A recent road trip holiday took us from the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne to the Turner in Margate. At the Towner we saw an exhibition of Sussex Modernism that included a number of works under the heading Anything Will Happen. A connecting theme in all of this was movement, and with movement comes possibility. Our hopeful travels were reflected in some of the works on show at the Towner.

We took our second road trip of the year in late August and early September, this time going west to east along the South Coast, from Eastbourne to Margate. The first one began on New Year’s Day when we took a train to Oxford, from where we hired a car and hit the road, eventually to hit the North in Hebden Bridge, or Heptonstall to be precise, where we visited Sylvia Plath’s grave. That one had been a poetry pilgrimage, and our other stops included the Oxford colleges of MacNeice, Larkin and Wendy Cope, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the former mining town of Hucknall where Byron is buried. 

A road trip might, I suppose, just mean travelling along a road from A to B, where any hope involved will be about getting to the physical place of B. But to say one is going on a road trip is usually to say more than this, and to hope for more than this. The means of transport may be important too, even if not always as iconic as the Harley-Davidsons of Easy Rider (ours was a small hire car), as well as events and experiences on the way. There may be an element of pilgrimage, with the destination as much sacred as physical. We didn’t consciously set out to emulate the pilgrimage in Graham Swift’s Last Orders, where Jack’s friends end up in Margate to scatter his ashes from Margate Pier, but we enjoyed ending our trip there, strolling along the Harbour Arm (the actual name of the stone pier in Margate) and visiting the Turner Contemporary, the art gallery built on the site of the guesthouse where JMW Turner often stayed.

A week or so earlier, we had visited the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, where we saw Sussex Modernism, curated by Hope Wolf of the University of Sussex. This is a fantastically varied exhibition, of work made by artists from Sussex, or artists who have moved to live or work there, and mainly modernist though with many other comparison points. Being someone who lives in London but enjoys the chip on his shoulder of a person from the “provinces”, I liked the way it explicitly challenged the apparent metropolitanism of modernism, with the fresh air perspectives of Sussex Downs, coast and towns. It has a playfulness too, including a nice juxtaposition of beach and music. I didn’t know that David Bowie had filmed the video for Ashes to Ashes on a beach near Hastings, nor that rapper Kendrick Lamar loves Camber Sands, which he probably doesn’t other than in the imagination of artist Sophie Barber.

Anything will happen

However, the part of the exhibition that drew me in the most was entitled “Anything Will Happen”. This phrase was inscribed by the artist Gus Cummins in tiny writing in the right hand bottom corner of one of the works in this section, The Cupola of St Mary in the Castle. The section’s central work is entitled A Better Life for All, and it is inspiring. It is actually just one seventh of the huge International Workers Mural that was once displayed in the Transport and General Workers Union Convalescence Centre in Eastbourne (now the View Hotel, which is still owned by Unite the Union). This painting consists of 14 panels and the two on display in the Towner are called Union and Peace: The Spirit of Liberty, and Recognition and Achievement.

The mural as a whole includes interpretations of major and turbulent events from the industrial revolution and throughout the twentieth century, from a workers’ perspective, and the centre of these two panels depicts movement along the Sussex coast towards a rising sun and better life. The painting was made by the Art Workers Cooperative made up of three artists, Christopher Robinson, Simon Barber, and Mick Jones (the son of Jack Jones, the Transport and General Workers Union general secretary). There are calls for this “extraordinary tribute to international trade unionism and fellowship amongst workers” to be on permanent display at the Towner Gallery, and I hope that happens. This excellent blog post by Carol Mills of Eastbourne Unite Community includes a wonderful photograph of the dining room at the TGWU Centre in Eastbourne, where the tables are surrounded by the mural above, and I would have loved to have eaten there.

The general blurb for the Anything Will Happen section refers to there being many examples in Sussex of architectural projects designed to bring the benefits “afforded by the few to a wider number of people”, a phrase with a fine and familiar ring to it. One such project saw Basil Spence being commissioned to design the 1960s University of Sussex campus as part of an effort to expand the numbers of students admitted to higher education. Apparently the buildings in the painting Campus, by Julian Bell, grandson of Vanessa Bell, and son of Quentin Bell who taught art history there, are only meant to resemble those at Sussex University. Bell described it as his “six-foot-wide phantasmagoric view” of the university.

What stood out to me was a feature it shared with A Better Life for All, the representation of movement at its centre. This takes the form of a bridge-like structure that stretches far beyond the campus into the Downs. Bell has described how in this work he is reflecting abstractly on knowledge, and his bridge and the painting’s movement said something to me about the temporal reorientation of knowledge towards the future described by Miyazaki, drawing on Bloch and Rorty, that I’ve referred to in earlier blog posts. Or perhaps it is hope, rather than knowledge, that the bridge is heading towards. 

The other two works in this section show the 1935 De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, and St Mary in the Castle, in Hastings. We saw them both later as our road trip took us further east. The De La Warr Pavilion is sometimes claimed to be the first major Modernist public building in Britain, and I love the fact that it was built on the initiative of Herbrand Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr, a committed socialist and Mayor of Bexhill (the “De La Warr” in both the pavilion’s name and the Earl’s name is pronounced “Delaware”, as in the American state named for his ancestor Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr). It is a superb building indeed, full of space and light. 

St Mary in the Castle was built into the cliff at Hastings in the 1820s, and had fallen into disrepair by the late 20^th century. Gus Cummins painted its interior at a time when its renovation had begun and it was opened as an arts centre in 1998. Closed after Covid, it stands empty and its future is unclear. The heritage development trust, Hastings Commons, hopes that this much-loved building can be brought back to life, and I hope so too. Maybe Cummins can go in and do another painting, and anything will happen.