by Julia Winckler
Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021, 407pp, £93 (hardcover)
The town of Peacehaven in East Sussex is an unusual place.
Not that you might notice at first sight.
A small town just six miles east of Brighton, sitting on perilously high chalk cliffs over the Channel, most people, taking a glimpse as they pass on the fast A259 coastal road, see a blur of houses and shops, a low-level suburban sprawl. To its cooler, hip neighbour down the road, Peacehaven equals ‘the sticks’, the suburban backwaters.
But if you stop for a closer look you’d find a landscape and atmosphere that seem a million miles away from its big city neighbour. Fresh air, a slightly different light, space organised into straight lines and angles that have more in common with North America than Sussex. Many of the houses and bungalows have neat gardens and driveways where vans adorned with the logos of sole traders and small businesses are parked. Is that a pioneering spirit you sense on the air alongside the salt of the sea and sharp breezes from the Downs?
In Fabricating Lureland, Dr Julia Winckler, principal lecturer at the University of Brighton and longtime Peacehaven resident, has amassed the fascinating history not only of the town, conceived as a social utopia garden city in 1916, but also how it has been imagined and remembered. In this monumental and timely work – like many towns of its era, Peacehaven is currently colonised by cranes, bulldozers and the agendas of a different century – Winckler has painstakingly unearthed, dug deep, laid out and interrogated previously underexplored material through visual and creative research methods, with oral history at the forefront.
In her own words, she has created ‘the first indepth and ethnographic and interdisciplinary study to mobilise and interrogate a vast amount of underexplored vernacular and public and archival material relating to the construction of Peacehaven’ (v). Its story of Peacehaven – from its conception in 1916 by entrepreneur Charles Neville – feeds into the wider narrative of town planning, the garden city movement, post-First World War domestic aspirations, and the building of communities in twentieth century Britain, as well as exploring our relationship to place.
The vivid picture that Winckler paints is of a swashbuckling kind of place. Neville, a fan of the North American grid system, sold plots of land cheaply and people could build more or less whatever they wanted on top. Some early dwellings were rough and ready – former railway carriages and old army huts, small-holdings with animals and crops. Target customers were war veterans eager for a more gentle place than the increasingly busy inner cities in which to nurse their battle scars, people returning from colonial service abroad, and Londoners concerned about creeping industrialisation. Artists, writers and slick marketeers were employed to lure customers with the promise of good health and the chance to own your ‘own bit of England’ between sea and Downs. Promotional brochures, early postcards, the in-house magazine Peacehaven Post, newspaper advertisements – Winckler presents, decodes and analyses every last scrap of marketing material that created, sustained and doubled-down on the myth of Peacehaven as a second Eden, a place where dreams could come true. The evocative term ‘Lureland’ was used in marketing campaigns from 1921, the word ‘lure’ suggesting a gentle and wholesome force of attraction. An early cover of the Peacehaven Post depicts a simple line drawing of a man plunging a shovel into virgin earth, brow creased with determination. Another shows a shepherd gazing across the Downs at a spectacular sky, material that taps forcefully into pastoral and religious imagery, tropes and mythology. Neville originally held a competition to name the new development, advertised in every newspaper in England (the winning name ‘New Anzac-on-Sea’ lasted a year). No wonder that early purchasers of land were termed ‘settlers’ and ‘pioneers’. Electricity and water didn’t come on tap. Until the late 1950s only one road was surfaced. And so Winckler dives deep into Peacehaven’s sometimes contradictory foundation mythology, its ups and downs, the ‘mutating agendas’, its growth, its moments (and monuments) of civic pride, its landmarks, its detractors (Such cultural figures as Virginia and Leonard Wolf as well as Art Historian Niklaus Pevsner saw the development more as encroaching on the rural idyll rather than being one itself, while, in 1932, Town Planner and Built Environment expert, Thomas Sharp, deemed it ‘a rash on the countryside’).
Winckler is also a photographer and participatory arts facilitator, experienced in working within local communities on projects that explore collective memory and forgotten histories. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that she foregrounds the experience, memories, thoughts and archives of local people. Her work is shaped by hours of reminiscence sessions, interviews, history workshops, memory box work, and field trips with members of the Peacehaven Pioneer group, some of whom are long term residents of Peacehaven, and some from the first generation of children to have grown up in the town. From vividly told personal anecdotes and family stories, Winckler tracks how the idea of Peacehaven as ‘Lureland’ evolves from individual and collective memories. Illuminating accounts and memories unroll and develop, and interviewees bring the town into sharp relief in their own words. They describe early businesses and shops, the first library, encounters with entertainer and interwar super-celebrity, Gracie Fields, who had bought a house in the town, the arrival of sewers, pavements, electricity, the widening of the coast road, the arrival of Canadian soldiers stationed in the town during the Second World War. Then, as the twentieth century progresses, the disappearance of many community spaces, the demolition of landmarks, such as the Peacehaven Hotel and Rosemary Tea Gardens that had put the town on the map and played a role in its social life, a gradual loss of the pioneer spirit.
Winckler interprets for us how deeply Peacehaven’s history is interwoven with the residents’ lives and gently draws us to observe how these memories resonate with early marketing material and aspirations for the town. As an example of the transformative potential of sharing stories and activating memories, Winckler reports that many of her interviewees have since been drawn to write poetry and become actively involved in lobbying for the retention of Peacehaven’s early buildings and architectural landmarks.
Winckler is a skilled storyteller. Lureland is interesting and, at times, gripping. As a reader it’s difficult not to care about the town and its cast of characters, its slick marketeers, its pioneers looking for a better life and its present residents watching the town adapt to the demands and fads of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the book has a certain compulsive page-turning quality that can only come from a writer who feels passionately about her subject matter. In the first few pages of the book we learn that Winckler’s great aunt was one of the many people who bought a plot of land, putting a deposit down on a bungalow due to be built on Phyllis Avenue in 1968. The descriptions of Winckler’s childhood memories of visiting her aunt, lunch at the Peacehaven Hotel, watching badgers in the sunken gardens and walks along the cliffs, followed by her subsequent return to live in the bungalow in the 1990s, give the book a rich personal context which the reader senses hovers ever close to the text. Winckler describes the start of her interest in tracing Lureland. ‘I began to photograph and document some of the early pioneer homes, searched for traces of original features and landmarks and embarked on a journey to track, interrogate and reactivate the town’s layered history through archival objects and conversations with older residents’ (11). For Winckler this is more than history. Thanks to her thoughtful and thought-provoking book, it is for the reader too.
