Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  Little retired in 1950. His day was done; so too – broadly speaking – was the age of big spending by seaside local authorities on prestigious public works. It did not take long for changing times and habits and the sea to take their toll on Sidney Little’s bequest to Hastings.

  He was known as the Concrete King. Like many architects and other planners of his time, Little embraced reinforced concrete as the answer to all the twentieth century’s building challenges. But the British seaside weather has a habit of searching out concrete’s inherent flaw. Where the salt spray touches the steel implants, it corrodes. The rust eats into and degrades the concrete, which stains and over time cracks and crumbles. Preventing corrosion and keeping the concrete sound demand constant and expensive maintenance.

  Much of Sidney Little’s work in Hastings has been erased or just abandoned. The mighty St Leonard’s pool was turned into a holiday camp, and eventually filled in and demolished. The sun lounge at the front of the promenade was torn down. The White Rock Baths are shut off and mouldering away. The glass screens along the front of Bottle Alley have long gone and the ceiling is pitted with holes where the concrete has been devoured by damp. The pillars are flaky, spotted with brown, the floor slabs are cracked, wet, uneven.

  Hastings fishing boats

  For bad, if understandable, reasons, Hastings Council has consistently shied away from tackling any of this, preferring instead to hire consultants to draw up improbable schemes and hold extended public consultations on them. A choice example of this familiar species of dithering was the 2005 Hastings and Bexhill Seafront Strategy. This took the form of a lavishly illustrated publication stuffed with stale jargon of the ‘nodes of activity . . . multi-purpose function space . . . area-wide action . . . zones of change . . . public realm improvements . . . renewal initiatives . . . design strategies’ type.

  Bottle Alley, for instance, was to be transformed (these people only ever think in terms of transformation, usually radical transformation) into ‘a covered space’ to be filled with studios, craft workshops, ‘market-style accommodation’, retail outlets, café. The spending envisaged by the authors of this futile document was comically divorced from reality. ‘In all more than £35 million will be spent by 2013,’ they warbled, but 2013 has come and gone and the wind still whistles around the pockmarked pillars on Bottle Alley.

  The example of Hastings Pier should alert the town’s leaders to the peril of continued inertia. Built in the 1870s to a design by Eugenius Birch, the prince of pier builders, Hastings Pier flourished for half a century, declined for half a century and was then left to rot until a fire in 2010 reduced it to a blackened shell. In that condition it seemed somehow to sum up and symbolise all Hastings’ well-documented problems of social deprivation, unemployment, crap schools, vandalism, drug use, violence and so forth.

  The pier’s restoration has cheered the town up no end. True, the £14 million budget is not coming from the council but is being provided from lottery funding. But Hastings’ leaders need to realise that unless the rebirth of the pier is followed by the salvation of what is salvageable from the Concrete King’s legacy – certainly the promenade and Bottle Alley, possibly the White Rock Baths – a huge opportunity will have been lost, for which they will not be easily forgiven.

  The signing of the Entente Cordiale between England and France in April 1904 signalled the formal end to 900 years of hostility and suspicion between the nations. But Hastings was ahead of the game; it had already concluded its own entente. As the site of the battle that delivered the England of old into French hands, Hastings led the way in putting ancient antagonisms to rest.

  The initiative was organised by a prominent Hastings citizen, Edward Clarke, a passionate Francophile (the Hastings and St Leonard’s Observer said of him that he spoke French as a native and English with a French accent). On a visit to Normandy Clarke had met a distinguished aristocrat, the Marquis de la Rochethulon et Grente, and got talking with him about Anglo-French relations, then going through a sticky patch because of colonial rivalries in North Africa. The Marquis was president of the Souvenir Normand, a high-minded body established to promote links with European peoples who, at one time or another, had come under Norman influence.

  Clarke saw an opportunity to ‘dispel by friendly discourse the cloud that for several years has hovered over our relations with France.’ The upshot was the arrival in Hastings in August 1903 of a delegation from the Souvenir Normand led by the Marquis de la Rochethulon and the Vicomte Jehan Soudan de Pierrefitte. The English could not match their visitors in nomenclature – the delegation was welcomed by Clarke and the Mayor, Alderman Tree. But in nobility of purpose they were well-matched.

