Angela Wigglesworth – Journalist and Author

I’m Angela Wigglesworth, a writer, and I’ve just published my seventh book: The Sheffield Arms, The History of a 200-year-old Sussex Coaching Inn. I’ve also been a news reporter and feature writer before specialising in travel writing.

I’ve contributed features to the Financial Times, the Observer, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Good Housekeeping magazine, Country Living, Brighton Argus. At one time I syndicated travel articles to eighteen regional papers.

I’ve also contributed articles to a variety of books including: The AA’s ‘Book of Britain’s Walks’, ‘Great Voyages of the World’ (St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha) and The Gazetteer for the ‘Ordnance Survey Leisure Guide to the South Downs’. My article on ‘Craftwork on Orkney’ was published in ‘Essential Scotland’ magazine.

For Burke’s Peerage publication ‘By Appointment’, I wrote ‘Poles Apart’ about a 5000 mile journey from Chile to the Falklands, South Georgia and Elephant Island, the whaling stations at Grytviken and Stromness, now ghost towns, the British Antarctic Station in Signy.

It was in 1986 that I was invited to the Falklands, four years after the war, to write about it as a travel destination. (See About Page). After two later visits, I wrote Falkland People, published in 1992 on the tenth anniversary of the Falklands war. Other books on the people of small islands followed: ‘People of Scilly’ with a Foreword by Leslie Thomas, and ‘People of Wight’ with a Foreword by Cliff Michelmore.

I was commissioned by the Francis Frith Collection to write Lewes, a photographic history of your town with Francis Frith photographs. Francis Frith was a Victorian photographer who, in the early years of photography, travelled round the UK taking pictures of towns and villages.

In 2016, I wrote ‘The Chair Man’, the life story of Romany gypsy, John Lee, who caned chairs on the streets of Sussex. Two years later, I wrote ‘Not Just Another Swan’, the life of dancer Silvia Ebert whose father-in-law, in 1934, was Glyndebourne’s first Artistic Director.