Heene Terrace was built in 1865, along with Heene Hotel (now the Burlington), as the first part of the development of West Worthing. At that time, the western boundary of the main town was at the Old Coastguard House, and the village of Heene was beyond, with open fields between. There was a collection of cottages at Little Heene, on the site of today’s Thorn Road and Brunswick Road, which the town officials regarded as hovels inhabited by loafers and smugglers. The new West

Petworth is a quaint market town in the heart of the South Downs National Park. I spent a couple of days there in June and enjoyed the comforts of a modernised Victorian photographer’s studio, above an art gallery, on a picturesque car-free road called Lombard Street. The magnificent Petworth Estate was a stone’s throw away but I only had time for a short stroll among some of the park’s enormous ancient trees. Georgian Elegance Goes Pop My first destination was in the opposit

I launched my art career with a solo exhibition at Montague Gallery in the summer of 2025, with a series of paintings inspired by Worthing beach at low tide, plus photographs recording the erosion of wooden sea defences. The paintings are sandscapes rather than seascapes as the focus is the expanse of sand revealed with the tide goes out completely. Seaside Jolly Reaching the age of 66 was a major turning point for me. I was disappointed in myself for not creating the artis

I've done a lot of life drawing over the years at a variety of places, from scruffy art college classrooms at Chealsea and Camberwell to an amazing loft studio in Bow. I recently went to the Cellar Arts Club in Worthing and was pleased to discover I could still draw. I had a thrilling experience at a life drawing class in the summer of 2011. At that time, I was working in London and one afternoon, I got a call from my artist friend Chrissie, saying I was in for a surprise if

I love wandering around historic houses and Charleston, near Lewes in East Sussex, is a particularly delightful place to visit, being the former home of two Bloomsbury artists who transformed a tumbledown farmhouse into an avant-garde work of art. Vanessa Bell moved into the 16th-century farmhouse in 1916 with her young sons, Julian and Quentin. As well as a cook, a housemaid and a nanny, she brought her lover Duncan Grant, who brought his dog Henry and his lover David Garnet

Surprising, magical and spectacular are the best words to use when describing the Collector Earl’s Garden at Arundel Castle. As a Sussex native, I’ve visited the magnificent fairytale castle numerous times over the years and always found it a thrilling place to be, and the Collector Earl’s Garden adds a further dimension to the ancestral home of the Dukes of Norfolk. The Collector Earl was Thomas Howard (1585-1646) 14th Earl of Arundel, 4th Earl of Surrey and 1st Earl of Norf

I spent a great deal of my youth watching old movies on TV. I was mad about Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Errol Flynn and Montgomery Clift. I couldn't get enough of those so-called 'women's' pictures, melodramas in the 1930s and 40s starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Old Hollywood offered me escapism and my ideas about love and romance were shaped by the passion I saw on the screen. For me in real life, no one ever measured up to expectations. Here are my pencil drawings of t

I fell in love with a place call Talywern, a hillside hamlet six miles east of the market town of Machynlleth in the county of Powys, Mid Wales. There are only six houses in Talywern, plus a disused chapel. One of these houses is called Cil Haul and I lived there for a few months. Idyllic is the only way to describe Talywern. The road from Machynlleth is narrow, winding and hemmed in by hedgerows, and a stream runs under the road leading into Talywern, which is pretty and pea

Never settle. Find love that is wild, sets your soul on fire, a love like nothing you've ever felt before. And when you do, be brave. Follow your heart. Poem by Rebel Romeo

There's a lot to be dismayed about when you look at Worthing these days but if you explore, you can discover some fascinating things that hint at the town's previous pride in itself. Worthing actually has some world-class public sculpture: the Grade 2* listed Desert Quartet by Dame Elisabeth Frink, installed in 1990. This group of four monumental heads by an international artist faces the terrace of fine Georgian houses of Liverpool Gardens and makes amends, in a way, for the