We publish Sussex books and other fiction and non-fiction titles, and specialise in self-publication
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Sussex BooksThese books can be bought direct from Pomegranate Press via Paypal. Free postage and packing to UK addresses only - contact us for a price to send books elsewhere. |
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ST JAMES'S STREET, BRIGHTON, AND ITS ENVIRONS: A walk through its history from 1800–1900
This is the first ever exploration of the commercial and cultural life of this busy Brighton street. Richly illustrated with photographs, maps, old advertisements and extracts from newspapers, it plots a steady course from No. 1A ('Family mourners' back in 1846) to No. 130 (which has variously housed grocers, outfitters, an employment agency, a brace of banks and, today, a charity shop). It's an essental guide not only for local residents and businesses, but for anyone fascinated by hitherto unsung areas of Brighton's history.
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THE TRADITIONAL DIALECT OF SUSSEX Ever since the Rev W.D. Parish’s seminal A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect, first published in 1875, there have been attempts – some more convincing than others – to replicate, codify and explain the way our forefathers spoke, but never until now has a professional linguist explored the subject with such magisterial comprehensiveness as Richard Coates has achieved in this long-awaited study. A research professor at the University of Sussex, and professor of linguistics at the University of the West of England, Coates presents no fewer than 40 examples of the dialect for detailed analysis, from the Anglo- Saxon period to the present day. The book also includes a description of what was special about the dialect in its various local forms, an extensive bibliography of works relevant to the Sussex dialect and a discography of recorded material with Sussex voices.
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HAMMER AND FURNACE PONDS
They beautify the woodlands of the Sussex and Kent High Weald, but they were created to power what has been described as the country's first industrial revolution. Helen Pearce's walker-friendly guide to the rich crop of surviving hammer and furnace ponds in the area traces the history of iron exploitation from pre-Roman times, but concentrates on the 16th and 17th centuries when the Weald throbbed to the sound of trip hammers. Her attractively illustrated guide includes a complete gazetteer of surviving ponds, with map references and access details, and a list of museums with iron industry displays.
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THE SUSSEX PUB QUIZ BOOK Here’s the ultimate test of your knowledge – ideal not only for pub quizzes, but for family gatherings and individual brain-teasing. Dip into no fewer than a hundred rounds, each of them covering the east and west of the county, historical curiosities and the Sussex of today. The book also features more than a hundred ‘Fancy that!’ boxes, celebrating a wealth of weird and wonderful Sussex facts.
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MAKING LEWES HISTORY MODEL
Between 1984 and 1986 more than a hundred volunteers joined forces to build a scale ‘sound and light’ model of the historic centre of Lewes as it had been during the 1880s. Some were experienced model-makers, but others were simply brought together by chance and enthusiasm: students at Lewes Technical College, local artists and even prisoners at Lewes Gaol. The model, now known as ‘The Story of Lewes Town’, was recently renovated and can be enjoyed by all visitors to the castle. James Franks's account of this remarkable project explores the logistics of its making and records the memories of many of those involved.
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SUSSEX REMEMBERED Alexandra Ayton’s book, based on a popular magazine series, brings to life a wide range of larger-than-life Sussex characters and colourful stories from the 19th and 20th centuries. Attractively illustrated, and written with an eye for fascinating and revealing detail, Sussex Remembered celebrates the men and women who have helped shape the county’s recent history. Her vibrant cast includes writers as diverse as Rudyard Kipling, Patience Strong, Patrick Hamilton, Enid Bagnold and G.K. Chesterton; characters such as Mad Jack Fuller and the ‘Red Indian’ conservationist Grey Owl; the inventors Magnus Volk and John Logie Baird; and the pioneering educationalists Canon Woodhard and Dame Grace Kimmins. You can also read about a Sussex missionary martyred in Africa, a renowned healer who foresaw the 9/11 atrocity and the man who created the amazing flying car Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
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THE SUSSEX YEAR: A country calendar Sussex is rich in wildlife, and few naturalists have as broad a knowledge of its birds, beasts and flowers as David Lang. The author of acclaimed books on wild orchids and hedgerow berries, and a popular lecturer on travel and natural history, he here leads us on a month-by-month safari into the countryside he loves. His vivid photographs are complemented by captions which illuminate, with both wit and erudition, the adaptation of our diverse flora and fauna to the soil, the climate and the activities of that most powerful creature of all, homo sapiens. Your eyes will be opened!
