The History of 34 Sussex Square

​Iken House

No 34, known as Iken House, was added to Roedean School in 1892. After Roedean moved to its current location in 1898 the house was first a “College of Housewifery”, then a gentlemen’s school, before being converted after the Great War to assume its current identity as The Leas. For full information see the House History for No 35 Sussex Square.

The first resident of the house, in 1832, had been Lady Augusta Hervey, daughter of Frederick William Hervey, 1st Marquess of Bristol, who owned the nearby mansion house at number 19/20. Lady Augusta did not stay in Kemp Town long; she married in September 1832 and had left by 1834. However she must have kept an interest in the house as her husband Frederick Seymour is resident in 1846, and Lady Augusta herself is listed in the street directory again from 1864 until 1867, her husband having died in 1856.

From 1850 the house was home to John Sullivan (1788-1855), explorer, colonial administrator for the East India Company and the founder of the colonial settlement at Ooty, “Queen of the Hill Stations”, in Tamil Nadu. At the time of the 1851 census Sullivan was living at this address with his second wife and four daughters along with eight servants, including butler, footman and governess. There was also a visitor on census day: Princess Galitzan, from St Petersburg, possibly a mis-spelling of Golitsyn, one of the greatest princely families of pre-revolutionary Russia.