My sister, Annabelle Hughes, who has died aged 79, was an architectural historian and expert on timber-framed buildings in West Sussex. She delighted in asking the owners of suitable properties if she could crawl through their timbered roof spaces, exploring the bat dropping-infested crevices and cobweb-covered corners.
Annabelle was born in Penang, Malaysia, to Lionel Earl, a civil servant, and his wife, Joan (nee Tubb), a stenographer. During the second world war she was evacuated with her mother to Australia just before Singapore fell, arriving in the UK in 1944 to be reunited, eventually, with her father, who had been held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese.
She was educated at Streatham and Clapham High school in south London and then did teacher training at Sarum St Michael College of Education in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Straight out of college, she married and became the mother of three children, Ben, Sam and Jo.
Following her divorce in 1969, she married the Rev John Hughes in 1970, and they moved to Horsham in Sussex, where Annabelle had another child, Theo. She taught English and religious education at Tanbridge House school. Widowed in 1980, she continued to teach part-time but also took an Open University degree, followed by an MA at Sussex University.
It was then that she became involved with the Horsham Society in a campaign to save the local Prewetts Mill from demolition – and began to cultivate what would become a lifelong interest in timber-framed houses and their captivating stories. Her first book, Horsham Houses: A Study of Early Buildings in a Market Town (1986), was the benchmark for how Horsham should preserve its old buildings, and many towns and villages have replicated her approach. Later she wrote other books on Horsham’s history.
Annabelle’s involvement with the Wealden Buildings Study Group led her to pursue a PhD in timber-framed buildings. She then found a way to turn her specialist interest into a career – by producing heritage statements related to applications for building consent, compiling reports for architects and surveyors, and researching old buildings for their owners. She also became a much sought-after speaker on local history.
Any local drive with Annabelle was enhanced by her commentary on the history of the buildings we passed. Her touchstone was: “If we don’t know where we’ve come from, how can we see where we’re going?”
She is survived by her children, seven grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and by her siblings, David and me. Our other brother, Adrian, died in 2014.
