The Second Edith Festival takes place in October. For more details see Edith Festival 2023 – Hastings Museum and Art Gallery (hmag.org.uk) and https://www.hastingsweek.com/events-3 and https://friendsofedith.org.uk/events/  

Soon there will have been 200 years of St Leonards.  Recently the question of celebrating James Burton's New Town was discussed in articles in the Hastings Online Times:  'The Original DFL:  James Burton' and 'How should the bicentenary of St Leonards be marked?'. Below is news of a meeting on the subject on the evening [...]

Alderman Tree was Mayor of Hastings four times between 1891 and 1904. When he died in 1927 at the age of 82, he left a trust fund to buy objects for the museum collection. Over the years the Museum Fund allowed the Went Tree Trust to gift a wide range of objects to the museum, [...]

St Leonards Parish Church – Public Meeting on 6 March at the White Rock Hotel Early last year a ‘stakeholders group’ was set up to address concerns about the former parish church, now declared redundant on account of instability in the surrounding land. The group will consider possible uses to which the building might be [...]

Would you like to join our core team? As readers will have seen from our AGM notes, we’ve recently adopted a less formal structure, so that membership now requires no subscription (though donations are always welcome), simply an active interest in heritage matters across the borough and a readiness to keep in touch with the [...]

The National Town Criers Competition A member has written to express regret that the borough council has withdrawn support for the popular Town Criers competition. This is one of a number of stringent budget cuts, often counter-intuitive, such as the apparent decision to reduce the tourist information service for Hastings. In 2018 we brought out [...]

West St Leonards Neighbourhood Plan We recently drew attention to the fact that The West St Leonards Forum has established a Neighbourhood Plan and recently instigated a survey of West St Leonards residents in order to understand their concerns and to help establish priorities for action. www.weststleonards.org.uk The council has put the Neighbourhood Plan out [...]

In our recent Update, we wrote: A ‘stakeholders’ group was set up early last year to try to take forward matters concerning possible uses to which the now disused church might be put and whether it might form a community asset under some kind of charitable organisation. The issues are formidable, particularly as much of [...]