‘No tender-hearted garden’: The Promenade at Bexhill
If Kent is the Garden of England, Sussex is its gravel driveway. The amount of the county that is rolling greenery is limited to a narrow strip behind the Downs, and the rest is weird landscapes with odd names. Yes, some people live in little villages or market towns, and I grew up one of them, but most live in workmen’s terraces or flimsy strip developments in forgotten coastal cities.
Bexhill-on-Sea is in the flimsy category.
It’s a baffling assemblage of crumbling Victorian villas, chirpy Edwardian boarding houses with no remaining Edwardians, half-hearted post-war mid-rises and things that defy classification. It has two attractions of note. One is a magnificently macabre museum of things a rich man shot and stuffed in the early years of last century. The other is the De La Warr Pavilion, a nationally important arts venue and an internationally important example of early Modernist architecture, moored like a great ocean liner in this tideline of seaside fantasies. Bexhill has not been planned and at some deep, visceral level it doesn’t work. It’s pretty typical of the Sussex Coast, in other words.
The other half of the picture is the great non-negotiable: The Channel. Where the landward side is cacophonous, this bit of sea is empty and endless, even in a storm. It’s a unique, distracting shade of aquamarine in the summer and eau-de-nil in the winter. On a good day you can see Beachy Head, but generally there is nothing but water. It is the ultimate void, in garden design terms. Not so much a view as an existential crisis.

On the day that I visit the brave garden that stands athwart the two, it is raining. It might be August, and it might be the hottest Summer on record since 1976, and this might be the driest place in the UK, but I am given a reminder of the greatest challenge to growing anything here. The climate, soil and conditions are almost gleefully hostile to most plant life. And to humans. I am literally soaked to the skin with briny rain before I clear the De La Warr. One of my contact lenses nearly washes out beside the ice-cream van. Still, I can’t help but smile as I reach the Promenade. This is one of my favourite gardens in the world.
I’ll try to sum up why. Like the De La Warr, this garden asks how we can make anything of beauty in this place. And the answer is that of course we can. Beauty is already here.

