WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND?
Letter
Homes and Green Spaces
Dear HIP,
We need nature and development to be in harmony for the benefit of both. Our MP in Hastings and Rye, Helena Dollimore, is generally actively supportive in this matter. It is crucial that we address the local housing crisis whilst retaining our coastal and rural aspects for the wellbeing of all. Homes and green spaces are needed equally.
Penny Beale
Letter
Artistic Graffiti
Dear HIP
In Graffiti–Signs of Disengagement (HIP 275), Tony Collins compared graffiti to fly tipping and dog mess. It’s a false equivalence. Letting your dog shit all over Bottle Alley is not a legitimate form of self-expression. Graffiti can be.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Shepard Fairey and Banksy all started out as taggers. Humans have been scratching marks on walls for centuries, it’s just the context that has changed.
Bottle Alley doesn’t belong to Studio ZeroH and its supporters. As your Editor’s Note (also 275) states, it’s a communal space. And the graffiti in Bottle Alley isn’t simply mindless vandalism – it can be entertaining, surreal, witty and sometimes deeply moving. This poem was written on a column before the recent paint-job:
My Mum
Mum, do you love me yet?
Mum, can I be your little girl?
Mum, will you wash my back this once?
Mum, do you still want to hurt me?
Mum, will I ever forgive you for what you’ve done?
Mum, I can’t help but hate and miss you
Hardly the “talent-free scribbles” that Tony Collins describes. An “enthusiastic volunteer” painted over it–I wonder if they read it. Confusingly, an adjacent statement that reads “He Who Feeds You Controls You” is not only left untouched, but is respectfully painted around. Why? Because it’s art? Who decides?
This isn’t an apology for vandalism, it’s a plea for tolerance and engagement.
And being precious about keeping Bottle Alley pristine betrays a disheartening lack of imagination. Graffiti can be big business. Pay a visit to Leake Street Tunnel in London, Digbeth in Birmingham, St Paul’s in Bristol–people flock there to see the very thing that Tony Collins and Roger Lewis (his letter–“Ignorant Destruction” in the same issue) want to paint over. Leake Street is a vibrant, exciting, global destination. It could be a model for Bottle Alley: a democratic, sanctioned place for expression for whoever wants to leave their mark there. Continually repainting over each other’s work will only increase disengagement. As one contributor succinctly put it–“Stop Painting Over Art With Your Art”.
Noel Farragher
Letter
Dear HIP
“The government’s planning and infrastructure bill is the worst assault on England’s ecosystems in living memory”. George Monbiot’s words in a recent article–but I echo them, as does anyone with concern for our already beleaguered wildlife.
The UK’s natural world is facing a significant crisis, with one in six species at risk of extinction, and many habitats in poor condition.
This bill, on the precipice of going through, will not save, it will destroy. It favours corporations and commerce over our greater assets of value, our shrinking ‘green and pleasant lands’.
The Wildlife Trust’s Natural Health Services Report lays out just some of the ways that our fragile heritage of nature helps us all. We cannot and must not let it slide into oblivion, and so must oppose this bill, at the very least in its current form.
Barnaby Green
Letter
Keep the Staircase
Dear HIP
I am writing in response to, and support of, Robin Holtom’s letter published in HIP 275, What Future for Azur?
I am in complete agreement with his description of the process of commissioning, design and then building of Azur, the end result of which is the deserted and defunct pile of builder’s rubble which continues to obscure the seaview from the Burton terrace opposite.
There were so many things wrong about the process that it is difficult to point the blame, but it was wrong from the very inception. There was no need for anything like Azur in its current location, and the fact that it was built – literally–on top of the Sidney Little function rooms was a clear and early sign of the waste and foolishness of it all. Less money could have been better spent on adapting the attractive (if overly large) function room on the lower level to better purpose.
As for the materials used in the build 20 years ago, Mr. Holtom remarks that they were ‘high quality’ materials, which they may have been, but without doubt they were the wrong materials, ill-suited to a position on a south-facing seafront with exposure to the relentless cycle of wind and rain and storm (and sunshine) we enjoy. The exterior walls started failing within six months of the building’s opening, and such repairs as have been made over the years have done little to maintain the precarious state of the building. It is now in a sorry state and only serves as a monument to the inept and wasteful teams of people who started the process, spent a great deal of public money, and left us with a useless pile of rubble.
By all means let us have this eyesore removed and start a sensible reversion to the use of the function rooms beneath. The staircase from the promenade is, indeed, still there, and would take the punters down to the beach, which may be where they want to go anyway.
Gilbert O’Brien
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