Camberwick Green Turns 60: Village Celebrates Beloved Puppet Show Legacy!

Wivelsfield Green, a village in East Sussex, is celebrating a special connection to the beloved children’s television show Camberwick Green, which turned 60 years old this year. Many residents believe that their village inspired the setting for the show, which first aired on January 3, 1966, and became the first BBC children’s program to be broadcast in color. Camberwick Green was created by Gordon Murray and featured stop-motion animation, a technique where small models are moved frame by frame to create the illusion of movement. The show had only 13 episodes, but its charming stories and memorable characters, such as Windy Miller, PC McGarry, and Mickey Murphy the baker, made it a classic. The voices for all the characters were provided by Brian Cant, and the show has been repeated on television many times over the years.

Richard Morris, a resident of Wivelsfield Green, fondly remembers watching Camberwick Green with his mother when he was a child. He describes the show as a ‘soap opera for kids’ because it focused on the daily lives and adventures of ordinary people in a small village. Richard still owns DVDs of the show and has enjoyed sharing them with his own children. He says that the village’s connection to Camberwick Green is a quirky fact that brings smiles to people’s faces. His wife, Sue Morris, agrees and feels that it is something the community can be genuinely proud of.

Camberwick Green was part of what became known as the Trumptonshire Trilogy, which also included the shows Trumpton and Chigley. These programs were broadcast weekly by the BBC from 1966 and continued to be shown for two decades. Each show was thought to be based on real villages in Sussex with similar-sounding names: Wivelsfield Green for Camberwick Green, Plumpton for Trumpton, and Chailey for Chigley. The opening of each Camberwick Green episode featured a musical box that played a tune, with the narrator inviting viewers to guess what was inside. TV historian Tim Worthington explains that Camberwick Green was ahead of its time, being one of the first independently made children’s programs and inspiring many shows that followed. Gordon Murray, who developed a love for puppets as a child, once said that the real locations of the villages should remain a mystery to prevent them from being overrun by tourists. In recent years, villagers in Wivelsfield Green have even dressed up as characters from the show to protest against new housing developments, showing just how much the show’s legacy still means to the community.