The Death of St Leonards
STEVE PEAK, local historian and museum trustee, explores a little-known aspect of the relationship between St Leonards and Hastings
This month is the 150th anniversary of the death of the newly-born town of St Leonards. On 29 September 1875 an Act of Parliament dissolved the local authority that had been running the town since 1832, forcing its streets, buildings and open spaces to come under the rule of Hastings Council.
The birth of the local authority of St Leonards was the result of a long pregnancy that began on 1 March 1828 when the foundation stone of what is now the Royal Victoria Hotel was laid. The father of the town was the famous London architect James Burton. Born in 1761, Burton was the most successful property-developer of Regency and Georgian London, building over 3,000 properties over 250 acres. These included much of Bloomsbury, St John’s Wood, Regent’s Park and Regent Street.
In 1827 he decided to create the first purpose-built seaside resort in the country. In February 1828 he paid £7,800 (about £750,000 today) for 1,151 yards of coastline and a beautiful wooded valley running down to the sea. These were part of Gensing Farm, owned by the wealthy and extensive Eversfield Estate. Large-scale work quickly got under way, building not only a high-class hotel and housing but also the roads and promenade. The first completed building was Burton’s own residence, Crown House No 57 Marina.
The new St Leonards was designed as an exclusive residence for wealthy Londoners wanting to be beside the sea. Members of the working class were kept to an essential minimum, with a ‘lavatoria’ (laundry) and stables at the east end, and a market behind the seafront at the west end. However, the new town of St Leonards was not an official local authority but a private building venture by Burton, who had no legal power to levy rates to pay for public services such as drainage, water, road maintenance. By 1831, the lack of these services had become a serious problem and Burton decided to obtain legislation that would set up a form of town council which created the power to impose rates on residents and property owners to supply the services.
The St Leonards Improvement Act became law in May 1832. It formed a corporation governed by 75 commissioners who were given the legal authority to govern the town, levy rates and spend the income. The first commissioners’ meeting took place on 18 June 1832 in the Conqueror Hotel on Marina, and it agreed to reimburse James Burton for the £7,027 he had spent on roads, paving, sewers, sea-walls etc. The commissioners first major work was extending the sea wall and parade.
But the independence of the new corporation and its exclusive population quickly started coming under threat after the passing of the 1835 Municipal Reform Act. This was an attempt by the Whig (Liberal) government to make 178 boroughs more democratic and less corrupt in England and Wales, including Hastings Corporation, which had been set up in 1588. The 1835 legislation followed the Whig’s 1832 Reform Act, which had abolished most of the rotten boroughs and had reformed the parliamentary electoral system.
Hastings had long-standing legal rights over much land to the west of the town, although in practice the new Hastings Corporation set up in that year did little more than look after the land in and around the Old Town. But the 1835 Reform Act brought into existence the new modern-style Hastings Council (a ‘municipal borough’) whose geographic boundaries took in St Leonards. From 1836 the new Hastings Council had 18 councillors: 12 in the East Ward, which covered the Old Town area, and six in the more sparsely populated West Ward, which included St Leonards. Ironically, in practice the St Leonards councillors had more say over Hastings affairs than Hastings councillors had over the town of St Leonards because the 1832 St Leonards Improvement Act remained in force.
Hastings Council tried to exercise some power over St Leonards following the passing of the 1848 Public Health Act after a national cholera epidemic killed thousands of people, including 65 in Hastings and St Leonards. The severe outbreak was caused by the lack of sewer systems and by polluted drinking water, and the 1848 Act gave local authorities new powers to create sewage and drainage services. The general sewage conditions in St Leonards were found to be deplorable in 1850, but the St Leonards commissioners managed to evade the responsibility (and expense) of implementing the 1848 Act, although eventually its bad drainage would be one of the main reasons why St Leonards was taken over by Hastings Council.
The towns had physically merged by 1860 following the spread of Hastings westward along the seafront and the development of the central St Leonards area outside Burton’s St Leonards which provided the shops, builders and labourers Burton had excluded. But the St Leonards commissioners resisted scrapping their 1832 Act and surrendering to Hastings town hall for a decade. However, by 1871 it began to seem inevitable, as Burton’s St Leonards residents were then paying 2/6 (12½p) in the pound in rates, while Hastingers were only paying 1/11. And the St Leonards commissioners did not have (or were not willing to pay) enough money to solve increasingly serious problems, especially sewage and sea defences. The end of independence was nigh.
Then the 1872 Public Health Act came into force, passing many of the commissioners’ duties and powers to Hastings Council. Initially, the better class of people in St Leonards resisted this, but they soon changed their minds because it meant the poor of Hastings would be subsidising the rich of St Leonards. The Hastings Observer reported that at the commissioners quarterly meeting in December 1872: “The members bowed, with some degree of cheerfulness, to the decision abolishing them as a sanitary authority. Nay, they even went further than this. The Acts having left them power to remain as a body, to impose and collect coal duties and grant licences, they passed a resolution praying the Poor Law Board to take even these powers from them, and thus make the only ruling body in the town the Hastings Town Council and Local Health Board.”
But the details of the surrender had to be sorted out first. This took another three years, with various arguments taking place, including the fact that the commissioners had a debt of £17,000 while only having assets of £7,500. Last of all: would the commission’s clerk and its surveyor get decent pensions? Finally, Hastings Council was told the St Leonards commissioners were being taken to the gallows on 29 September 1875 when the St Leonards Improvement Act District would be “dissolved” by the Local Government Board’s Provisional Orders Confirmation Act 1875.
For further local history, see Steve Peak’s website hastingshistory.net/images-alias
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