Spirit of Place | Eric Ravilious’ Furlongs adventures, at Towner Eastbourne
The 27-year-old artist and designer Peggy Angus, hiking round the South Downs looking for a country cottage to rent in the summer of 1931, stumbled upon a remote and semi-derelict farm building, two-up, two-down, with spectacular views.
She eventually persuaded the reluctant local shepherd, Mr Freeman, to let her rent it. He must have been surprised she wanted to live there. ‘Furlongs’, unlived in for years, comprised two knocked-together flint dwellings: there was no electricity, no running water, and the nearest well, the other side of the farm, was so deep it took 95 turns of the handle to raise a leaky bucket.
Eric Ravilious, Furlongs,1 934, On loan from a private collection
Over the course of the decade, Angus invited artist friends, including John and Myfanwy Piper, Serge Chermayeff, Ernő Goldfinger, Alexander Calder and László Moholy-Nagy, down from London and beyond for weekends of walking, painting, and communal living in this ramshackle environment. There was something liberating about the experience: there was no dress code, no set time for dinner. If the spare bed was occupied, guests were expected to camp in the field. Perhaps the most frequent visitor was the painter Eric Ravilious, who found while staying at Furlongs the clarity and confidence that would define his mature style.
The friendship between Peggy Angus and Eric Ravilious started with an unexpected reunion. On Boxing Day 1933, Angus travelled up to Great Bardfield in Essex to pick up a painting she had bought by Edward Bawden ‘on the never-never’. There she was reacquainted with Ravilious, who was lodging with the Bawdens. They had studied together at the RCA in the early 1920s, though had only been on ‘hat-raising terms’. She invited him and his wife Tirzah Garwood down to Furlongs in February 1934, showing Ravilious the local sights while Tirzah worked at her marbling tub in the cramped scullery, fashioning wallpaper.
Eric Ravilious, Sussex Landscape, 1931.Towner Eastbourne
Ravilious had struggled to connect with the ‘unpleasant colour of the Essex earth,’ and rediscovered in his home county of Sussex a landscape he could really engage with. He had been brought up in Eastbourne, met Tirzah while teaching at the town’s art school, and felt a strong affinity for the area. Aged 30, he had established himself as a brilliant commercial woodcut artist, and in November 1933 had enjoyed the first solo show of his watercolours at the progressive Zwemmer Gallery in Soho. It was a quiet success, with over half his paintings sold.
The Sussex countryside galvanised the artist. Over a dozen visits that year, and countless more throughout the decade, he produced works that reimagined the Downs with crisp lines and lyrical clarity: Downs in Winter, Chalk Paths, Tea at Furlongs, Train Landscape, Waterwheel. Watercolours of gently unsettling, stylised imprecision, intent on capturing the spirit of place, rather than topographical accuracy, which went beyond his previous efforts. You can see many of these works at Towner Eastbourne’s excellent, newly extended Ravilious Gallery, where the impact of Furlongs on his career is a major theme.
Eric Ravilious, Kettle, Teapot, Breadboard, Matches, 1939, On loan from a private collection
The nearby twin Asham cement works, nicknamed Greta and Garbo by the Furlongs crowd, became an unlikely muse. Ravilious was drawn to their ‘everyday strangeness’ - rail systems, gantries and cranes, engine sheds, in a shattered rural setting. The manager sold Ravilious two caravans, former Boer War ‘fever wagons’, which were towed to Furlongs and converted into a studio and sleeping space, so he and Tirzah could stay more often, without hogging the spare bedroom. Tirzah painted them green with red wheels; skylights were added, windows put in, overlooking Mount Caburn.
Peggy Angus very much wanted Eric and Tirzah to move into the area, showing them a nearby farmhouse – even more derelict than Furlongs – to consider. The splendidly named Muggery Poke was on sale (Virginia Woolf had her eye on it too) and Ravilious, tempted, embarked on a painting of the building. Unable to capture its essence, he ripped it up. Angus kept the pieces, reassembled them, and put the work on her bedroom wall, where it remained until her death 59 years later (it is now on display at Towner). Meanwhile Tirzah had found a house she loved in Castle Hedingham, not two miles from Great Bardfield, and the couple moved there instead. What might have been. Soon Tirzah was pregnant with their first child.
Throughout the decade, Virginia Woolf would regularly pass the front door of Furlongs, on her long Downland walks. She lived in Rodmell, five miles away; her sister’s Charleston Farmhouse was even nearer. She never stopped to chat; she never mentioned Furlongs in her diaries. Though she did complain about the nearby cement works, which she declared to be ‘glaring monstrosities’. I doubt she would have fitted into the group’s ethos, anyway. Where the privileged Bloomsburies struggled with servants and artistic self-consciousness, Furlongs was all about mucking in: chopping wood, fetching water, cooking mutton, singing folk songs round the fire. Arguing the toss about realism versus modernism, communism versus capitalism. Peggy, something of a firebrand, was nicknamed ‘Red Angus’.
Eric Ravilious, Dolly Engine, 1934, Towner Eastbourne
Eric Ravilious continued making frequent visits to Furlongs, throughout 1935. He generally left Tirzah at home, having begun an affair with Angus’s London housemate, the artist and puppet-maker Helen Binyon, another frequent visitor. Ravilious and Binyon’s affair was consummated on a trip centred round the Lewes Bonfire celebrations, in November 1935. He admitted this dalliance to his devastated wife, but nonetheless continued sleeping with Binyon, mainly under Angus’s roof. Tirzah Garwood blamed Angus for encouraging the affair, and was extremely rude about her in her autobiography: ‘We never thought of Peggy with any respect, to us she was like an old Scottish terrier that one turned off the chairs’.
In February 1936, Eric Ravilious was given a second solo show at the Zwemmer Gallery. It was a tremendous success: two of the works, both painted near Furlongs, were bought by The Towner Gallery (now Towner Eastbourne). Dolly Engine and Downs in Winter hold pride of place in its Ravilious Gallery, the first items in what has become the biggest collection of his work (the Imperial War Museum is also a must-visit for Ravilious fans). Eric Ravilious had previously been known as something of an artist’s artist: this show cemented his reputation as a major player on the Modernist scene, with a unique voice that cast an unsettling sheen on quintessential English scenes.
The war put an end to Ravilious’s visits to Furlongs, but the reputation he had gained for his Sussex landscapes helped earn him a commission as one of Kenneth Clark’s official war artists. His life was cut short on a mission to Iceland in September 1942, in a plane crash: the wreckage has never been found. Peggy Angus continued to host friends at Furlongs until her death, aged 88, in 1993.
The Ravilious Gallery is a permanent exhibition, free to visit, at Towner Eastbourne. Also currently on show is JMW Turner and his Contemporaries, until April 12, 2026.