  The visit was extensively reported in the local press and secured coverage in the national newspapers. The main events were the inspection of the battlefield north-west of the town and the unveiling of a commemorative stone near the altar in the ruins of Hastings Abbey. That evening the guests were treated to a performance in the Abbot’s Hall of a musical pageant especially composed by the Vicomte Soudan de Pierrefitte (described by the Hastings and St Leonard’s Weekly Mail and Times as ‘having the slight stoop and faraway look in the eyes that one generally associates with artists and poets’).

  Before returning to France, the visitors were given an extensive tour of Hastings itself, including the seafront. According to the Mail and Times, there was disapproval of the summer dresses on display, which some considered ‘thin, insufficient and unsuitable’. Nevertheless cordiality persisted and the following year the newly formed Hastings branch of the Souvenir Normand were entertained in Rouen. In 1906 Hastings played host again, one of the highlights being a battle on the pier fought with confetti and what Edward Clarke called ‘thorough heartiness and goodwill’.

  I’m glad to say that the Hastings branch of the Souvenir Normand continues the pioneering work of Edward Clarke to this day. Exactly how it does so I’m afraid I cannot say, as the secretary was extremely guarded about its activities when I telephoned her. But it’s heartening to know that Hastings still sets an example in promoting ‘friendship and cordiality where once had festered mistrust and enmity’. It cannot be a coincidence that, since Alderman Tree and the Marquis clasped hands, we have never fought the French again. Edward Clarke was right when he looked forward to a time ‘when chivalry will be more concerned with raising up than striking down, when Englishmen and Frenchmen will shake hands instead of fists, when the bayonet will be replaced by the branch and the apple blossom.’

  * * *

  Bexhill and the De La Warr Pavilion

  There is a long, gentle slope into Bexhill from the east. The coast road runs through a wide stretch of closely mown grass abundantly provided with wooden benches placed in memory of departed Bexhillians and sat on by those destined to follow in due course.

  Hastings has distinction and problems. Bexhill, in comparison, has few problems and no distinction – apart, that is, from its one glory and claim to attention, the extraordinary De La Warr Pavilion. I own to being something of a philistine about architecture – I can see the point without being stirred in my spirit – but even I was startled by the beauty and brilliance of Mendelsohn and Chermayeff’s pleasure house.

  Almost equally startling is its incongruity. The hope, when it was commissioned in 1933, was that it would light the way to a new Bexhill, and lift it from the mediocrity of what one critic called ‘the rococo redness of that terrible town’. The Pavilion was to be complemented by a lido and a pier in a general aesthetic rebirth, but it did not happen. Eighty years on, the Pavilion is spiritually more isolated than ever, the mediocrity of its surroundings enhanced rather than diminished.

  The people of Bexhill do not seem bothered. To judge from the letters page in the Bexhill Observer, affection for the town’s only celebrated landmark is lukewarm at best, and there is an undercurrent of resentment over the £500,000-a-year support it gets from the council. Bexhill has long been something of a joke beca
use of the large numbers of elderly people who choose to live there. They do so for sound reasons that have very little to do with the De La Warr Pavilion. They like the benches and the neat cream and crimson shelters, the silver painted railings, the smart beach huts, the easy walks, the air, the general spick-and-spanness, above all the feeling of safeness.

  I met a couple who had retired to Bexhill from Cambridge, where he had spent forty-five years working for the gas board. Weather permitting, they walked one-and-a-half miles along the seafront in one direction every day, and one-and-a-half miles back. ‘You can never get bored by the sea,’ she said, and the sea answered with a soft, percussive sigh. They had no opinions about the Pavilion but plenty on the subject of Hastings. ‘We like it here because there’s no trouble,’ he said. ‘Not like Hastings.’ Trouble meant youths and teenage girls, and youths and teenage girls meant spitting, swearing, shouting, fighting and worse.

  I talked to a lady of mature years who was sitting on a bench on the colonnade warming herself in the pale sunshine. She had come from Belfast in the 1980s. Why Bexhill? ‘I love the Pavilion,’ she said (so someone does). ‘And the peace and the calm. After Belfast.’