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AMBLES ALONG THE PROMENADE Here’s a striking gallery of images which shows the Brighton & Hove seafront in all its moods. Seasonal shifts, subtle changes of light, maritime flora and fauna, people at work and at play, half-hidden curiosities, piers, statues and beach huts – Richard Sayer’s photographs, taken at all times of the day and at every time of the year, introduce us to a promenade by turns beautiful, quirky, human and elemental. From the finely veined detail of a fig leaf to a little girl blissfully asleep in her carrier; from the drama of an electric storm to a swarm of starlings over the gaunt West Pier, these are compositions that will long stay in the memory. Some of the sights will be familiar to us all, but many will surprise and delight even the most observant of Brightonians. This is a collection to treasure.
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THE SUPERSTITIONS AND CURIOUS BELIEFS OF OLD SUSSEX Here’s a fascinating world of witchcraft; of spells and counter-spells; of so-called cunning-men; of death omens; of girls conjuring the identity of their future husbands; of fishermen’s precautions against ill luck; of the fairies, always uncertain of temper; and of the Devil and all his nefarious ways. W.H. Johnson, well known for his many books on Sussex themes, here explores the mind-set of people whose lives were coloured by a richly woven tapestry of ancient beliefs that today seem outlandishly far-fetched but once gave ordinary lives their meaning.
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A SUSSEX KIPLING This is the first comprehensive anthology of Rudyard Kipling's prose and poetry for many years. It includes practically all his Sussex verse, several short stories, excerpts from his autobiography and a sprinkling of his amusing and idiosyncratic letters. Kipling lived in Sussex for the greater part of his life, and this illustrated collection is saturated with a profound love of what he called “the most marvellous of all foreign countries that I have ever been in”. We first meet him in Rottingdean, and we follow his escapades as one of the country’s pioneer motorists, but it is the Bateman’s period which dominates. Here he created the writer’s haven we can still visit today– immersing himself in the life of Sussex, telling its history through the children’s stories of Puck of Pook’s Hill and fashioning a potent literary myth from his study of the Sussex people and their colourful past.
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THE VICTORIAN DEVELOPMENT OF THE CLIFTON, MONTPELIER AND POWIS ESTATES OF
BRIGHTON Royalty turned its back on Brighton after its glorious Georgian flowering, and this first ever detailed study of the conservation area close to Seven Dials reveals how splendidly the Victorians responded. The innovative architecture of Amon Henry Wilds and the vision of the Welsh developer John Yearsley combined to create the attractive iron-balconied villas in Clifton Terrace, Powis Square, Montpelier Road and their neighbouring streets. The book begins with the sale of a swathe of sheep-grazed downland by Thomas Read Kemp, the developer of Kemp Town on the town’s eastern fringe (now Brighton & Hove High School). Within a few years from the late 1840s a rash of terraces sprang up, and by the mid-1870s there were no fewer than five new churches in the area. This meticulously researched hardback contains around 80 illustrations, most in colour, and includes maps and early engravings.
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CITY STREETS TO SUSSEX LANES A wonderfully evocative memoir of rural life in Sussex during the 1950s. When 8-year-old David Johnston, his mother and his older brother were made homeless in London in the early 1950s they first slept rough on a Sussex beach before being taken into the East Preston workhouse. His mother then fell in with “Old Harry”, a farm labourer who periodically moved about the county from one farm job to another. The author's vivid prose relates his tough, but happy, childhood with his new stepfather and his two sons. He recaptures the sounds and smells of the old farms and cottages where he lived; his adventures down country lanes and field paths; and his delight in the wildlife and the country characters he met on the way. It was only 60 years ago, but these tales of living in tied farm cottages in remote parts of rural Sussex evoke a way of life now gone for ever.
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THE RESTLESS MILLER: Scenes from rural life in byogone Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire This true story of a well-to-do miller who fell to the level of a pauper and was buried in an unmarked grave is thronged with a lost world of farmers, auctioneers, innkeepers, wine merchants and smugglers who mingled in the borderlands of Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire in the Victorian age and beyond – Chichester, Petersfield, Bedhampton, Leigh, Harting, Chiddingfold, Dunsfold, Wisborough Green, Barford, Headley, Colworth and Oving.
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DEAD & BURIED IN SUSSEX incorporating WHAT THE VICAR SAW Here we have two successful books brought together in one binding. Dead & Buried in Sussex is the first ever book on the county’s abundant churchyard heritage. It traces the colourful history of our epitaphs and memorials, discovering a wealth of striking examples – many of which would never be allowed today. The chapter headings include Words to the Wise (dire warnings), Many a Slip (masons’ mistakes), A Pride in the Job (trades and professions) and Gripes and Grievances (memorials with a grudge). The copious photographs include gruesome death scenes, a smattering of Sussex dialect, some poignant verses and memorials to animals. What the Vicar Saw is a collection of remarkable marginal comments in the parish records of yesteryear. Vicars often treated the birth, death and marriage registers as if they were their own personal diaries, scrawling witty or contemptuous comments that would have astounded their unsuspecting flock. These secret scribblings reveal a vivid cast of characters gamely struggling against life’s adversities – cruel accidents, ghastly diseases and the lurid temptation of sex and drink.
