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 […]
Spare a thought for Old Humphrey. In case you are wondering, Old Humphrey was one of the pen names used by George Mogridge, a very popular religious writer in the 19th century and who remains popular in some countries today. Alas, he is virtually forgotten in Hastings despite Old Humphrey Avenue just off All Saints Street […]
‘Can archdeacons go to heaven?’ was a question that exercised medieval minds because it was this rank of the clergy – between the parish clergy and the bishop – which dealt with financial matters. Today’s archdeacons remain concerned with matters of finance and buildings but I hope that the current Archdeacon of Hastings – whose […]
Those of you who are old enough to have been around may well remember the Memorial Clock writes Tom McCann. Commissioned after Prince Albert’s death from typhoid in 1861, the Albert Memorial clock tower was designed by Liverpudlian Edward Heffer. There had been a contest to find a designer and Heffer beat off competition from […]
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 […]
Michael Blencowe is the Sussex Wildlife Trust’s Community Wildlife Officer and recently published this piece on the history of mink in Sussex on the Wildlife Trust’s website where there is a fascinating range of news, stories and pictures about the work of the trust. The Wind in the Willows is one of Britain’s most beloved books. […]
Winning a prestigious grant will help Hastings Museum and Art Gallery make better use or its archives according to the man in charge. The museum has been given a National Archives scoping grant, one of four grants announced this month and Damian Etheraads, Museum and Cultural Development Manager, says: “It will enable us to better […]
