East Sussex

With Eastbourne hosting the Turner Prize exhibition and the region about to hit the big screen in a new film, arty East Sussex is having its moment in the sun, writes Debbie Ward

“These were Lee’s knuckledusters,” explained our guide, pointing to a shelf: “bronze for daywear, silver for eveningwear.” It’s the kind of fact that you just accept about Lee Miller, the late Vogue model-turnedwar photographer. She wore these “accessories” for protection during the Second World War; now they decorate Farleys House & Gallery, her former home near Chiddingly, East Sussex.

In the study next door, I spied a photo of Miller bathing contemptuously in Hitler’s Munich apartment on the day of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, her boots having stained the dictator’s bathmat with mud from the camp. It’s a scene that has been recreated by the actress Kate Winslet, who plays Miller in Lee, a new film about the photographer’s life that comes out in 2024.

Miller’s own images, some exhibited in a farm building alongside the house, show an eye for the surreal: the latest fashions set against bomb-damaged buildings, a barrage balloon that looks like it has been hatched by a goose. She married the Surrealist artist Roland Penrose, whose mural – based on the nearby ancient chalk figure the Long Man of Wilmington – graces the huge dining-room fireplace.the pair entertained notable friends from the art movement at their Sussex home, including Pablo Picasso, whose own work crops up in the kitchen and garden. I did a double take when I recognised his distinctive style in a face painted on a fat-splashed tile above the stove.

But even by the time Miller moved here in 1949, bohemian 20th-century creatives were not new to this slice of Sussex. Decades earlier, artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and writer David Garnett had moved to another farm building nearby, Charleston House, where they entertained fellow members of the Bloomsbury Group, the literary set that included Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf. Its highly decorated walls and furniture are worth a visit alone, as is the starry line-up at its annual cultural festival in May.

East Sussex’s further links to Modernism are celebrated in a series of contemporary art galleries linked by a charming coastal cycle path. I followed its trail from Eastbourne – host of the Turner Prize exhibition until mid-april – then pedalled past the kite surfers of Pevensey Bay and called in at the Grade I-listed De La Warr Pavilion, a Modernist wonder in Bexhill. After a hilltop pause above a beach where an 18th-century shipwreck is uncovered at certain low tides, it was a fast descent towards Hastings, to browse the galleries and independent shops of a whole new generation of creatives.

Boho paradise (this page; clockwise from top left) The Modernist De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill dates from 1935; the late Surrealist artist Roland Penrose at work in his home; sculptures dot the Coastal Culture Trail; Pevensey Bay was part of England’s Napoleonic defences in the early 1800s, when Martello towers were erected between Eastbourne and Hastings; Charleston House was at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group, a set of early-20th-century intellectuals who counted Virginia Woolf among their number; model-cum-war photographer Lee Miller; the charming Much Ado Books; (left page) the eclectic studio at Charleston House