Before Crawley was designated a New Town in 1947, it was a small market settlement on the London to Brighton road — and that original village survives almost intact as the Old Town, centred on the High Street. The scale here is entirely different from the postwar neighbourhoods that surround it: timber-framed buildings, a coaching inn that has been serving travellers since the Middle Ages, and a human street that predates the car.
The George Hotel on the High Street is a fifteenth-century coaching inn, listed and recognisably old in a way that most of Crawley is not. Ancient Priors nearby is a fifteenth-century hall house. The White Hart Inn and the Old Punch Bowl pub are both centuries old and still functioning. Worth an hour if you have time between flights and want to see something other than airport retail.
The Old Town sits roughly a kilometre south of Crawley station, easily walkable, and is the most concentrated stretch of historic streetscape in West Sussex outside of the larger market towns.