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Spend it on St Mary
If You Had £400k to Spend on the Arts… in HIP 229 was another great feature which contains lots of interesting ideas. John Knowles is right to say that the town lacks a vision – there’s plenty going on in terms of art, music, design, illustration and all types of creativity, but it’s stuck at a certain level as there simply aren’t the spaces to deliver high quality work.
St Mary for me is where I would spend money as this is a £100m building if you tried to build it today. This is the place which could be the home for opera, dance and theatre groups, and perhaps the Hastings Piano competition. It could be a world-class venue, like the De La Warr, if it has the right management. And it is the Council’s responsibility to ensure such vulnerable buildings are maintained: this is why we have councils.
It’s frustrating to see this amazing building written off when the cost of a lesser alternative is perhaps £20m and 5-10 years away. A council that can propose to sell this asset off for £500,000 clearly has no understanding of the arts, and there lies the problem.
A starting point is of course council dialogue with the likes of John, Tara Reddy and Neville Kurt.
Philip Oakley
Separation of drinking water and sewage
Regarding the article written by David Dennis for HIP 229, We Just Want to Swim in the Sea, I have designed a number of housing estates and am confused by his reference to drinking water and sewage water being conveyed through the same pipe. In my experience the design and construction specifications are totally different for these two purposes.
I assume he is referring to the common practice, for many years now, to separate foul sewage, which needs treatment before discharging, from rainwater from property roofs which can be safely discharged to local watercourses.
The advantage of this two-pipe layout is that it removes the problem of the sewerage system being overloaded with rain water, as happens with the old combined system used previously. One problem has proved to be builders illegally connecting toilets etc to the rainwater systems, often because it was cheaper than doing the job properly. I believe that Southern Water and Hastings Borough Council are tracking down such mis-connections and requiring the property owners to correct them.
I too can remember the 1950s and 1960s when untreated sewage was discharged direct to the sea at Rock-a-Nore and several other outfalls along the coast. It was therefore a great improvement when Southern Water completed its £50 million local bathing water improvement scheme in 1999 (see historymap.info/Southern_Water_Storm_Drain). This resulted in sewage from both Hastings and Bexhill being piped to Bulverhythe for full treatment before discharging through the long sea outfall. This scheme also included the construction of a large diameter tunnel one mile in length from Alexandra Park to Warrior Square with a number of smaller tunnels to intercept all those locations where the old combined sewers overflowed into local streams. This provided storage during storms, thus removing the discharge of contaminated stream water onto the beaches. The stored water was treated as capacity became available at the treatment plant.
I’m sure there must have been many articles in the local press in the 1990s, bearing in mind the disruption caused by the works right across our towns.
Thus, while I’m a bit old for sea swimming, I have no problem with a bit of paddling.
Peter John
Strange World
Invisible Hands: The Anxiety of the Childless in HIP 228 was an incredibly thoughtful and deeply personal article – it is a heroic ambition to describe and pin down the strangeness of the times we live in!
I wonder that the things that the article describes (at least having children and a stable material environment) are indeed necessary a priori conditions for the feeling of having a stake in the world/society (as the potential basis for community to happen). Is settling this new reality simply impossible? Inevitably, my own fear of remaining childless is for me akin to the fear of death. To this extent, as the article discusses, it is problematic to consider the state of our childless generation as being some sort of enlightened choice (as Danny Dorling states).
The article describes the state of the young having very little control due to the material coordinates of our lives being over-determined by a new global but unsettled reality – the fact of the lack of control and self-determination is a very interesting way to think about the negative side of globalisation. The reflection that our language can no longer describe the reality of the lives of the indeterminate mass of young people is brilliant, and indicative of the strangeness of this transitory world.
Tim Searle
Beware Barnstaple precedent
Dear HIP
John Knowles’s article (A Poverty of Ideals in HIP 229) compares arts opportunities and the lack of them in Hastings with leisure centres etc. I recently went to Barnstaple for a fringe festival, where I found a white elephant of an up-to-date state-of-the-art leisure centre.
When I say state-of-the-art, I mean just that. I say white elephant as it is now closed, costing millions of wasted taxpayers money. Just two years after it was opened, they then opened another swimming pool down the road and the leisure centre is now an empty building.
Sidney Kean
Hundred Up
Thank you for the article St Leonards Resident Celebrates Monumental Milestone in HIP 229 about Diana. Very nicely done, and the Elvidge family thanks you very much. Your newspaper serves the Hastings community well.
Bob Elvidge
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