When the celebrated critic returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, Alexandra Harris realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area’s past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see? 

From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying stories inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape. 

In conversation with art historian Ruth Scurr