Their way to heaven

One hundred years ago, a utopian community of artists, farmers and thinkers sought ‘a country life worth living’ in the heart of West Sussex

- Russell Higham

SUSSEX has always attracted the avant-garde. The last county in England to convert to Christianity, it has been a magnet for bohemian artists, radical writers, revolutionary thinkers and the sexually liberated—libertine, even—ever since.

The Bloomsbury Group frequently escaped London’s squares both the architectural and intellectual kind for the unbounded horizons of Sussex. Sculptor and calligrapher Eric Gill co-founded an artists’ community in Ditchling and Vogue-model-turned-warphotographer Lee Miller hosted Surrealist picnics, attended by Picasso, Miró and Man Ray, at her farm in Chiddingly. But in 1923, a Christian Mystic and her artist husband attracted global media attention when they created, in what is now a well-heeled, middle-class residential estate between Storrington and Washington, in West Sussex, a rural utopia that challenged the world order.

Vera Pragnell (1897–1968), the wealthy daughter of a textile magnate, had worked as a Red Cross nurse during the First World War. The death and destruction she witnessed caused her to lose faith in urban society and its pursuit of material gain—an approach that, she felt, had led to so much human suffering, including the death of her own brother.