Second Walk: Corinne Fowler Our Island Stories In Lewes: Empire Beneath The Landscape

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Accompany Corinne Fowler on a thought-provoking walk through Lewes that reframes familiar landscapes in the light of Britains imperial past. Drawing on the themes and methods of Our Island Stories, Corinne explores how apparently tranquil English settings railways, rivers, country houses and parish churches are woven into global histories of empire, trade, migration and resistance.
In Our Island Stories, Corinne shows how Britains countryside is not isolated from colonial history but deeply entangled with it. Railway expansion, often celebrated as a symbol of Victorian progress, was financed in part by imperial wealth and built to serve an economy tied to global extraction. Rivers such as the Ouse connected inland towns to port networks that linked Sussex to the Atlantic world and beyond, moving goods shaped by plantation labour and imperial commerce.
Country houses including those across Sussex were frequently funded or sustained by fortunes derived from slavery, the East India Company, Caribbean plantations, or colonial administration. The book that this walk draws from emphasises that these houses were not only sites of wealth but also of complex social histories involving servants, global commodities, and cultural exchange. Lewes historic buildings and estates prompt questions about who financed rural gentility, and whose labour lay behind it.
Churches, too, were implicated. Parish memorials often commemorate men who served in colonial regiments, administered overseas territories, or profited from imperial enterprise. Religious institutions sometimes supported missionary activity abroad while benefiting from imperial patronage at home. Corinnes approach invites us to read plaques, architecture and landscape features as historical documents embedded in global networks.
A key thread in Our Island Stories is that the countryside also holds stories of resistance, abolition, migration and hidden presences. Black Britons, South Asian lascars, colonial soldiers, and anti-slavery campaigners all form part of rural history. The walk will reflect on how these narratives complicate romantic ideas of timeless England.
Throughout the walk, Corinne will encourage discussion and questions the spirit of the book is conversational and inquisitive rather than didactic. Participants are invited to look again at familiar Lewes landmarks and consider how local heritage intersects with global history.
Bring sturdy shoes and waterproofs depending on the weather forecast.
Professor Corinne Fowler is the author of Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain. She co-authored the National Trust report examining country houses colonial links and directed The Colonial Countryside, a child-led history and writing project that resulted in a published collection of creative responses. She also curated The Colonial Bronts exhibition at the Bront Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire.