A former police motorcycle has been donated to road safety charity Doc Bike to help save lives of riders across Sussex. The BMW R1250RT was a Sussex Police fleet motorcycle used by officers from the Roads Policing Unit. It has been donated to Doc Bike to support the charity’s work on the roads of Sussex […]
Hastings and St Leonards are full of quirky statues and historical artefacts, Tom McCann has been looking in to the history of some of them Erected in 1902, a year after her death and unveiled by the Marquess of Abergavenny, the town mayor and other famous locals, the statue of Queen Victoria in Warrior Square […]
The history of Hastings Pier is a chequered one. But no one could have anticipated the mess that it would become when it was triumphantly reopened a decade ago after a £14m rebuild following a devastating fire in October 2010. Today, at the height of summer it is devoid of visitors and only three businesses […]
Once again courtesy of Derelict In The UK we bring you photographs of iconic and deserted buildings, this time St Leonards Parish Church. Standing grand on the St Leonards seafront, this beautiful building was completed in 1961 to replace its predecessor destroyed by a direct hit from V-1 ‘doodlebug’. It originally had structural building problems […]
Was Hastings cursed by the occultist Aleister Crowley? Much has been written about Aleister Crowley, the famous dabbler in ‘sex magick’. He reached the end of his days in a boarding house on The Ridge in 1947 – he’d run out of money and he’d run out of friends. The Victorian house known as Netherwood […]
Stuart Baillie finds out about the history of a building that has always intrigued him… I was standing on top of the East Hill at the weekend showing some friends who were visiting the town some of the landmarks of the area. They pointed west and asked, ‘what’s that?’ What they were asking about was of course Marine […]
Even today more than 30 years after it closed people still fondly remember ‘the old bathing pool’. It’s a place where memories were made. If this feature evokes some memories in you we’d love you to share them with us, or if you have old photographs we’d love to see them email us at tellmeyourstory@hastingsinfocus.co.uk […]
Once again we’re dipping in to the work of ‘Modernity Mark’ with a selection of photographs from the former Palace Hotel on Hastings seafront taken in 2014. Mark is also able to provide some detailed history of the hotel and explains the architectural and design features that make the building stand out as a architectural […]
Nottingham woman Sue Church is spearheading a campaign to have a blue plaque erected in Hastings in memory of the legendary Biddy The Tubman. This Pathe newsreel footage of Biddy in action probably better explains his ‘act’ than words ever could. Sue says: “As Hastings Borough Council no longer funds these Blue Plaques, it looks […]