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THE STREET NAMES OF LEWES past and present Where can you find a cluster of street names which remember the Battle of Lewes in which a king was overthrown? Where exactly were the long-lost thoroughfares called Lodders Lane (beggars’ lane) and Pilcher Street (where pilches, or fur cloaks, were made)? Who were Spence and English and Lee – men honoured by having roads named after them? And was there something truly nasty in Rotten Row? In this fascinating exploration of the Lewes street scene, Kim Clark expands and brings up to date the seminal work which L.S. Davey first published in 1961 and twice revised, in 1970 and 1981. Complete with a fold-out colour map of the town, it brings history to life at every turn, leading us between the sites of medieval gateways along routes whose names recall foundry workers, soap-makers, market traders and becassocked friars
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THE INNS OF LEWES past and present Lewes once had at least seven breweries and seventy inns, and this book (a revised edition of Leslie Davey's original work of 1977) traces those long-gone, the many sturdy survivors and a sprinkling of recent additions. A map of 1890 shows 66 pubs against just 21 today, the newest addition being the John Harvey Tavern in Cliffe. Attractively presented, this is a fine inspiration for all pub-crawlers of an historical bent.
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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JOHN HENTY? It’s a question many of his fans from the good old days of BBC local radio in Sussex have long been asking. And here, in a typically offbeat autobiography, is the answer. Henty, a south London lad, took off for America as a young man, later worked for BEA’s public relations arm and – after many an excursion and detour – found himself in the 1960s behind a microphone at one of the first of Britain’s new local radio stations, Radio Brighton. Here he discovered the talents of an insurance salesman with a keen interest in sport – Desmond Lynam. (Lynam describes him as “One of the most agile minds I have ever met in the world of broadcasting . . . a wholly original talent”) Here, too, his inspired zaniness found him an early morning audience devoted to his special brand of good-humoured banter, and he broadcast from the studios at Marlborough Place for many years. After leaving the radio station he went freelance, but an abiding interest in these post-BBC days was his growing collection of Mabel Lucie Attwell memorabilia. He’s now the world’s leading authority on the subject, has written a book about her and for some years, with his wife Sylvia, founded and ran a museum in Cornwall dedicated to her art and the products it inspired.
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WHEN SKIES WERE ALWAYS BLUE Illustrated with his drawings of the family home in West Street, Lewes, this memoir by the late W.F. (Bill) Wells brings to life a world between the two world wars that has gone for ever – a humble Sussex upbringing without television or telephone, radio or refrigerator, central heating or even electric light. Blessed with vivid recall, the author takes us through the streets of the county town, savouring its fairs, markets and shops. He recalls his first sight of an aeroplane and taking train trips, third class, to the seaside. We follow him to school and church, and savour the thrill of the circus. If life was harder then, it had no shortage of joys. As he writes in an epilogue, “What fun that boy had yesterday!”
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THE SUSSEX STORY Billed as “the history lesson nobody managed to give you”, this is a guide to the unfolding drama of our Sussex past which explores its profound impact on the landscape. It recreates the great and colourful events of local and national history as a series of verbal snapshots which focus on memorable incidents and individuals. Bronze Age barrows, Roman roads and villas, deserted medieval villages, tithe barns and dovecotes, monastic ruins, shipwrecks, windmills, canals ... The Sussex Story finds teeming evidence of the past at every turn. Special features include a page-by-page scroll of significant dates; a period-by-period digest of places to visit; and an area-by-area gazetteer of the hundreds of sites featured – an invaluable aid for planning local history tours.
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THE UPSTART GARDENER When writer and broadcaster David Arscott took over a plot of wasteland in Sussex he looked for an experienced gardener to help him develop it. In Bert Winborne he found not only a champion grower, but a man steeped in the traditions of the old country houses where he’d worked, man and boy, from the early 1920s. This engaging book includes tales of the old days at the big houses, when her ladyship demanded violets every day of the year and the wily head gardener buttered up the fearsome cook; countless “wrinkles” on the sowing, planting and growing of vegetables; and an unfolding drama as our intrepid pair enter the local horticultural show and strive to grow winning specimens on ground choked with bindweed, horseshoes, spark plugs and old false teeth.
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