Sussex Retold: Sounds, Sites, Stories

Learn about the Sussex Retold project, which is helping to rethink regional arts, crafts, folklore and music through participation, partnership and performance.

A photo of someone’s feet dancing at a Locating Women in the Folk event

Image credit: Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin

About the project

The arts, crafts, music and folklore of Sussex speak to us about many people: land workers, townsfolk, farmers, shepherds, fishers, traders, migrants, makers, writers, story-tellers and singers. The Sussex Retold project explores ways to retell these stories from an inclusive perspective and reconsider where natural, cultural and regional heritages relate. Working with local cultural, council, and land organisations, we investigate how sounds, sites and stories can express how people have lived on and with the turf, chalk, cliffs and clouds of the region.

This project builds on a range of research projects across the 5XÉçÇøÊÓƵ which explore the distinctive regional cultures of East and West Sussex and their local and global relationships. Through this, we hope to enhance local civic engagement and sustainable development in ways which benefit our partner organisations.

  • People

    Read about the people involved in the project.

    • (Principal Investigator)
      Margaretta Jolly’s research on the theory and practice of life narrative and oral history supports the vision and application of this project in the context of a longstanding interest in Sussex folk heritages. She has explored these as methods for public and community engagement and as tools for enhancing and evaluating use and impact.
    • (Co-investigator)
      Hope Wolf’s extensive inquiry into the visual art and crafts cultures of Sussex forms a bedrock for the project. Wolf’s work focuses on place-making as a vital determinant of identity and community, exploring how these dialectically support creative innovation. Especially significant is her challenge to conventional and pastoral stereotypes of Sussex culture.
    • (Heritage Consultant and Project Manager)
      Sam Carroll is an oral historian, project manager, learning facilitator, and community heritage consultant with twenty years’ experience across a diverse range of projects in both community heritage and academic research. She is director of Sweet Thames: The London Folk Club Heritage Project. Star Creative Heritage (National Lottery Heritage Fund), 2022 – 2023.
    • Ed Hughes’s work as a composer and researcher also underpins the project. Hughes’ compositions in and about the Sussex landscape and South Downs are springboards for thinking about the relationship between music, song, dance, environmental conservation and farming.

    • From the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, Chris Sandom brings expertise in rewilding and land management. Within the SSRP’s South Coast Sustainability theme, he has worked specifically on the issues, visions and futures of the downland in Sussex and especially within the City Downland Estate, owned by Brighton & Hove City Council.

    • Perpetua Kirby, also within the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, draws on educational philosophy to hone a practical approach to urgent sustainability challenges, including with school children and those involved in farming and land-use. Her 2023 Open Press book, , edited with Rebecca Webb was produced collaboratively, including with Jo Walton and Michael Jonik.

    • Jo Walton works in climate communication, including through science fiction, serious games studies and other creative methods. With Chris Sandom, Perpetua Kirby and Dan Locke he has supported 24 Hours to Envision a Sustainable Future.

    • Laura Kounine specialises in the history of witchcraft and lore. She focuses on gender, emotions, selfhood, crime and conflict and early modern witch trials. She also explores methods involving historical self-narratives and oral history.

    • Fiona Courage, Director of the Mass Observation Archive, specialises in its uses in educational contexts, and also, as Deputy Director in the Library, will facilitate showcasing of heritage, including the in our Special Collections.

    • Ben Rogaly has extensively researched community development and regional identities with a particular interest in how participatory oral history methods can illuminate the interests of migrant and minority peoples. He also exposes the racial capitalism involved in agricultural work.

    Other academics at Sussex with relevant interests include:

    • , who researches local and global landscapes through ecoacoustics
    • , who works on the perception of the South Downs landscape for walkers who have impaired vision
    • , who explores and post-human perspectives, including at Wakehurst Gardens.

Sussex Retold: Sounds, Sites, Stories conference - Friday 19 June 2026

Artists, story-tellers, scholars, land-workers and policy-makers will gather at the 5XÉçÇøÊÓƵ to share work and ideas at a creative conference, Sussex Retold: Sounds, Sites, Stories, on Friday 19 June 2026. The day offers a timely investigation into the diversity of Sussex heritage and how the past can be used for progressive futures.