Impossible horizons
I have always been afraid of the Downs. Their ‘blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed’ hills cast long Nosferatu shadows on the villages below. The name of the town I grew up in, Lewes, comes from the early Saxon word “hlaewes”. It means “place of the mounds”, and the hills around it are full of man-made earthworks. Some are defensive, but most are either burials or as-yet unexplained. There’s an argument for approaching the Downs as one vast sacred place linking the sky, sea and earth, the solstices and the equinoxes, the living and the ghostly, and that Lewes is a place where the sea pierces the chalk, the sun hits shadow. It is a door through which the dead walk in.
People elsewhere tend to think of Sussex as default, gentle middle England, and in many ways that’s what its become. But there’s an older, wilder, eldritch Sussex which had to be displaced for that Tudorbethan fantasy to be built.
Rudyard Kipling left behind a massive corpus of well-read literature and an incredibly controversial legacy. I know for most readers of my generation he’s a symbol of everything oppressive, white, male and un-woke, and I agree with the criticisms levelled at him. But despite that, he remains one of the few writers who ever really saw and understood the Downs for what they are, or treated them and the people who live there as something worthy of literature. He actually listened to the ordinary people around him, how they spoke, what they believed, their superstitions and their folk heroes.
Kipling lived in Burwash for the second half of his life, just a few miles inland from Bexhill. He wrote some of his most famous poetry there, including several about the local folklore and history of the area. We were taught Smugglers’ Song in school, and it evokes a completely different coastline to the end-of-the-pier postcard whimsy that dogs Sussex. It’s a warning to children not to look out the window if you hear smugglers outside. There are vivid descriptions of the contraband in their barrels — ‘brandy for the parson, baccy for the clerk, lace is for a lady, letters for a spy’ — but although it’s never said explicitly, the insinuation is clear: bad things will happen to you if you step out of line. ‘Watch the wall my darling, while the gentlemen go by…’
Robertsbridge is a pretty little village next door to Burwash, but back in the eighteenth century it was the headquarters of one of the most vicious smugglers gangs of the South Coast, and there was plenty of competition for that title. India cotton had devastated the wool trade, and since few things apart from sheep thrive on the Downs the local economy had collapsed. Then enclosure drove these marginal places over the edge. The local population only had the sea to rely on, and smuggled gin, brandy and tobacco had a much higher mark-up rate than fish. Big money from London soon upped the stakes, and the Hawkshurst Gang was one of the outfits that turned smuggling into an industry. Like all drugs cartels everywhere, they kept the local population in line with a combination of bribes, threats and outright torture and violence.
It’s parched, bleached and inhospitable. It’s full of ghosts and devils, crooks and thugs.
And yet to this day Sussex identifies with the smugglers, not the hapless Customs Officers. It’s interesting that Smugglers Song delivers no moral punchline, no comeuppance either way, and I respect Kipling for that. The enduring appeal of these brutal gangs has probably got something to do with a sense that is the price of living somewhere literally marginal. Kipling’s ambivalent but beautiful poem captures that uneasy, grizzly history; ‘Them that asks no questions, isn’t told no lies.’ Surviving a place like this will do things to you. Like Pinky’s Brighton rock metaphor, it leaves its mark upon your bones.
Kipling wrote a poem called Sussex, and that is all about a connection with this landscape born of profound and constant attention. It takes work, but that’s part of love:
“No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn —
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald. […]We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales —
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails —
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies —
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.”
Kipling was not repulsed that this is not a gentle landscape, or a forgiving one. He didn’t try to finesse that or distract from it. It’s parched, bleached and inhospitable. It’s full of ghosts and devils, crooks and thugs. You have to love unloved things to make this place your home. It demands you find beauty in voids and uncanny patterns.
I have never liked walking alone for any distance on the Downs. I always feel that I am being watched. I sense people walking beside me although I can’t see them. I’ve been told that this is common, and I’ve been given several explanations for it over the years. The first is that there’s something weird that these rolling, pale, bare hillsides do to your perspective, so it is impossible to judge what is close and what is far away. Not just in terms of specific objects, but the width and depth of the valley that you’re in, or the size of the curve of the hill. This makes an already-echoing landscape even more uncanny, because your eyes and ears can’t reconcile themselves. Another thing is that the lines of the paths and fences often form a visual equivalent of an adverse camber; they run counter to the swell of the land, and it almost makes you feel sea-sick. And then there’s the endless sky and sea again, and the vertigo of all that.
Maybe. Perhaps they are just haunted.
I can’t write about this without mentioning Eric Ravilious. If Kipling understood why the Downs tell the stories they do, Ravilious captured their disorienting visual beauty. Other people painted the Downs, but no-one engaged with their eldritch charisma like him.

In his pictures, nothing is forced to resolve itself. Paths go to nowhere. Lighthouses pierce grey horizons, but their beams broadcast into nothing. Seas, skies and land are similar shades and shapes. His Downland rolls and pitches like a stormy sea, but when you look at it forensically all that movement comes as much from texture as from line. Certainly there are few objects in these paintings, and buildings are scarce. Even if things are different colours, they all have the same chalky tone. Nothing is distinct from anything else.
And yet these paintings are rhythmic, to the point of being percussive. There are the same sweeping curves, over and over, as the land folds into itself. Large, low, arcing, blue-green hills. Like whales’ backs. It’s a funny combination of featurelessness and frantic power.
Ravilious drew something I struggle to put into words. When I am driving home to Sussex, I don’t just see Devil’s Dyke rise up to meet me. I hear it. I feel it. Its taste fills my mouth. Even in the pitch dark of a winter night I know it is before me, pressing in on me. It fills my senses and then it swallows me.
Kipling and Ravilious captured the Downs as development on the coast was at its peak, but it had started over a century beforehand when Brighton became fashionable. Once holidays and railways were invented, modern Sussex was born. But Kipling and Ravilious were very aware what haunted land these dreams were built upon, and the tough, lawless lives that were buried beneath it.
I feel sad for the ghosts on the ridge of the Downs. I’ll give Kipling this: he saw them too and he paid respect to them. Their names are forgotten, and their colours are blue and white and silver-sage.

+
There’s really only one way to approach a promenade, and that’s head-on. It always opens up like the first chord of a Beethoven symphony, a big vista that sets out the thesis that will run throughout its length. Bexhill West Parade is no different. On the day that I return to it, the rain has blurred the sea and sky together, and the promenade itself is a ribbon of silvery water. I’m astonished that I managed to take any photos, so I’m not going to apologise for the lack of sketches here. But it’s hard to capture with a camera what it’s like to take it in from the lawns outside the De La Warr Pavilion and know that you have half a mile of it in front of you.

