Town Plans and Money Plans
The 410 pages of Hastings Council’s Draft Local Plan on the future of the town till 2041 attracted many criticisms earlier this year, and the Council meeting on 23 September will be discussing possible changes. This is a serious business, but two of the most important ‘local plans’ in the history of the town were implemented many centuries before Hastings Council existed as it is today, as STEVE PEAK explains.
The first of these large-scale changes in the shape of the town was the reconstruction of the Old Town after the hurricane of 1287; the second was the attempt, around 1580, to build a harbour in the Priory Valley which laid out the town centre as it is today.
At both these times the government of the town was carried out by a bailiff, assisted by 12 jurats, normally referred to as ‘the brethren’, who were basically the leading members of the local establishment. The bailiff represented the Crown, imposing any necessary taxes, and generally ‘looking after’ the town in a limited semi-formal way.
As Hastings had a population of many hundreds of people, rather than the tens of thousands that there are today, the bailiff and brethren should usually have been able to find a consensus agreement of the chief residents about what to do in serious matters.
Until 1287 most of the Old Town was laid out further south than today, and the East and West Hills extended further to seaward. But a series of damaging storms from the 1250s, culminating in February 1287, brought major destruction to much of the southern coast of England. Whole areas of the coastline were then redrawn, with estuaries silting up and cliffs collapsing.
The most famous victim of the 1287 hurricane was the original town of Winchelsea, which until then stood on a massive shingle bank that protected the confluence of the estuaries of the Rivers Brede, Rother and Tillingham, and provided a sheltered anchorage called the Camber. After the Norman Conquest, Winchelsea was of great importance in cross-Channel trade (acting especially as an entrepôt for London) and as a naval base. By 1281 the people of Winchelsea had become aware that the end was near for their existing town because of the many storms, so they began laying out the new town on higher ground, where it is today.
There is no surviving written record of just how Hastings suffered from the late 13th century storms, but the result can be seen on the ground in the layout of today’s Old Town, which was actually a new town built after 1287. The clue is in the way both the High Street and All Saints Street have been laid out in parallel straight lines, as can be seen in the 1746 map. These were cut into the slopes of the West and East Hills respectively.
This encroachment required high pavements to be constructed on which the houses could be built. The houses could not have been built prior to the pavements, and no buildings in the Old Town today date from before the late 13th century storms.
But it was different, two centuries later, when the local ‘ruling class’ decided unilaterally that they wanted to turn the Priory Valley into a harbour. The Priory Valley in Roman and Anglo-Saxon times was one of only a handful of English harbours available for cross-Channel traffic. This was probably the main reason the town of Hastings had been created in the 9th century, as a new national economy had begun to emerge, based on increased cross-Channel trading and transport. The town itself was on top of White Rock, mostly on the section that has now been lost to the sea.
But in the 12th century, the harbour mouth silted up and the town gradually moved into the Bourne Valley, where the West Hill provided some shelter for a port at the mouth of the Bourne Stream. This was largely destroyed by the 1287 hurricane, so for the next 300 years a succession of wooden harbour arms was built roughly where the west end of West Street is today. These provided some shelter for fishing boats and the small commercial vessels operating off the beach in front of the Bourne Valley.
By the late 16th century, England was increasingly becoming an international trader, buying and selling goods around the world. In 1578 leading members of the Hastings establishment decided this would be a good time to restore the Priory Valley as the harbour it had been long ago. A petition was sent from the ‘townspeople’ of Hastings to Queen Elizabeth asking for a grant of £4,000 (many millions of pound today) to turn the valley into a “very good haven for the arriving and safeguard of ships, barks and boats, to the great relief of the inhabitants and all merchants and travellers sailing along the narrow seas [the English Channel]”.
A ‘haven’ is a closed-in dock, like a marina, rather than a harbour arm projecting into the open sea. Queen Elizabeth gave her blessing, authorising the local establishment to start collecting funding for the scheme, so work began. Within a year £2,000 had been spent. But then the rest of the money that the local businessmen had obtained went missing and construction had to stop. Historian William Camden wrote in 1586 that “the contribution was quickly converted into private purses, and the publicke good neglected”.
It seems that in about 1580 a sea-wall of soil, and possibly rock, had been built across the Valley near the sea where Cambridge Road is today. This may have been put on top of an already-existing trackway across the valley which is likely to have been formed by people travelling along the coast once the Priory Valley had partly filled with shingle and silt.
Parallel to the c1580 sea-wall across the valley, there appears to have been another wall further inland, where South Terrace is now. These two walls and the hillsides to east and west of them would have formed the deep-water haven where the Priory Meadow shopping centre is today.
But the haven was never completed, instead it became a large wet marshland in the middle of the valley. In the mid-18th century it could still be seen on ground in outline, as shown in the 1746 map. In the southern corner of the haven was the outlet to the sea of the Priory Stream, over which a succession of bridges was built. As the town expanded westward in the 1830s, the bridge site became the heart of the town, where the Albert Memorial clocktower was built in 1863.
The 1580’s trickery by the leading Hastings businessmen which halted the haven scheme was probably the key factor in the setting up by the Crown in 1588 of a commission of inquiry into the mismanagement of the town of Hastings. To regularise the controversial situation, a ‘charter of incorporation’ (usually referred to as the ‘Elizabethan Charter’) was passed in February 1589. The elusive, self-perpetuating cartel which had been running the town for many years was replaced by a new governing body, described as the ‘Mayor, Jurats and Commonalty of the town and port of Hastings’.
This was essentially the old self-interested ruling group by another name. But from 1589 it was a new legally-defined corporate body – Hastings Corporation – which had specific rights and responsibilities. were many similar local government corporations around the country, most of which were run by members who re-elected themselves or friends, and who were suspected of becoming rich at the expense of the town’s inhabitants.
This became so widespread that the Whig government in 1833 set up a royal commission to investigate the working of 285 local authorities. This resulted in the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act which established the principle of local councils elected by ratepayers, which had to publish audited financial accounts. Hastings Council was born.
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