A Weekend in… Rottingdean
For hundreds of years Rottingdean’s inhabitants were largely either farmers or fishermen, but the village was ‘discovered’ by aesthetes in the Victorian period, who lent its pond-side heart an air of bohemian grandeur. Nowadays, while officially being part of the city of Brighton & Hove, it’s a thriving village in its own right…
A Day Out in… Crawley
Crawley is surely the most-maligned town in Sussex, with the Crap Towns website rather cruelly suggesting ‘it has a cultural life that makes Milton Keynes look like the Weimar Republic’. The snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan, stated in 2019, during the English Open at the K2 Leisure Centre: ‘every day I spend in Crawley is a day lost in my life’.
A Weekend in… Dieppe
Dieppe, an easy and inexpensive four-hour ferry hop from Newhaven, is one of France’s most popular seaside resorts, with a rich cultural heritage dating back to its foundation by Viking settlers…
A Weekend in… Lewes
Founded as a trading port on the formerly navigable River Ouse, Lewes certainly has an interesting history, which has led to a hodgepodge of architectural styles, from half-timbered medieval townhouses (including Anne of Cleves’ House, now a museum) to Georgian crescents…
A Weekend in… Rye
The first thing you should do when you arrive in Rye is to make a beeline up the hill it’s built on, to St Mary’s Church. Once there, having admired the stained-glass windows by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, you can pay an old chap £4 to gain access, via a harum-scarum system of steps and ladders, past a set of gigantic brass bells, to the top of the tower…
A Weekend in… Chichester
Chichester enjoyed something of an annus mirabilis in 2022, with its ‘Season of Culture’ celebrating a remarkable slew of landmark birthdays for the wealth of artsy institutions and events in town: The Festival Theatre was 60, Pallant House 40, the Chichester International Film Festival 30, the Festival of Chichester 10, and the Novium Museum 10…
A Weekend in… Eastbourne
Is it time to reassess the reputation of Britain’s sunniest town, traditionally (and rather sneerily) nicknamed ‘God’s Waiting Room’, due to its notionally elderly population?
A Weekend in… Petworth
‘Proud Petworth, Poor people. High Church, Crooked steeple’
So goes the traditional rhyme about the West Sussex town of Petworth, which has become rather out of date, on a couple of counts…
A Weekend in… St Leonards
St Leonards-on-Sea (popularly just ‘St Leonards’) is located within the Hastings Borough, and is often associated with its joined-at-the-hip neighbour. But it’s very much a town with its own identity, and is well worth a visit in its own right…