I just hope you get a sense of what’s exciting and unusual about this promenade. Generally, traditional ornamental beds on seafronts rely heavily on geometric pattern and loud colours to cope with the enormity of it all. At first glance, the Promenade at Bexhill seems to be sliding into the shingle. It’s almost as if the clumps of seakale and stonecrop on the beach have got out of hand and started to creep into town. A series of low, rounded bushes reach out along the shore, all a bit herby, all a bit wind-bitten. It’s only closer inspection that reveals that what you’re looking at is highly structured, with a few key shapes replayed over and over to build up a layered, textured planting that knits the built and the wild and the sea and the land together.
If you look at the photo above again, you’re viewing one of a series of “rooms”. They’re each carefully walled off from one another by either a structure or a screen of taller planting. Inside each is an open area of grass, and most have a facility or feature within that space; a piece of play equipment, an outdoor shower tucked into a hedge, a fountain. The same simple hard materials come back throughout in different combinations; low white walls, stark unvarnished benches, and sleepers laid on the ground as paths and stacked up as screens.
These rooms are aligned carefully with the existing buildings and street furniture — the beach huts, the steps, the groynes, and the masses and voids of the houses on the seafront. The shelters that punctuate the garden seem to have taken their cue from the De La Warr, and they follow the same line of projection as Ravilious’ fences and lighthouse beams: a point of origin you can’t see, heading to an impossible horizon.

The individual elements that make up this highly structured pattern reflect the shapes in the landscape around the garden. The low white walls are the final part of a series of them that hug the contours of the lawns in front of the De La Warr. The borders fade in and the walls fade out using the natural slope of the shore, and it does a remarkably good job of managing the transition from this beautiful but very stark piece of architecture and the peculiar Edwardian cupola-and-seawall arrangement below it to the shingle and ordinary architecture of the town. My childhood memory of the Pavilion is that it felt like an accusation (and I think it was intended as such by its founder, the 9th Earl De La Warr, but that’s another story). Now it feels like some reconciliation has been achieved, and it’s the use of line and the continuation of those white walls into the landscape that’s made the difference.
The sleepers are a bit of a garden cliché these days, but in this context they do a similar job to the walls but from the sea end of the equation. The sea groynes that punctuate the Sussex Coast are one of the most distinctive things about it. They’re literally anchors: without them the shingle would constantly wash away, eroding the shoreline with it. The use of heavy dark wood in the garden extends these lines up into the town, as if they’re anchoring the plants as well.

The final key element in this pattern is the rounded blue-green mounds of the borders. A lot of that effect is about the varieties of plants that have been chosen, but at the same time there are lots of ways to clip a lavender. Here they’re kept carefully rounded and layered upon one another, diving in and out of one another’s space, forming steep valleys and long, low, sweeping ridges. It’s not hard to see Ravilious’ landscapes again, the blue-green hills and the paths that go to nowhere.
The way that it works with vernacular materials and the patterns in the town and the landscape means that the Promenade is both a bit like walking through a pleasure garden and a bit like walking on Beachy Head at the same time. Somehow that doesn’t feel as weird as it ought to. It captures the openness and freedom this coast has always been associated with, but it breaks it down into human-scale, manageable spaces that are sheltered and welcoming.

Natural Histories
Every garden has many histories. Natural histories: the soil and climate and the flora and fauna in and around it. Social histories: why it was built, what was there beforehand, why people still use it and what gardens mean to them. Personal histories: its makers and maintainers, its visitors and residents, the living and the dead. All gardens are about a place and can’t be successfully extracted from it, because all gardens rely upon context for at least some of their impact. Even the ones that set out to be exotic do so in reference to the world beyond. It’s why people grow palm trees in Cornwall, and olives in Northumberland.
For all its gravel and minimalist architecture, Bexhill Promenade is a deeply traditional seafront pleasure garden. All the elements are present and correct. At the most obvious level, there is a wide, flat and completely straight path that runs the whole length of it, bordering onto the beach. There are shelters for taking refuge from the inevitable wind and rain. During my visit they were used for finding the last scraps of dry fabric on my body and wiping my camera lens.
There’s formal bedding. I hadn’t appreciated this until I went back with a critical eye, but the planting in this garden is very structured and carefully triangulated. The shapes in the borders might echo the sliding, shifting Downs, but the hard landscaping itself is done on a simple grid of squares, rectangles and doglegs. That helps tie the Modernist edifice of the De La Warr and the sixties flats into the beach, but it also gives the garden an underlying dynamic that’s measured and controlled. Thinking about it, it would be hard to reconcile a more organic design with the endless horizons and mile-long stretch of tarmac. While the grasses and herbs give plenty of Ravilian texture, it’s the sharp lines of the flower beds that keep us moving through the garden, as rhythmic as a row of cypresses. Just like a row of cypresses, the repetition of plants helps build that rhythm too. There are remarkably few species doing a lot of different things here. The sharp angles of the shelters dramatically extend our lines of sight towards the horizon and away behind us, like they are fast-moving objects captured in a photo.

