Category Archives: Place

East Sussex: excursions and diversions, part 1 – Hastings

Posted on by

 

Back in 2012 my partner and I took a week’s touring holiday to South East England; it was partly for me to revisit places I’d known as a child when my grandparents lived in Bexhill-on-Sea, and that I’d not seen since, but also out of curiosity – we felt it was somewhere no longer familiar and probably worth exploring. We were pleasantly surprised by all sorts of things; I wrote about these, along with some other musings on South East England, in this post.

Through an odd turn of fate we’ve become more familiar with one part of this area when we began to visit our elder son who’d moved from Bristol in 2018 to the High Weald near Battle with his partner; her family have connections with this part of Sussex and it’s only a few miles to Bexhill where my grandparents lived. It’s an extraordinarily varied landscape with many contrasts – undulating hills and steep cliffs, marshes and dense, stream-filled woodlands (once the heart of a huge iron working industry in the 17thC that dates even further back to pre-Roman times), and seaside Continue reading →

East Sussex: excursions and diversions, part 2, St Leonards-on-Sea

Posted on by
The charming St Leonards Warrior Square station, built in 1851

If you continue westwards from Hastings pier (see previous post) along the seafront, once you reach Warrior Square you will have arrived at the relative newcomer of a town, St Leonards. Warrior Square is unmissable – it’s an expansive rectangular park surrounded by very large 19thC seaside apartment houses, but the square is misleadingly-named. It’s less a memorial to fighters than smugglers; “the name Warrior is most likely a corruption of ‘Warehouse’ – smugglers being known to secrete goods in the vicinity”. St Leonards was originally conceived as part of a planned seaside resort in the mid 1820s – “a place of elegant houses designed for the well-off” Continue reading →

East Sussex, excursions and diversions, part 3, Bexhill

Posted on by
Bexhill on Sea in the 1950s, unused postcard, photo from flickr by Phil Sellens,
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

 

Four miles or so further west along the coast from St Leonards (see post here) is the odd (my personal perception!) town of Bexhill-on-Sea. I spent several summer holidays there in the mid 1950s staying with my slightly melancholy grandparents who’d moved to a utilitarian bungalow when my Grandfather retired. There were some recurring pleasures to our stays but even as a child the town seemed a bit dull and full of old people! I have only recently found out that comedian Spike Milligan (treasured by my family for his absurdist antics in the Goon Show) was Continue reading →

A Pill plot – Pasture, Plantations and Pilots; history through the window

Posted on by

My “Window Wanderland” display, in the three windows of an upstairs bay, as seen from the street in the dark February night – and including the unforeseen problem of condensation around the bottom of the apple tree!

This post was started not long after the first Window Wonderland event in our village in February 2017, but sat at the back of my computer unfinished until now! We’ve had two more of these events since then, more on those in a future post.

Our village held its first Window Wonderland event recently, organised by a neighbour (the idea started in Bristol and has become global now, click here to find out more); it’s a charmingly inventive way to brighten the evening streets after the glitter of Christmas has been put away and there still seems to be a long stretch of dark nights to get through before spring arrives – we couldn’t not take part! No theme was specified but I decided to use the event as an opportunity to look back at the past of our house and its surroundings – a topic I’ve always been interested in but the fascination and the urge to learn more has been growing. So I created three images for an upstairs bay window that offered a visual micro-history of our part of the village – and being a bird lover a few resident and regular visiting species appear too! So here are the multiple-layered stories behind each window. Continue reading →

Fortunes, fruit and fevers … biography of an orchard, part 1

Posted on by
 Pill Village

The village of Pill, my home in North Somerset, clusters (once attractively I hear) around a deep, muddy, tidal creek formed by the Martcombe Brook rising just a couple of miles south of the village. A ‘pill’ is the West Country and Welsh name for a tidal creek – there are several pills along this stretch of the river, each identified with its own prefix, our old, ‘proper’ name is Crockerne Pill, see below for explanation. The Martcombe Brook spills into the River Avon, two miles or so south-west from where it joins the Severn. Shirehampton is only the river’s width across from us (but a different world Continue reading →

Fruit, Friends and Festivities … biography of an orchard, part 2.

Posted on by
Orchard reclaimed (a continuation from the previous post)

Five years or so after the Pill orchard was handed over to the local community in about 2004, a group of committed volunteer enthusiasts (which later became the Friends of Watchhouse Hill) began to organise improvements to the hill area and a reclamation process began on the orchard. Workparties (that are still regular events) vigorously tackled the brambles and the neglected trees were pruned Continue reading →

The Brights of Ham Green House – wealth and health, science and slavery

Posted on by

The Bright Family at Ham Green

This post accompanies  “Fortunes, Fruit and Fevers – a biography of an orchard. part 1”

“The Bright family of Bristol was a tremendously important and wealthy one, having made its fortune in the slave trade, [West] India dealings and ultimately banking.” Quote from ‘Tempestuous teacups and enigmatic leaves’ Larry Schaff.

From Herefordshire farming to Apprentice Merchant, and success in Bristol

Continue reading →

Old Twelfth Night, Wassailing and the ‘Christmas place’

Posted on by

It’s Old Twelfth Night, ‘Twelvey’, 17th January, the date of Twelfth Night in the old Julian calendar before they played catch-up in 1752 to reclaim those accumulated days that we’d lost through miscalculation, or was it just carelessness? This is the traditional day, down ‘ere in the West Coun’ry anyway, when we do our Wassailing – treating the orchard trees to a hullabaloo of singing and saucepan bashing to drive away the evil spirits, Continue reading →

Englishness / England – Keep’n it shabby.

Posted on by

Is this a uniquely English pursuit? Nature tamed and tormented at the local flower show.

Is this a uniquely English pursuit? Nature tamed and tormented at the local flower show.

Over the last few months I’ve encountered a range of ‘stuff’ – exhibitions, books and articles – that has English written through it like seaside rock; some are featured here, more may follow in future. It seems there’s been increasing debate about this elusive quality of Englishness going on for a while now (centuries really), and clearly there’s been some specific focus on the topic lately – the forthcoming Scotland vote on independence is churning up an awareness of the UK nations; the wild aspirations of our national football team had some people’s blood up for a while in the summer and much was made in the media of the Commonwealth Games a few weeks back – I was intrigued to discover that the English ‘national anthem’ played at the Commonwealth Games was ‘Jerusalem’ – but it’s only now that I seem to have become attuned to the recent output on Englishness.

Continue reading →

Oporto photo shuffling

Posted on by

Porto montage 1Ten years ago, I was commissioned to create a poster to help mark the 20th anniversary of Bristol’s twinning with Oporto/Porto in Portugal – one of the nicest commissions I’ve ever been asked to do! I had proposed the idea to the Twinning Association way back in the 1980s and it lay dormant for a long time, but the anniversary provided an opportunity that I jumped at. Continue reading →