Speakers include:

  • , Cultural Heritage Lead for the South Downs National Park Authority
  • , artist, writer and local cultural activist
  • Caroline Lucas, former MP and now Professor of Practice in Environmental Sustainability at the 5XÉçÇøÊÓƵ
  • , Director of Love Our Ouse
  • , Knepp Wildlife Foundation Director and
  • , National Trust Ranger, Saddlescombe Farm.

The day will also feature walks, workshops, and a site-specific play by award-winning playwright , and end with music and dancing at The Swan Inn, Falmer, with acclaimed young folk stars .

Read more about the event on Broadcast and .

  • Contributing to the conference

    Ahead of the conference (November 2025-January 2026), we invited contributions from those investigating traditional arts, crafts, cultures and folk music in the Sussex region.

    We aimed to share understanding and respect for the past, where it can support future flourishing of communities, increase knowledge of our diverse heritages and consider our connections in a world of ecological fragility and social fracture. We were especially interested in popular cultures connected to local land in neglected or under-represented rural or semi-rural Sussex. This included farming heritage, endangered heritage crafts, arts in the South Downs National Park and Living Biosphere, folk music and lore, oral histories of travelling and migration in, through and across Sussex, village greens, city green spaces and edges and suburban gardens.

    We posed questions such as: What ways have previous generations creatively responded to local landscapes in their working and everyday lives? How will we do so in the future? What can we learn from traditional cultures and ways of life – within Sussex and from global majorities and cultural groups connected to Sussex – to help us live sustainably? What particular experiments can the 5XÉçÇøÊÓƵ undertake as a parkland campus with its own rural heritage and a commitment to sustainable development?

    We were also keen to explore the role of culture in understanding non-human species from the grasses of chalk Downland to grazing farm animals, sea-kelp to larks, and where cultural tools can help to support co-existence and stewarding.

    The conference is designed to emphasise practical or collaborative knowledge. In addition to researchers, we were interested in hearing from dancers, artists, musicians, landworkers, farmers, rangers, archivists, craftspeople, curators and storytellers.

    We hope to challenge stereotypes of a pastoral and elitist county in a day of critical and celebratory work, ‘retelling’ Sussex through sounds, sites and stories.

    Suggested themes for contributions included:

    • popular arts including: folk songs, music and song collecting; visual arts, design and traditional methods, materials; dance, festivals
    • folklore, story-telling, magic, myth and ritual, ‘weird Sussex’, folk horror and fantasy; craft making and materials; endangered or revived heritage crafts; intangible and tangible cultural heritage policy and practice
    • place identities including; the local, regional, ‘provincial’ and ‘rural’ Sussex; travelling cultures, migration and cultures of travelling, plurality of Sussex
    • belonging, inclusion, exclusion, including: decolonising folk culture initiatives; Gypsy-Roma-Traveller cultural heritage; women, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion in relation to Sussex places; rural working-class histories; disability and differently abled places
    • access to the countryside and development, including national parks; natural-cultural heritage links and tensions; dog walking; walking, trailing, rambling, immersive arts, tourism
    • histories of and new approaches to Sussex archaeology, palaeontology
    • posthuman flourishing; non-human species rights and relationships
    • farming and land use cultures, including growing, husbandry, stewarding; cultivation and food and drink cultures; farmer clusters and sustainability
    • environment and climate, including woodland management, wood working; trees; fishing and coastal cultures; Downs, chalk and chalkland; rivers, streams, weald, biosphere
    • urban green; urban-rural-semi-rural relations and initiatives; built environment and architectural traditions and adaptations
    • archives, documentation, oral history, eco-acoustics, curating, performing
    • education; generations; deep time; memory, investment; university and school lands and policies, including the 5XÉçÇøÊÓƵ campus
    • tradition and change; revival, retelling, future roots.

Sussex Retold is supported by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, the Centre for Modernist Studies and the South Coast Sustainability group within the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme. We also acknowledge and thank: the sponsorship of the charity , the support of the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) programme, and the work of the Research Professional Services team in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities.

Our work (2024-2026) spans three strands:

Diversifying Ditchling: Sharing new arts and crafts stories within and beyond the Guild

showcase the artists and craftspeople who made Ditchling a creative hub in the twentieth century, as well as contemporary practitioners whose work reverberates with their historic work. We are working with the museum to support its interests in community involvement, including through an oral history. This work draws specifically on Hope Wolf’s research and the oral historian is Sam Carroll. Find out more in Hope Wolf’s  and .

