Sussex has no shortage of cultural honey pots, with many artists and authors houses, including Henry James in Rye, Kipling at Batemans and Virginia Woolf in Rodmell, close to her sister’s farmhouse at Charleston, most with accompanying opportunities for afternoon tea, souvenir mugs and garden plants. In the West, there’s Chichester with the ever rewarding Pallant House gallery, the Festival Theatre and the cathedral, a visit to which must always include the Arundel Tomb, with the recumbent medieval couple forever gently holding hands, with a nearby copy of the eponymous poem by Philip Larkin with the uncharacteristically sentimental last line, ‘What will survive of us is Love’.
Then there are the Towner and the gallery formerly known as the Jerwood, trying to bring a bit of Bilbao to Eastbourne and Hasting respectively. Not to mention the original ‘Guggenheim effect’ of Brighton’s Pavilion, the pearl around which the grit of Brighton blossomed in the Regency period.
As the culturati trundle up and down the A27 between these sites, Bognor Regis is literally bypassed, saddled as it is by a combination of Butlins and a probably apocryphal expletive imperative from George V.
Bognor, not an obvious candidate for City of Culture
Although not an immediately obvious candidate for City of Culture, Bognor does have some claim to cultural significance. It has been suggested that the postscript to Finnegans Wake should read ‘Bognor Regis, Paris’, not quite as exotic as the ‘Trieste, Zurich, Paris’ that ends Ulysses. James Joyce stayed in Bognor in 1923 while recovering from an eye operation and was already writing episodes that would find their way into the final book.
The name, however, that may shortly push Bognor into the cultural spotlight is that of William Blake, best known as author of what is now sung as ‘Jerusalem’ and also for ‘The Tyger’ (well, the first two lines anyway).
His influence, however, is greater than just the writer of the unofficial national anthem. Although he died in poverty, recognition of the originality of his wider work has grown over years, covering subjects such as personal liberty, including of sexual and religious choices, challenging institutional power – especially the church – and the dehumanising effects of the industrial revolution. His belief in the primacy of imagination, and that the promotion of reason and observation, central to ‘the enlightenment’, was limiting our consciousness. This resonated with modern writers and artists such as Aldous Huxley, who named a book from a passage of Blake, ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’ and in turn, gave Jim Morrison the name of his band.
Revered by both the establishment and the counterculture
Blake seems more relevant and widely read now than his hero, John Milton. It is difficult to think of another artist who is as revered by both the establishment and the counterculture.
Born in Soho in 1757, to a family of dissenters, his father was a shopkeeper. Unlike many of his contemporary Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake was not university educated. He left school at 10 to enrol in a drawing school before becoming an apprentice to a printer for seven years. As a printer and engraver, he worked for radical publishers including those of Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine (and is often credited with tipping Paine off that he was about to be arrested, leading to his escape to France in 1792). As well as printing for others, he started writing his own poems or ‘songs’ as he called them and illustrating them.
He developed a new form of printing, relief etching, which he used to produce his work with drawings and text on the same block, subsequently hand painted, not unlike modern graphic novels.
These are beautiful but they didn’t sell. What is now one of his most famous works, Songs of Innocence and Experience, (which includes ‘The Tyger’), sold only 28 copies in his lifetime. A copy sold for £3.4million last year.
He spent nearly all his life in London but of all the known addresses where he lived, all but one have been demolished, including his last house which stood where the Savoy Hotel now stands. The only remaining house is in South Molton Street, just off Bond Street and Oxford Street and is prime high-end shopping territory, so it’s unlikely ever to become available for a museum or centre of Blake study.
Moving to Felpham, West Sussex
The only place where he lived outside of London, between 1800 and 1803, however, is standing, just about, and is in the West Sussex village of Felpham, now effectively a suburb of Bognor Regis.
Initially at least, he seemed happy to be here, stating: “Felpham is a sweet place for Study. because it is more Spiritual than London, Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates her windows are not obstructed by vapours.”
Blake used the time in Sussex, as well as working for patrons, on his own epic poem about the aforementioned Milton, with the introductory ‘song’ now known as ‘Jerusalem’.
He left, presumably because the damp made his wife increasingly unwell, but also after an incident when Blake was arrested for sedition after he said some unwise things about the King after he caught a local soldier urinating in his garden. He was acquitted at trial in Chichester.
The cottage was bought by a trust set up to rescue it in 2015, but only over the last couple of years has there been progress made towards restoring it, with an urgency brought on by its imminent collapse as the thatch failed and the timbers started to rot. At least this danger put the house on the ‘at risk’ list and so attracted emergency funding allowing the current work.
Currently undergoing restoration under the expert guidance of Nick Tyson, who over the last 30 years has led the project at the Regency Townhouse in Brunswick Square, Hove, the cottage is being returned to the layout and structure as Blake found it in 1800.
The trust has ambitions to develop an educational centre and other facilities to make this a world leading hub for all matters ‘Blake’. There are hopes to have the cottage ready for visitors in time for the bicentenary of his death in 2027.
If Philip Larkin helped Hull to become a City of Culture, maybe Bognor could benefit from its association with the enduring spirit of William Blake. At the very least, there will be a new destination off the A27.
Updates on progress and how to donate to the renovation can be found at www.blakecottage.org
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