As far as English counties go, Sussex is not usually viewed as a cultural heavy-hitter. It boasts no equivalent of the Brontës or Thomas Hardy. Wordsworth never took time off from striding the northern Lakelands to stroll across the South Downs. True, Shelley was born on his family’s estate in Horsham, but he got out as soon as he was able, and never looked back. Painters similarly voted with their feet. William Gilpin, pioneer of the picturesque, toured the southern coastal counties in 1774 and, inevitably, given his hatred for the way that chalk soil always gave everything “a blank glaring surface”, decided that Sussex offered little to delight.
But there was one man who, while not Sussex-born, got the proper measure of the place. In 1802, William Blake was staying near Bognor, when a walk on the beach prompted his ecstatic line about being able to see the “World in a Grain of Sand”. With this model of close-looking in mind, Alexandra Harris returns to her native soil to conduct her own fingertip search and discover the multitudes that lie within. The approach is properly hyperlocal. This isn’t just Sussex, or even West Sussex, but the few miles around West Chiltington, the village outside Horsham where she grew up in the 1980s. Her patch of what TS Eliot called “significant soil” stretches from the foothills of the Weald down to the sea and takes in Chichester, Arundel, Petworth and Pulborough.
