parmaceutical research and development, by this time employing nearly 1,000 people. In 1985, a five-storey wing by architects Cruikshank and Seward was added to the main building, creating an enclosed internal courtyard. Large laboratory and factory buildings were added to the east some time later.

In 1996 CIBA-Geigy merged with yet another Swiss firm, Sandoz, to form Novartis. Horsham housed the organisation's UK Headquarters and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in respiratory disease, recognised internationally as a centre of excellence. Novartis was still one of Horsham's largest employers in March 2011 when the company announced a major restructuring plan that involved cutting up to 550 of the 950 jobs here; manufacturing and global development were wound down and gastrointestinal research was moved to Basel. The pharmaceutical giant’s UK board had approved redevelopment of the site, parcelling off some land for new housing and other usages, but stated it was committed to Horsham with plans to invest in the facility long-term. In 2013, however, Novartis' UK President, Sue Webb, confirmed that the Horsham site would close permanently the following year with the loss of 371 jobs. As well as a “difficult” climate in the UK for pharmacauticals (largely thanks to an increasingly ambiguous relationship with the European Union and public opposition to animal testing), the company was going through yet another restructuring, concentrating research in three major hubs in Shanghai, Boston (USA), and Basel; as Ms Webb said, “Economies of scale mean it is better to consolidate into those three hubs rather than have them distributed throughout the world.” The last employees left Horsham in the summer of 2014, and shortly thereafter all buildings were demolished except for the main office building.

In 2016 the West Sussex County Council purchased the site for an undisclosed sum with a view to developing a business park for health and life sciences which would bring up to 1,000 new jobs to the area. Protracted discussions followed, interrupted by a global pandemic and recession, leading ultimately to the abandonment of these plans; per the most recent planning application, the site is to be redeveloped entirely as housing with only the locally-listed clock tower retained.
In the meantime the single remaining building has stood empty, colonised by countless pigeons and a pair of nesting peregrine falcons (which being a protected species have delayed redevelopment even further). There is little here to recall the site's decades at the forefront of pharmaceutical research, but even stripped back to the bare concrete it is a remarkable building.