Celebrating Edith
Friends of Edith, a not-for-profit, charitable group who are licensed by Hastings Borough Council to maintain the Edith and Harold statue and its surrounds in West Marina Gardens, will be holding an all-day festival on Tuesday 11 October. There will be a programme of talks and presentations delivered in the Seafront Room of the White Rock Hotel on that day “to celebrate the life, times and cultural milieu” of Edith Swan-neck, the wife and consort of King Harold, who fell at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, as well as a “tour” of the statue and gardens.
CREDIT: Dave Young
Ian Jarman, founder and secretary of the Friends group, says: “We hope this will be the start of a regular annual festival held here in St Leonards which celebrates our Anglo-Saxon heritage in diverse ways, such as through history, literature, music and the arts. We are keen to use Edith’s statue as a meaningful legacy to focus, trigger and inspire awareness, education and appreciation of our heritage today, with particular emphasis on the perspectives of women, like Edith, who have been written out of, or largely ignored by, conventional history.”
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