Ditchling Museum’s guiding dream

The charming East Sussex village of Ditchling lies at the foot of the South Downs, its narrow streets lined with ancient houses and pubs. For much of the 20th century it was home to a community of artists and craftsmen, the most famous of whom are Eric Gill and David Jones, master and pupil. In 1985, two sisters, Hilary and Joanna Bourne, founded a museum to preserve and celebrate the wealth of local creativity. It is this museum that reopened at the end of September after a major overhaul and redevelopment by Adam Richards Architects. The results are very fine indeed: this is one of the loveliest small museums I have visited, the lucid spaces well laid out, the plan and the detailing equally considered. The new museum is a welcoming building with a beguiling air of good fellowship and a pervading belief in the value of a shared culture. The visitor enters through what was once a cart lodge and is now opened out to reveal its structure to the coffee-drinkers and cake-munchers: a homely yet actually quite grand arrangement of oak beams, flint-and-lime mortar walls and slate floor. The wooden furniture is English-made, the cutlery by Robert Welch, the mugs by the Big Tomato Company of Stoke-on-Trent. The café doubles as a shop with a good selection of related publications and artefacts, and home accessories by Another Country. Up a few steps and you enter the museum proper and an introductory display in a beautiful high space that features a modest cabinet of curiosities. Among the objects gathered here are shepherds’ crooks, vegetable dyes and a hackle — a slab of spikes like a fakir’s bed. This was fixed to a wall in weaving and dyeing workshops: the spikes were heated and fleeces drawn through them.

The next room is actually the long main gallery, but I diverted first into the Print Gallery, which is arranged around an old iron Stanhope Press, the very machine used by St Dominic’s Press, founded in Ditchling in 1916 by the printer and poet Hilary Pepler.