Book Review: Fixing Hastings and Rye
DAVE YOUNG
Fixing Hastings & Rye by HIP newswriter James Prentice is an ambitious overview and explanation of the area’s social and economic fabric. Informed by the author’s Fabian Society membership and underpinned by a PhD in social science research from the University of Sussex, it attempts to quantify the many issues, human and infrastructural, which beset Hastings and many other coastal towns.
Prentice has lived in the area for most of his life, lending a local perspective to the many maps, tables, graphs and source annotations which support his findings. Impressively and extensively analysing and ordering a plethora of official figures from the public domain, Prentice tackles the shrinking and poorly coordinated two-tier local government structures, neither effective nor efficient; housing; economic activity and the area’s parlous transport links, among much else.
Perhaps the most shocking – albeit unsurprising – revelations concern health, education, poverty and deprivation. Despite its ABC1 coastal strip population demographic of artists and musicians, the town has areas of intense inequality and deprivation. This is partly due to low-paid seasonal and part-time employment and a skew to low-paid hospitality and care work, but also rooted in the increasing unaffordability of food, fuel and above all, housing. I’d like to have seen mention of the long shadow cast by the cynical dumping of homeless families from London into peripheral housing estates in the 1960s and 70s. However, Prentice is astute in demonstrating how a dearth of social housing and the impact of incomers on the cost of both private rented and owner-occupied homes, along with the blight of Airbnbs, has affected the market.
Think it’s nice living by the seaside? Hastings is the 13th most deprived area in the country, 14,000 people (from a combined population of around 97,000) live in multiple deprivation and 26% of local children are from low-income households. According to research by Prentice, over the last decade, child poverty has increased by 45%, yet there is little central government impetus to devolve the necessary funds and resources to tackle their long-entrenched low quality of life.
Using detailed case studies and specific examples throughout, Prentice provides positive policy remedies (a mixture of pragmatic and pie-in-the-sky) at the end of every chapter, concluding with an ultimately bleak assessment of the state we’re in.
Non-fiction. 400 pages. Paperback. £10
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