The delights of Rottingdean

Whilst I – we – were all so delighted to be travelling abroad again one must not forget the delights Great Britain has to offer.

Yesterday I had cause to visit Rottingdean, only a couple of miles from my home.

It suffers from too much traffic travelling from the A27 to the coastal road – and its residents are rather ‘up themselves’ – but this 1,000 year old place, bigger than a village but smaller than a town, has that Sussex asset of both being by the sea and close to the Downs.

After completing my shopping in the narrow High Street, I passed the home and blue plaque of North End House, the house of Pre Raphaelite Edward Burne Jones.

He lived in North End Road, Fulham, but moved to Rottingdean with his wife Georgina, keeping the Fulham name.

Georgina was one of the remarkable MacDonald sisters: one married John Kipling, father of Rudyard, himself a Rottingdean resident; another married Alfred Baldwin, MP father of three-time Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.

Georgina was something of a socialist activist, displaying an anti British banner outside their Rottingdean home during the Boer War which then – and indeed now – would not go down well with locals.

Her granddaughter was the novelist Angela Thirkell.

The literary association does not end there.

The House was acquired from artist Sir William Nicholson – father of Ben – by a leading figure in Reuters Chairman Sir Rodrick Jones whose wife Enid Bagnold wrote National Velvet.  

The council has restored the Kipling Gardens and – with all the troubles in the world – it’s a delightful place to rest on a garden bench away from them all and in tranquillity.