Our new series of interviews are designed for you to get to know the people who’ve chosen Rye as their home or place of work, a little more personally.
Subject of interview: Marcus Crane. He and his husband, Gareth McCully, have lived in Rye 14 years. He runs McCully and Crane, an art and interiors business.
Twitter or Instagram?
Instagram. I just don’t understand Twitter.
Meat or fish?
Fish. My favourite place to eat at the moment is Tillingham Winery in Peasmarsh.
Music or talk radio?
That’s hard. It depends on the time of day, but I basically have Radio 4 on all the time.
Sand or shingle?
Oh shingle, I can’t bear sand, it gets everywhere, no thank you.
Coffee or tea?
Coffee. I have my first cup mid morning, on the way into work. Usually a flat white with oat milk from Rae on The Mint. Great coffee.
Dog or cat?
Dogs. I mean I like cats, but dog.
Vacation or staycation?
Staycation. We’ve had so many dogs over the years, travelling abroad is a hassle. We’ve got used to being here.
Cinema or theatre?
That’s a tough question. I don’t know, what an impossible question. Probably both; I know that’s not really an answer…I love the theatre and I love the cinema, for very different reasons though… Cinema, actually cinema really.
Sun or shade?
Shade. Shade. Did you get that? Shade. I actually don’t like the sun. Shade all the way. I don’t like eating in the sun. I literally cross the road to walk on the shady side of the street.
Why Rye?
After living and working in the capital for eighteen years, we both wanted to leave East London and move to the countryside. For two years, we used to go away almost every weekend. Norfolk, Somerset, the Cotswolds, Hertfordshire – all the usual suspects. Nothing ever really clicked.
You’d go and see a house and think, I love this house. But then you’d walk out of the front door and think, what am I going to do here? I grew up in Sevenoaks and Rye was my seaside town, for holidays and trips with my parents, so it was very familiar to me. Family friends of ours have a house here and as teenagers we’d pile into the car and spend weekends.
And then someone asked jokingly if we wanted to go and run their pub in Rye. The answer was no, but we thought why don’t we go and have a look at the town though; it hadn’t been on the radar. And once we did, that was that, it was all done and dusted within a year.
Initially there was no plan to open a shop. Gareth was going to keep his job for a year. 14 years later, he’s still got it. But I thought, what am I going to do? We opened a little shop on Needles Passage selling our gear from London. We’ve been on Cinque Ports Street for 13 years now and the business just evolved over time.
Image Credits: McCully and Crane .