Brilliantly, this seafront also comes with amusements. There’s probably a whole different essay to be written about how public gardens encourage certain behaviours and what that says about our civic anxieties, but I’ll let someone else deal with that. This promenade eschews donkey rides and novelty photo booths for low-rise children’s play equipment. Except they are clearly not just meant for children. The climbing log is huge, like the mast of a wrecked ship. There’s a rolling chair shaped like a colander that will take five toddlers, three primary schoolers, two bored teenagers or one fat elderly gent. There’s a pair of ear trumpets sticking out of the earth, about eight metres apart, done out in smart chrome. They beg for you to figure them out, to get your friend to stand next to the other one and whisper obscenities at them. I’m the sort of adult who’s as delighted as any five-year-old to discover there really is a tube running all the way beneath the earth connecting us together.
The seaside is supposed to be fun, after all.
And do not fear. There is a kiosk. I’m not sure if it’s English law that a kiosk serving tea, sandwiches and something bland and unseasonably hot must be stationed every two miles along the coast, but they are always there, defying Continental standards of cuisine like Martello towers.
Thinking about Martello towers, there’s always an issue of scale along the South East coast. The lack of busyness in the landscape can make even massive things look diddy. Martello towers were always talked about as impressive feats of engineering when I was a child, and then you realised that they were those things that looked like disused toilet blocks. They were dwarfed by the vastness of the horizon, the emptiness of the shore, the featureless cliffs and marshes.
Bexhill Promenade knows what and where it is, and just like its flashier Victorian ancestors it is more of a giant bedding border than a conventional garden. I only counted three trees in the entire half-mile site, and they were modest myrtles of about seven foot high. They were clustered together beside a toilet, creating a sweep up from the main planting to the wooden structure behind. Promenade gardens like this are a transitional space from one colossal statement to another: the land to the sea. They might cover a large surface area, but to feel proportionate they need to be quite open and low-rise.
They also need to accept that they are holding a dialogue between both sides of their nature, and this is one aspect of the new garden here I think is especially clever. Yes, the Promenade’s structure echoes the sea kales and gorses of the wild beaches and Downs, but it’s also borrowed carefully from the reality of the modern sea front. The only colours besides the grey-greens, yellows and silver-blues of the local wildflowers are bright stabs of orangey-red kniphofia and the ripe rosehips of the rugosas. You find this colour all over the seashore, on lifebelts and flags and buoys. You’ll find pitch-tar black everywhere, too; on the hulls of fishing boats, on the groynes, on the netting sheds. Bexhill Promenade doesn’t just remind me of the Downs, or of Mediterranean holidays. It also reminds me of queuing for the ferry at Newhaven, of sitting in my grandfather’s car eating ice-cream, of walking home at sunrise after clubbing in Brighton. It’s affectionate, but it’s not nostalgic.

Sunstruck
Although they look more natural here than the seasonal bedding plants in traditional borders, most of these plants are actually from the Eastern Mediterranean. There are a few castaways like Kniphofia from the Cape, whose cool sea mists and exposed maritime hills are a good proving ground for shingle beaches. But mostly they are from Greece, Turkey, Sicily and the Levant.
Eastbourne is only a few miles away, and it’s officially the sunniest place in the UK. This corner of the world is blessed and cursed with what is essentially a cool Mediterranean climate. The average annual rainfall is a geography-defying 31 inches, and during July the recorded temperature has never dropped below 8°C. That’s not 8°C on average, by the way, but 8°C ever. While this makes for an enjoyable staycation, it is a challenging place for most native plant species, and a deathly one for your average bedding plant. Add to that the thin, poor soil and the constant scouring by salt and wind, and it is not hard to see why the landscape around there looks the way it does.
The design team that planned the garden, an architectural firm called HTA, therefore had a limited palate to choose from if they wanted to create a sustainable and affordable public park. In some ways it’s a blessing to have some constraints on a design. The reason these plants look like they’re at home here is that the native species they’re rubbing shoulders with have similar adaptations to help them survive similar conditions: fleshy leaves to store water, a thick cuticle to avoid dehydration, and tough stems and roots to withstand the elements. Many have the distinctive blue-green, glaucous foliage that the Downs is well-known for. In some plants, like olives and rosemarys, this is a sort of waxy film, and in others it’s the product of tiny hairs, as in sages. Even this colour is a further adaptation to drought and scorching from wind, salt and sun. It’s very helpful to choose foliage from a particular part of the colour wheel, and if you have to choose plants from similar places, they’re likely to have elements that will hold them all together even if they are otherwise very diverse.

