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Launch of the West Street Chronicle at our Street Party
July 29, 2018 @ 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Just to let you know that as part of our year-long project to research and celebrate West Street, we will be launching our free publication the ‘West Street Chronicle’ at our street party on Sunday 29th July from 2-5pm.
The road will be closed to traffic and we will be celebrating with a range of activities, open studios, children’s workshops, refreshments and games. It will feature live music from Thomas Truax.
Everything is free and everyone is welcome.
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In October, 2017 the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) awarded a grant of £10,000 to the West Street Community Group to support a year-long project researching, sharing and celebrating the history of West Street in Hastings Old Town.
The histories of West St have never been properly recorded, people have come and gone and have been long forgotten. Few accounts exist in official archives and West Street barely gets a mention in any local interest or historical books.
It has a reputation as a narrow, dark, back street; linked with crime, smuggling and deprivation. Buildings were left derelict for years. Historically it often flooded after bad storms. Recent recollections relate to antisocial behaviour, plus blocked drains, discarded rubbish and fly tipping. Over the course of a year, we have searched for these lost histories, by digging into street directories, old records, newspaper archives and by speaking to a wide range of people with a personal connections to the street.
Thomas Truax (pronounced troo-aks) is an American singer/musician, inventor and multi-media artist.
One of the most imaginative characters on the pop music fringe, since the year 2000 Thomas has been traveling the world performing with his evolving “band” of bizarre self-made Harry Partch-esque instruments including a motorized drum machine made of bike wheels called ‘Mother Superior’ and a pimped-up Dr. Seuss-ian Gramophone called ‘The Hornicator’, as well as his venerable resonator guitar ‘Hank’. Time Out magazine has dubbed him “The king of home-made instruments” while Splendid magazine called him “one of the five or ten best singer/songwriters in the world that you’ve never heard of…an exceptional talent, unique and resistant to comparison, yet fairly accessible even to casual listeners.”
Truax crafts rich, poetically evocative songs about insects, trees, technology, and a lifelong obsession with things lunar, including various reasons ‘Why Dogs Howl at The Moon’. Notable supporters and collaborators include Jarvis Cocker, Duke Special, Richard Hawley, Amanda Palmer, Brian Viglione (of the Dresden Dolls/Violent Femmes) and the late author Terry Pratchett.