  Apart from the Pavilion there is not a lot of historical interest in Bexhill, if you discount the house where Eddie Izzard was brought up and the house in Station Road where the first genius of television, John Logie Baird, died in 1946. But there is a rather handsome railway station, built of red brick, with a canopy at the front and a cheerful pyramidal roof and lantern above. Inside is a waiting room with comfortable sofas and bookcases filled with romantic historical fiction and detective stories, which tells you something about Bexhill-on-Sea.

  5

  EMPRESS OF WATERING HOLES

  Eastbourne Pier before the fire

  ‘There is no more beautiful spot on the south coast than Eastbourne . . . everywhere the eye is enchanted . . . many of the busiest thoroughfares would console a Parisian flâneur for the loss of his beloved boulevards.’ The eye in question, somewhat rosy, belonged to a Victorian journalist and dramatist, George Robert Sims, who fell under the spell of the town as a schoolboy there.

  Eastbourne has survived changing times and fashions pretty well, and it would be a churlish soul who could not take pleasure in its handsome and handsomely looked-after seafront. In my view it has one major failing: its deplorable hostility towards bicycles and cyclists, who are banned from even a sliver of the wide esplanade and forced onto the pestilential main road.

  I stayed a night in the Langham, the last of the substantial stuccoed hotels before the eastern end of the front gives way to red brick villas converted to guesthouses and B & Bs. The hotel was extremely well run, staffed by friendly and attentive Eastern Europeans, and alluringly priced (in February) at £37 for a bedroom with a view of the sea and breakfast. Being there set me thinking about hotel names and their mysterious resonances.

  Eastbourne’s grandest hotel is the Grand, which is so grand that ‘gentlemen’ must still wear a jacket and tie to have dinner there. ‘Langham’, I would suggest, is a middling kind of name. One does not expect the same degree of deep-carpeted class at the Langham as at the Grand; or indeed as at the Imperial, the Chatsworth, the Burlington or the Cumberland (none of which I have been inside). Why Cumberland should be classier than Alexandra I cannot say, but it is. No disrespect to the west coast of Scotland but the Oban cannot hope to aspire to the status of the Cavendish, nor the Heatherleigh to that of the Claremont.

  The hotel with the most arresting name is the Big Sleep, which was once part-owned by the American actor John Malkovich. This connection, worked on by imaginative journalism, gave rise to a rumour that he was thinking of becoming an Eastbourne resident. This in turn inspired the council’s ‘cabinet member for tourism’ to urge that a Hollywood-style ‘Welcome To Eastbourne’ banner should be placed on the landward approach. Fortunately for Eastbourne, wiser counsels prevailed.

  The Langham is owned and run by a dapper marathon-running fanatic, Neil Kirby. He came to Eastbourne from the Grosvenor in London, where he was general manager. Kirby put £3 million of his own and borrowed money into retrieving the Langham from ruinous decay. He and his wife had toiled night and day to turn it round, and they had won.

  The secret of success, he told me, lay in pricing, investing and getting the right staff. Every once in a while he went across the road to study the Langham’s façade and note down the signs of wear. Nothing puts prospective guests off more thoroughly than letters missing from the hotel’s name and chunks of plaster from the stucco. Two-thirds of his rooms were occupied over the winter, he said; the Grand’s occupancy over the same period was a third. He ran a ladies’ lunch club, a jazz club, a pudding and wine club, lunchtime cabaret – anything within reason to bring locals in and make the place feel busy. When I was there they had a big group from a church in London, with an entertainer each night. The performer for that evening wandered through while I was chatting to Kirby, who broke off to remind him to eschew the blue when it came to the jokes.

  Eastbourne fishing boats

  In the morning I wandered east past the guesthouses and B & Bs. Most had ‘No Vacancies’ signs up, which made me think Eastbourne must be doing remarkably well for winter trade until I discovered that this was just a polite way of letting on that they were closed until spring.