From these photos it’s clear to see that this garden relies upon the repetition of some key varieties: cotton lavender, rosemary, sedums, sages, grasses, sea holly and echium. Where other plants appear, they pop against the rolling pattern of grey and blue. It’s a fine line with feature plants between standing out and wrecking the party. I’ve already mentioned the lifeboat-orange Kniphofias a couple of times, but this dark purple sedum looks like a cup of blood-red wine in this context.

I think it’s Purple Emperor, but am happy to be corrected. It works so well here despite how different in colour it is to everything else because it echoes the form and habit of the other sedums, and the way that the planting has gone back to some key shapes and textures again and again: wide seed heads, long elegant stalks, rounded outlines. It’s yet another nod to the Modernism further up the beach.
What makes this a truly inspired piece of planting in my view, and perhaps what won HTA Highly Commended in the Landscape Institute’s 2012 awards, is the plant associations. They work on a number of levels — strong structure with movement, features and uniformity, colour and texture — but they manage somehow to do this over the course of the entire year, and in surprising and exciting ways. This is a big challenge when working with Mediterranean plants, because they are adapted to flower briefly and then survive the rest of the summer as seeds.
Take this astonishing looking plant, for example, Turkish sage (phlomis russeliana):

Here it’s almost an alien thing, a piece of wrought-iron sculpture. In this photo it stands in contrast to the white walls that divide up the “rooms” of the garden in one part of the Promenade, but in another it’s the counterpoint to a delicate verbena and a flowing miscanthus.

It’s hard to believe it’s the same plant as the one Carol Klein enthuses about in this Gardener’s World package from a few years ago. Here it’s got lovely grey-green leaves and whorls of sunshine-yellow flowers, picking up on the flowering curry plant and golden yarrow.
The plants in this garden don’t just talk to each other and to the native wildflowers around them, but they do it all the time throughout the year. You can come back to this garden month by month and see them strike up new conversations with one another. As things die they become the architecture for something new. It looks effortless but is actually incredibly clever, and the garden is still coherent seven years on from planting. In striving for sustainability and biodiversity, this design probably was given a head-start in looking at ease with itself.

+
You have to get used to small victories in this landscape: bee orchids and vetch, bird’s foot trefoil and pimpernel. Even walking there won’t change the illusion that this is a barren place, an unending carpet of poor grazing. You have to stop and sit, and do it again after a few months, and then again after that, to notice the tiny triumphs and tragedies that make up the Downs.
The rampion is the most famous of these hardy little wildflowers. They’re normally found on mountains further south in Europe, and in the UK they’re rare beyond the South Downs. They have slender, tongue-like leaves and dazzling purple-blue pompom flowers. They can wait out the winter storms and the salt-licked winds, heads bowed and little bodies pressed flat to the earth. Every year they come back.

