The Church Street forge stood from, probably, the late 17th until the early 20th centuries against the Church wall in the ,then, Church Street, now Pinners Lane. The site is now occupied by a post box and car park.

When the White Horse alehouse was sold by the heirs of Thomas Pettit to William Hammond in 1700, the property consisted of "all that messuage or tenement with the barns stables smiths forge buildings courtyards gardens and all that part or parcell of arable land enjoining by estimation two acres more or less". A smithy had probably occupied part of the White Horse premises well before this as stable buildings are mentioned in a 1659 sale document and the alehouse occupied a central position in the parish next to the Church and was on an important cross-roads. Inn and alehouse often had adjoining smithy’s.

When the premises were sold in the 1750’s by Mrs. Elizabeth Beake, William Hammond’s heiress, to another William Hammond of St. Albans Court, it had by then been divided into "that messuage or tenement situated at Nonington in a place there called Church Street and called or known by the name of the White Horse with outhouses buildings orchards gardens about half acre" and "a smiths forge" occupying about half an acre and consisting of " stables outhouses yards gardens backsides and lands" At the time of the sale Henry Spain, son of Christopher, the previous smith, was plying his trade there, the family continued as smiths until 1801 when Andrew Morgan took over the forge. The Morgans, occupied the forge and, after its closure as an alehouse in 1832, the adjacent White Horse and its out-buildings as blacksmiths until in the latter eighteen hundreds they became blacksmiths and vetinary surgeons continuing as such until the early 1900’s.

In his 1930’s memoirs Richard Jarvis Arnold, a elderly Walmer blacksmith who had been born in Nonington, described his apprenticing in 1887 to Charles Morgan , blacksmith and veterinary surgeon when: " three men and two apprentices were then employed there and that there was a good amount of work from the farms of Nonington and the surrounding villages. The forge adjoined the Church as it still does ".

The last full time blacksmith was George Beer who finally hung up his striking hammer just before the Second World War, although a Mr. Dixon worked the forge part time until the early 1950’s when it finally closed. The forge building was hastily demolished by its then owner at the end of that decade.

The Frogham forge occupied the roughly triangular piece of ground next to the cottage at the of bottom of the hill leading from Frogham to Barfrestone. The forge is shown on the both the 1839 and 1859 parish maps. However, the then occupier, William Abbot, is listed as paying parish rates from a much earlier date but the premises concerned is not specifically identified but are most likely to have been these premises. The smith usually also occupied the adjacent cottage, for many years this was one of the Friend family. Its absence from parish rates records indicate that the forge was no longer in use by the 1890’s.