  At the shabby end of Royal Parade I came across Eastbourne’s fishing fleet pulled up onto the shingle amid heaps of lobster and crab pots and netting, coils of rope, stacks of plastic and polystyrene fish boxes, rusted barrels, anchors and chains, winches and cable – all the proper paraphernalia of the business, properly jumbled up. On the road was the headquarters of Southern Head Fishing, where a million quid’s worth of locally caught fish and shellfish changes hands each year.

  I looked at the board outside. Dover sole, lemon sole, dabs, whiting, hake, brill, turbot, cod, plaice, scallops – it was a fish-eater’s paradise, at prices to make the mouth water. Outside, three blokes were loading sacks of whelks onto a trailer. It was 9.30 in the morning and they had already returned from emptying 800 pots stuffed with this humble crustacean. I am a pretty keen consumer of shellfish, anything from lobster and crab down to clams and cockles and even the occasional winkle. But whelks? I’ve tried them and I can live without them – unlike the people of South Korea. This load was destined for sorting and freezing in King’s Lynn, and shipment to Seoul.

  That’s a lot of whelks, I observed acutely. There’s plenty out there, one of the blokes said. And cuttlefish, we’re just starting on them. Plus the Dover sole and the rest of them. It was heartening to hear a story of marine abundance for a change.

  Somehow wet fish and the smell of fish and the hard lives of fishermen seem not quite to fit the Eastbourne image, which perhaps is why the boats are kept out of sight. Eastbourne is about respectability and tidiness and restrained behaviour and taking your time. It has miles of smart blue railings, and equally smart cream and blue shelters at regular intervals. There are benches, hundreds of benches, possibly thousands of benches, arranged to give views of the sea and the massed ranks of petunias and begonias in the meticulously tended seafront beds and the lines of hebe and lavender and other decorous shrubs.

  Eastbourne has its seafront, the most consistently tasteful of all seafronts. Its very handsome pier was severely damaged in a fire in July 2014, but – Eastbourne being Eastbourne – it will surely return to its former glory before too long. It has a marvellous bandstand, domed in blue with a pillared colonnade. It has tennis, a lot of tennis and bowls, and county cricket. It has fine churches and many fine houses and remarkably few architectural horrors. It also has, in Camilla’s Bookshop, one of the few old-fashioned secondhand bookshops left in the south of England, a warren of book-lined passages and chambers that celebrates – or perhaps it should be commemorates – the toil of an army of scribes.

  Bowls in Eastbourne

  Remarkably, the town has managed to remain faithful i
n the important respects to the principles of its founding fathers and patrons. The historian David Cannadine argued persuasively in his study Lords and Landlords that these were, in the main, pecuniary rather than philanthropic. The Cavendishes, who owned the land, needed the money from rents for the upkeep of Chatsworth and their other drainingly expensive estates. The motives of the Eastbourne worthies were also largely financial, but it was in the interests of both parties to obscure the real purpose of the contract between them, and portray it as an exercise in benevolence.

  Whenever the 7th Duke of Devonshire appeared in Eastbourne – which was as infrequently and briefly as was consistent with his role there – the worthies made sure that the town abased itself before him. The opening by him of the new drainage system in 1867 inspired, in Cannadine’s words, ‘general rejoicing, with shops closed, streets decorated and a procession of townsfolk accompanied by the band of the Sussex 19th Rifle Corps.’ An illuminated address was presented to the Duke expressing ‘on behalf of the middle classes, tradesmen and inhabitants generally . . . our sincere admiration of those noble qualities which so pre-eminently distinguish Your Grace.’ At the celebratory dinner, the Vicar of Eastbourne toasted ‘our excellent patron, our genial saint of Eastbourne’, words greeted with loud applause.

  Deafening cheers, applause and expressions of undying gratitude greeted the Duke whenever he deigned to show his long-whiskered face, whether to launch the new lifeboat, open the pier or lay the foundation stone for Eastbourne College. His death in 1891 plunged Eastbourne’s council leaders into a deep well of official grief. They passed a motion recording that it was to his ‘liberality and forethought’ that the town owed its pre-eminent position among seaside resorts. His generosity, public spirit and warm interest in the welfare of his tenants (rather than their rents) would long be remembered, the motion concluded.