Sarah Hosking (founder/secretary) trained as a painter at St Albans and Leicester colleges of art in the early 1960s, and taught art before re-training in arts administration with the Arts Council in 1970. She was the first visual arts officer for the then newly formed East Midlands Arts Association from 1972, initiating artist-in-residence appointments, aid to artists and exhibitions. When Sarah became freelance in exhibitions and arts management in 1980, she also established her own studio in Northamptonshire; having studied dyeing and fabric construction, she produced fabric wall hangings, exhibiting in the Midlands and London before closing it in 1986. She lectured with the team ARTLAW on business studies around the art colleges, eventually leading to her first book on self-employment for artists and craftspeople, with Kogan Page. She then worked in the NHS as an interior and garden designer in Hampshire and Derbyshire, and was with the Special Hospitals Service Authority, developing the environment for long-term patients at Broadmoor and Ashworth Special Hospitals. She co-authored Healing the Hospital Environment: design, management and maintenance of healthcare premises with Liz Haggard (1999). This deals with all non-medical aspects of patient care and became the accepted publication for related NHS policy.
Sarah retired and obtained an MA in Shakespeare and Renaissance Cultural History from the Shakespeare Institute (Birmingham University) in 2005. She initiated the Hosking Houses Trust legally in 1995, moved to Clifford Chambers in 1996, acquired Church Cottage in 1998 and started fund-raising in 1999. The first writer was appointed in 2002. She initiated the Trust publication Round the Square and Up the Tower: Clifford Chambers, Warwickshire in 2014. She contributed the chapter ‘Coventry Cathedral’ for ‘The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts’ in 2014. She lectures locally on art related matters and is a member of the Anglican church.
Sarah was included in the King’s Birthday Honours list for summer 2024 and awarded an MBE for services to literature and the arts. This is in recognition not only of her initiation of the Hosking Houses Trust but for innovative work in the world of government arts subsidy during the 1970s/80s and her work in the NHS on environmental issues.
In the video below, writer and broadcaster Michael Bywater talks to Catherine Fox and Jo Baker who contributed short stories to the Kiss and Part collection (with a guest appearance by Sarah Hosking, founder of the Hosking Houses Trust). The interview was filmed at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature in Bloxham, Oxfordshire, February 2020