It's nice, but it's not bohemia ... Lamb House in Rye. Photograph: David Archer/National Trust
I'm not quite sure what I was expecting when I decided to visit Rye on a recent trip to the south coast.
What I got was a small, pretty town, accurately described by the local tourist information office as displaying "quaint charm". There were nice old churches, steep winding paths, cosy pubs with beamed ceilings and shops full of prosperous looking women of a certain age buying expensive-looking impractical products named after flowers and French actresses.
What I didn't get was the impression that this was somewhere bohemians were likely to prosper. Of course, that's no more than to be expected nowadays in a wealthy UK town that relies mainly on Laura Ashley-flavoured tourism and commuting for its income. However, enjoyable as Rye was to visit, it did seem that the place might have lost something.
I'd gone there gripping a copy of DJ Taylor's entertaining new book about Bright Young Things. I had a vague idea that gaggles of 1920s party animals used to regularly debouch from the Brighton train at the tiny station and fill the place with cravats, high jinks and tinkling laughter - a few of their number dashing off glorious booze-soaked novels as an afterthought.
As I realised when I read through the book while munching on a suitably middle-class gastropub lunch, however, DJ Taylor only actually mentions Rye in passing as a "well-known bohemian destination" popular for weekend visits by "Bright Young homosexuals". All the same, and even if it wasn't a particularly important inspirational lode for Powell, Waugh and friends, there's no denying Rye's rich literary heritage. During its long existence it's housed Joseph Conrad, Conrad Aiken, HG Wells, Rumer Godden, GK Chesterton, Radclyffe Hall, Henry James and EF Benson. Meanwhile the fun-sounding Dr Syn novels (about which all comments are welcome, since I haven't read one of them) by Russell Thorndike are set on the nearby marshes.
Now, however, this torrent of writing appears to have dried up. The only evidence of its passing lies in a plaque on a building opposite the town "Pette Shoppe" advertising the fact that Radclyffe Hall once lived there, and in Lamb House, the former home of Benson and James, now maintained by the National Trust.
This large 18th-century property is rather beautiful and worth the small entrance fee for a stroll around its gardens alone. There's also much fun to be had perusing the remains of James's library (all appropriately serious reading: Thomas De Quincey, The Letters of Meredith, Murray's Guide to Greek Literature, Matthew Arnold on God and the Bible, Swinburne and Walter Pater's essay on style). All the same, like all such museums there's also something vaguely depressing about the house too. As a literary junkie, I'm all for these places, but when indulging myself in melancholy philosophising I come to see them as rather vain attempts to preserve, as if in amber, an activity that is entirely ephemeral. The activity of writing can't be recreated once its practitioners have shuffled off their mortal coils, after all.
So I left Rye feeling slightly glum. As I've noted, I'm not really sure what else I could have expected. I'm also aware that it's daft to hope for any physical manifestation of a profession that it is largely carried out in the abstract. What's more, for all I know, and for all that such a brief visit could tell me, there might actually be all manner of creative activity going on behind the (studiously old-fashioned) closed doors of the town.
Even so, I doubt it. Not least because the place is so damn expensive nowadays. The Bright Young Things themselves would be hard pushed to afford a hotel room (I stayed in the far cheaper Hastings, down the coast) while the astonishing property prices must exclude all but the commuting classes.
Continuing to indulge in glum vagueness, I wandered onto a recurring idea of mine that bohemia is being steadily squeezed out of Britain entirely.
To give a personal example, I live in Oxford, a town admittedly packed to the gills with writers, but mainly writers of the baby-boomer generation and older. Since the average house price is a staggering £351,860, it's far too expensive for anyone intent on starting a career living by the pen. Far too expensive for me too, I might add, and so, like more and more young professionals of my generation who aren't prepared to sell their souls to be able to step onto the property ladder, I'm leaving soon.
And I'm not just leaving Oxford: I'm leaving the UK altogether. There's nowhere in the country I can really live in any kind of comfort at today's prices. And although I often moan about my lack of money, I'm far better off than many, especially since I'm old enough to have avoided the horrors of tuition fees. How any 21-year-old without private income who wants to become a writer (or, ahem, even an author of toilet books like me) could hope to survive in the UK is beyond me. Ditto painters, ditto musicians. Ditto members of bands. (Unless they carry on living with their parents of course. Which is hardly very rock'n'roll.)
So how do young artists survive? Are we going to see a huge brain drain over the next few years, turning Britain into little more than a twee, Rye-style museum to past glories and dead bohemia? Will all artistic endeavour be shipping in from France soon? Or am I barking up the wrong tree and ignoring the eternal truth that artists have to struggle and generally find a way, anyway?
