Surrey Homes | SH65 | March 2020 | Good Living supplement inside

Above left: Sally is gradually studding the soft green hall walls with seven-point gold stars Middle: Sally has emphasised
the steep staircase by positioning a tiny wardrobe and a top hat on top of a cupboard beneath it Right: A large portrait of
Lillie Langtry by Richard Jack hangs on the landing below another striking Ikea paper lampshade
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’
lunch – and decided she wanted to move down too.
The researchers found Sally a very nice house in
Bexhill, but for various reasons it fell through and
she decided it had to be St Leonards or Hastings.
“There are so many interesting people living here.
People speak to you. I thought they might be snotty
about Londoners ‘moving down here, taking our
houses…’ but you couldn’t find nicer, kinder, genuinely
pleasant people, once they know you are moving
down to live here, not buying a place to Airbnb.”
After a search, at times nail biting, Sally found her
cottage – her next challenge was to find furniture to
scale with it. “All my furniture was really big, this
room would have died and I thought, ‘what have
I done? I’ve bought a little mouse house…’”
But after finding the armchairs at Ben Southgate (formerly
in Kings Road, St Leonards, now online) and a small
sofa on eBay, she was set up. The finishing touch was
45 surrey-homes.co.uk