When I was growing up, my grandmother wrung huge runner beans and cascades of tomatoes and swags of grapes out of the sun-bleached chalk. It was only once I came to grow in the Tyne Valley, with its freezing winters, plentiful rain and loamy soil that I realised how bizarre my gardening references were. I have since learned that chalk soil is the weirdest and most dreaded of all in horticulture. It combines the clagginess of clay when wet with the insubstantiality of sand when dry.
There are benefits as well as problems, though. Slugs and snails exist on the Downs, but it’s not their comfort zone. In Northumberland, where I now live, the slugs are like the relentless march of a zombie invasion. In the time it takes to pick them off one row of cabbages they’ve repopulated the row you did before. No barrier, be it chemical or physical, will ever completely defeat them. I sit besieged in my little house surrounded by pellets like my ancestors sat around the campfire listening for wolves.
Back home, our greatest enemy had been the sun. Now I find myself desperately praying for daylight and warmth in Spring. I have looked at frost-withered seedlings on the May Bank Holiday with a thermos of tea, remembering May Days in primary school so hot the tarmac melted. Even the chemistry of the soil confounded me to begin with. My default was calcium to the point of poison, but in Northumberland this was all reversed. My brassicas struggled, but I grew my first carrots.
This summer, Sussex came to me instead.
Moving has made me appreciate how far my Granny had travelled to her garden on the Downs. She grew up in Fermanagh, and I suspect that her garden education took place in circumstances more like those I now face. I can’t speak for her, but I think where you first grow plants determines your relationship with the craft of gardening. I don’t think I’m ever going to feel less than cheated about the damp, or the frost-bitten seedlings, or the precarious roulette that is germination up here. I’m grateful for the loamy garden and the allotments I have had: I always thought owning a home never mind a garden was beyond my grasp. But I am always going to hanker for a south-facing scree with terrible soil, a hot wind, baking sun and briny air.
But this last summer was long and hot and dry. I have been at home with it in a way my neighbours weren’t. It was the constant comment that made me realise I hadn’t even noticed it. The lawns of Northumberland have been full of stricken Northerners, pointlessly wagging a hose at the foliage in the heat of the day, remarking to me how this “feels like being on holiday”. I’d just felt at home.
I’d unthinkingly slipped back into the old rhythms, rising early and watering at sunrise and sunset, breakfast and dinner outside but no cancer-baiting barbecues at noon, and practising acceptance that things like lawns just aren’t meant for hot, dry weather. I pulled the French doors all the way back so my house and the garden were one and the same. I watched the grasses rippling in the evening breeze. This summer I’ve sat with a glass of Bacchus looking up at the rising moon, listening to the owls begin the night shift. I’ve felt the chalk in the wine kiss my mouth, and I’ve taken the time to drink in the hidden gift of a hot, dry day: the nicotianas and jasmines and sweet peas pouring their perfume out into the night, the wholesome, parched aroma of long grass. It’s not right for Northumberland to be like this, but it reminds me of what’s magical about living in a warm, dry, dusty place. This summer, Sussex came to me instead.
After five years learning how to grow in Northumberland it’s a mystery to me why you would ever want to garden in ways that defy the soil beneath your feet. That’s what a really good garden does, I think. It’s of its place rather than there in spite of it. It takes what is already abundant, what is already a gift, and encourages us to notice, to savour and to respect. You fall in love and show love to another by attending to who they are. Anything else is narcissism, and in the end destructive to you and the thing you claim to cherish.

A place to think about place
I think everyone who can should go and walk along the Promenade at Bexhill. At the same time, I cannot lie and I see no need to: Bexhill isn’t Florence, the Promenade isn’t the Boboli Gardens. But then I’m not E. M. Forster, and you are not Helena Bonham Carter.
Places like Bexhill were never built with an eye on posterity, or for people to live profoundly within them. Like the Costa del Sol, they were mostly developed by property speculators looking for a quick return. The holiday makers who saved all year to be there came looking for release and for escape. The people who worked in the hotels and restaurants were mostly badly paid and picking up seasonal work: the towns behind the seafront have generally been poor and running to stand still. Richer enclaves exist of course but these were often aimed at retirees, people who felt they’d paid their dues and were now entitled to end their days in a warm and easy place. There is little stable work compared to the number of people looking for it. There is a sense of unreality to the Sussex Coast.
But people do think and reflect here. People spot meaning and beauty in their environment, because we all do. People are born and they fall in love and age and they die. Especially they die. All lives are meaningful, and so are all places. If you come looking for beauty in Sussex, don’t pass Bexhill and St Leonards and Hastings and Peacehaven and Newhaven by.
How we live with plants tells us a lot about ourselves, whether it’s a country house garden, an allotment, an office yukka or a pot of basil from the supermarket. If you have plants in your life then there is a part of it where patience, respect and nurture are what matters. A public garden — official or unofficial — is like a library or an art gallery like the De La Warr. It’s a place that lets all of us know that thinking and seeing, or just being you, is important and valued and that it matters to other people too. It’s a space to encounter the place you live in anew. It’s a place to explore being yourself and how you fit into a bigger world.
You can look out into the Channel and know that you won’t drown.


