Wealden Times | WT217 | March 2020 | Good Living supplement inside

Sally found her cottage –
her next challenge was to
find furniture to scale with
it. “All my furniture was
really big, I thought ‘what
have I done? I’ve bought
a little mouse house…’”
Thinking big, as she
does with such aplomb,
makes a space feel bigger
This page: There are pillars on either side of the kitchen entrance – where Sally plans to add a theatrical curtain,
currently drawn on the wall with pencil – and three working cuckoo clocks
people in St Leonards who do restoration for the V&A.”
As for what prompted Sally to rent that first cottage
– similar in feel, if slightly later in period, than the
one she now lives in – I can claim a small part in it.
I was coming down for a writers’ lunch club, which I
was one of the organisers of, which made Sally think
that St Leonards-on-Sea really was the place to be.
“I was living in a 1930s flat in Stoke Newington and the
freeholders decided to renovate the building and there were
suddenly massive fees, so I started to think about moving.
I knew Hastings because I went to boarding school here for
two and a half years. I hated the school, but every weekend
I would run away to St Leonards beach and I still had happy
memories of that.
“When I came down to that lunch I immediately
thought, ‘I could live here’. I started browsing Rightmove,
saw a house to rent in Burton St Leonards and took
it on the spot. After that it was a no brainer.”
There was a brief sidestep to possibly moving to
neighbouring Bexhill-on-Sea, when Sally took part in an
episode of Homes by the Sea, with fellow author Jane Harris
– who had also been at that now rather legendary writers’
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