WELCOME!

I am now well into the second phase of building up this website.  Having produced an entry for each Anglican church in East and West Sussex, I am now both continuing to add new information and to check and improve what I have written.  I have been helped enormously by the comments, corrections and new material that have come in from an increasing number of users.  I am in addition always happy to reply to queries if something is not clear, but it will often be easier to find the answer on the website itself. 

As part of this process, but at a slower pace, I have been revisiting churches, both to check what I have written and to take new and better photographs in colour, though the old black and white ones that I already had, mostly dating from the late 1970s, are sometimes worth retaining even if there have been changes since - redundancy or even demolition in a few cases.  Indeed, the normal course of events over the years can have an effect - I recently visited one church (Westfield) where the trees and bushes in front of it are now so high and so dense that my previous photo dating from c1977 shows the church building far more clearly than would be possible today.  This visit to Westfield was one of a good number in both East and West Sussex that I have recently undertaken, but though I made good progress, this process of revisiting is likely to take several years as I no longer live in Sussex; at present I have been back largely to churches at the Hampshire end of West Sussex, including most in and around Chichester, whilst I have also been to quite a few in the inland part of East Sussex and the far eastern end beyond Hastings.  Meanwhile, I have been greatly helped by some kind offers of photos of churches I have not yet revisited.  I am particularly grateful to Josie Campbell, who has provided some much needed strengthening of my images, mainly for West Sussex, and to Nick Wiseman, whose expert photographs are mostly of East Sussex churches.

After finishing the first phase, I am able to devote an increased amount of time to research again. A one-off event that proved to be most useful was a conference in May that was organised by the Sussex Archaeological Society in Lewes on early mediaeval churches in the county.  There were some excellent speakers, who offered new insights into several major early churches (in particular Bosham, Old Shoreham, Stoughton, Sompting and Bishopstone).  I didn't agree with everything I heard, but it proved a most interesting afternoon and I have had to reconsider quite a bit about the churches concerned - you can see the results under each of the churches concerned, where I have identified the new material as coming from the conference.  I hope that the material will be properly published in due course. 

In a second longer lasting area of research, I have been working my way through Kelly's directories for London, initially in search of information about makers of stained glass, particularly the smaller and less well known ones.  A long time ago I worked through the directories as far as 1914, researching architects, but at the time I had not focused on stained glass makers.  There is in fact  much of interest, even though the information is generally fairly brief in each case.  I have also realised how little is known about architects after 1914, so having passed that year, I am simultaneously looking at the architects recorded there.  I have reached the mid-1940s for glassmakers but only 1924 for architects, though already I have clarified quite a few careers.  I am adding this new information steadily to the Architects and Artists section, as I go through Kelly.  This is quite slow as very few are available except on microfilm.

More recently, I have been working on two new sources.  The first is a completely new work, Nigel Llewellyn's recently published East Sussex Church Monuments 1530-1830.  This has been a long time in preparation and was clearly effectively completed before Ingrid Roscoe's Dictionary was available, which supersedes Gunnis's pioneer work that is frequently cited by Llewellyn.  This matters less in terms of the author's concept since he is primarily concerned with the historical and genealogical aspects of those commemorated, rather than the artistic ones.  This in turn probably accounts for its inclusion in the publications of the Sussex Record Society.  Nevertheless, there is a wealth of new information, including quite a few signatures that Roscoe and her team overlooked.  This is perhaps the occasion to point out that as a general principle after about 1650 I only include monuments by an identified artist, though there are of course quite a few exceptions.  Since Llewellyn deliberately makes no such limitation, his work is much broader.  There is one uniquely valuable feature that will, I hope, encourage any doubting Thomases about the internet to accept that there may be important material on it.  In addition to the many photographs in the book, a picture of each monument is available for all to see on the Society's website.  Tantalisingly, the author says he has also assembled a lot of material about West Sussex church monuments, but in this book he is ambivalent about when he will produce another using this material.  Anyone who is interested in any aspect of monuments can only hope that he will do so soon.  For the moment the reader must be content with 13 churches that are included as the parishes were formerly in East Sussex.

The second new source is really only new to me, since it has been been published at regular intervals for about 20 years.  This is the Newsletters of the Friends of Sussex Churches Trust.  I was of course aware of the Trust and had indeed helped to produce a small book on Sussex churches for them in 1984, but I had missed the establishment of the Friends.  Their Newsletters not only contain reports of the usual kind for such bodies, but notes on visits and resumes of talks, often by eminent speakers.  These contain a large amount of new material and I shall be working through them over the next few weeks.

No piece of research like this is ever finished, so this website is far from its final form (it probably never will be!).  However, do keep visiting it and let me have your views and suggestions via CONTACT US.

John Allen