Old Town Traders
The Hat Shop
By Des Wilson
Back in the day my dad always wore a hat, or to be precise, a cap at weekends and a hat for business, presumably on the principle that ‘If you want to get ahead, get a hat.’
Jean Constable, who works most weekends in the hat shop at 52a High Street, clearly believes this too. She enthusiastically takes me on a tour of over 500 hats. There are bowlers and berets, top hats and homburgs, fedoras and trilbys, straw ‘boaters’, panamas and Stetsons, Chairman Mao caps and Peaky Blinder caps, Sherlock Holmes deer stalkers (much liked by Asian tourists) and pirate tricorns for festivals or fancy dress parties. For women there’s a selection of sun hats and colourful hats for weddings and social events. They share the tastefully decorated space in this small shop with old-fashioned hat boxes of the kind carried by Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days. On the wall there’s a Philip Treacy poster: ‘How a hat makes you feel is what a hat is all about.’
Jean, who works for the owners, says “Hastings folk love their hats”. Undoubtedly the shop has become one of the High Street’s main attractions; some buyers come from miles away to try them on in front of a mirror, choosing between three and six hats and paying from £9 to £109 for each one.
While she is the shop’s ‘star’, Jean is not the owner; the hats began their Old Town life further up the High Street at No 38, the ‘House of Habibi’, part of the Café Maroc before it was beaten out of business by Covid and transformed by Mark Byrom and his partner Keith Balfour-Morrison. It is now a place to display and sell the goods they carried back from a year living in Marrakesh: leather belts and handbags, hats, jewellery, rings, bracelets, candles, socks and scarves.
They found the hats were best-sellers and began to buy them from all over the place, London and the Midlands and as far away as Ecuador and Madagascar. In early 2017 they took over the premises at 52a to create a home for hats. They also now have a third High Street shop at No 32a selling interiors, i.e. furniture and other goods to lend colour and class to homes. Mark, who was born in Blackburn in Lancashire in 1961, is the buyer and runs the business and counts the pennies while Keith, a former chef, is the artistic and creative mind that makes these three shops so compelling. It’s an ideal partnership. And at the heart of their High Street empire? Hats. Mark and Keith have proved that if you want to get ahead, you really do have to have a hat, or in their case, 500 of them.
Read about other traders in this series:
Hare and Hawthorn
Robert’s Rummage
The Cigar and Pipe Shop
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