When we were visiting Sussex every couple of weeks, for family reasons, many years ago, Alfriston was our bookshop therapy! I think the visits helped us to cope with difficult times. This visit was our first for a few years and it was wonderful, everything we had remembered.
We left Alfriston, after a walk around the Clergy House and Church and a quick toe into the South Downs, with a couple of bags of carefully selected and delicious books.
Next on our itinerary was a visit to Charleston Farm House. Charleston was the country house of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and is a wonderful example of their decorative style. Almost every surface imaginable is painted in their unique styles, even the bath panel! The house is a living, breathing work of art. Charleston became a gathering point for members of the Bloomsbury Group, some of the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers. It is here that they lived out their progressive social and artistic ideals.