Storying Downland cultural heritage

We are working with local partners to explore the Downland landscape and cultural history of the South Downs in ways which reflect multiple heritages and inclusive regional and national identities. The South Downs Songbook - a music and composition project in schools and colleges - with composers Ed Hughes, Evelyn Ficarra, Rowland Sutherland and Shirley J. Thompson – is an inspiration. Its album Distant Voices, New Worlds was ‘’ in November 2024, reviewed as ‘English to its core’ yet defying tradition. The Songbook was performed at Towner Gallery in July 2025 – a sold-out concert whose powerful effects are reviewed in . Four workshops across Sussex addressed state schools, including Crawley, which has some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England; students reported not having visited Beachy Head. The focus of those workshops and performances was on developing students’ confidence to respond to a poem (Beachy Head, by the nineteenth century writer Charlotte Smith) using their own creative methods. Sussex Retold’s engagement with Towner in Eastbourne was also supported in relation to an original day course, . This drawing workshop was led by Catherine Anyango Grünewald, an internationally exhibited artist who has created adaptations of literary texts translated into multiple languages. Sussex Modernism curator Dr Hope Wolf and literature professor Dr Andrea Haslanger provided insight into the poem and its connection to the exhibition .

Composing sustainable landscapes in the South Coast through film, folk song and farming heritage

This work brings together the interests of three partners: Sussex Traditions, Land Use Plus and Writing Our Legacy.

Sussex Traditions

The approach is described in Steve Roud’s assertion that “it is not the grand issues of life which worry us here – they can look after themselves – but the lives of the ordinary people which are often allowed to be forgotten” (“”).

Land Use Plus

 is part of the . It aims to connect points of view from a wide range of people to create multi-use land. This land could provide food, spaces, opportunity for education and greater connectivity, whilst protecting and restoring nature. It is working with farmers, the council and others to improve food production practices that impact climate change.

Writing Our Legacy/Changing Chalk

is a National Trust-led initiative that connects natural and cultural heritage to support Downland conservation. Changing Chalk has collaborated with Writing Our Legacy (WOL), a Brighton-based arts and heritage organisation. The  was commissioned to “engage the general public and writers, creatives and audiences from the Black, Asian and ethnically diverse communities, connecting them to the unique chalk grassland of the Sussex Downs and the communities of the urban coastal fringe of Brighton & Hove, Lewes and Eastbourne, through literature, creative writing, storytelling and other arts and cultural activity.” They have supported (with others) “” with the South Downs National Park’s Writer-in-Residence Alinah Azadeh.

This work draws upon Jolly’s knowledge and networks, including the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research’s conference, Locating Women in the Folk. Sam Carroll and Laura Hockenhull are also key to these activities.

Past and upcoming events

See some of our event highlights:

Explore our gallery of images from past events

Attendees enjoying the Scholars of Simplicity exhibition

 

Jacqueline Faulkner, Sean Goddard and Jon Dudley enjoying the exhibition (© Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin II)

Mike Tristram, Chair of Sussex Traditions, stood talking at a microphone

 

Mike Tristram, Chair of Sussex Traditions and local farmer (© Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin II)

A lantern-lit singing walk from the library on campus to The Swan Inn in Falmer village

 

A lantern-lit singing walk from the library on campus to The Swan Inn in Falmer village (© Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin II)

Speakers and walkers from Whose South Downs? stood outside the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts

 

Speakers and walkers from Whose South Downs? (© Tunde Alabi-Hundeyin)

Medeni Fordham, Hope Wolf and Margaretta Jolly at Harnessing Heritage

 

Medeni Fordham, Hope Wolf and Margaretta Jolly at Harnessing Heritage (© Steve Brading, UEA)

  • Attendees enjoying the Scholars of Simplicity exhibition
  • Mike Tristram, Chair of Sussex Traditions, stood talking at a microphone
  • A lantern-lit singing walk from the library on campus to The Swan Inn in Falmer village
  • Speakers and walkers from Whose South Downs? stood outside the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Artsm
  • Medeni Fordham, Hope Wolf and Margaretta Jolly at Harnessing Heritage