Boarding Houses

 

I did these quick sketches while walking by a second-hand shop one day.  These belongings were all in the window and they reminded me of the bits and pieces left from the days of the boarding houses that Hastings used to be full of. Many Victorians would come here to stay for the season.  

I always wonder when I walk by these type of shops, who did these items once belong to and what stories, conversations and scandals could they all reveal. 

Hastings Castle

The ruins we all see over looking us in the town are the remains of the stone fortress built after William of Normandy's Coronation, Christmas Day 1066, but today less than half of the original structure remains. The Church of St Mary in the Castle within the castle walls are the best-preserved part of the ruins.

The savage storms of the 13th century brought disruption and large parts of the castle fell into the sea and the castle fell into decay.

The ruins became the property of the Pelham family and the site was used for farming. In 1824, Thomas Pelham the 6th Earl of Chichester, excavated the castle and it became a Victorian tourist attraction.

My first visit to Hastings

I first fell in love with the Hastings area when, as a child, I used to look at the photographs in my families Shell and BP Guide to Britain. Using black and white photographs they went about discovering each place.

My first visit to Hastings was when my family purchased their first car. That summer we became car-driving tourists and I kept hoping that we might make it to Hastings.

The journey was a long one but I can still remember driving through Battle on the way there and catching sight of the Battle Abbey Gatehouse, then having a picnic lunch on Hastings beach, watching the Cliff Railway, before visiting the castle in the afternoon. Before we left for home, we drove by the Net Huts and through the Strand Gate in Winchelsea, having just driven by the row of houses photographed in the guide, on our way to quickly look at Rye and its cobbled streets in the late afternoon. Everything we visited that day was just as the Shell and BP Guide photographs promised.

My next trip to Hastings a few years later was to go house hunting because my husband was offered a job in the area, it was all very hectic and we finally moved to Hastings ten days before Christmas.

Today both my husband and I always think of Hastings as home without hesitation and all our children only know this as their home. Yet I still can’t believe that the place I first fell in love with as a child, is now the place I return to at the end of the day.