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I don't know if he's still around but a great Sussex man who knew countless folk songs is/was Noel Dumbrell, a proper old Sussex surname too. This is my favourite version of GOSBTS. A lovely old pub, everyone slightly sozzled and there's him leading the singing with gusto...

I once had a fantastic drunken conversation with someone who wrote a PhD on Dylan Thomas and he had a theory that the poem Sussex and especially that verse was an influence for the Rev Eli Jenkins monologue in Under Milk Wood where he says about never, never leaving. I'd like to think it's true.

It's not poetry although it reads like it...the first lines of Virginia Woolf's Evening Over Sussex is quite something: Evening is kind to Sussex, for Sussex is no longer young, and she is grateful for the veil of evening as an elderly woman is glad when a shade is drawn over a lamp, and only...

Love it. The Constable seascapes are quite something too.

Did Shelley ever write about Sussex/Horsham/Castle Goring or was it all too sedentary for him? And did Blake ever write about Felpham and the Bognor Coast? I can't find anything by either man.

In which case I hang my head in shame. Sorry about that.

In pop and rock, Brighton gets hundreds of mentions, of course. Suede reference my hometown of Worthing, Leo Sayer name-drops Montague Street, there's a Phil Manzanera (no, I've never heard of him either) song which Robert Wyatt played on called Cissbury Ring (my favourite place in the whole...

Ah yes! Thanks for the reminder, I'd completely forgotten about the Coppers. I'll check that out right now.

Aside from GOSBTS, has anyone got any favourites? I love 'The South Country' by Hilaire Belloc. There's some lovely quotes in it.. When I am living in the Midlands that are sodden and unkind, I light my lamp in the evening my work is left behind; And the great hills of the South...