TEAM SPORTS: Another Sporting Dawn at Horntye?
HUGH SULLIVAN
The Horntye estate currently provides the town’s primary cricket ground and only current hockey pitch alongside a pavilion complex and large sports hall. Its trustees, the Hastings and Rother Sports Trust operating through Horntye Park Management Company, have argued for many years that the set-up is financially unviable – and always has been since its effective rejection as a first-class cricket ground by the Sussex County Cricket authorities.
A series of potential moves of cricketers and hockey players – to Bulverhythe, to Claremont school, to Sandhurst – have been contemplated and researched over the past decade. In the case of Claremont, a planning application for the development of new facilities there was approved in principle by Rother District Council in 2021, and some considerable sums were spent in infrastructure development. But, with no external funding offered, all initiatives of the Horntye trustees were dependent on being permitted to sell off the cricket ground for housing development – which planners at Hastings Borough Council (HBC), backed by a swathe of local opinion, have resisted.
Now, with governing requiring an increase in the number of homes built in the borough, the upturn of values in the housing market has caused the trustees to re-assess their development plans. According to the Finance & Development Director of the Management Company, Dave Nessling, a reduced development of between 50 and 65 residential units, located around the perimeter of the existing cricket ground at Horntye, could raise sufficient profit to bankroll a more economical sports package that ticks all the required boxes.
In short, the plan is for the cricket ground (including junior grass football pitches), pavilion and sports hall to be retained; the all-weather sand-dressed hockey pitch to be re-laid as a full-size 3G football surface; and fresh hockey facilities, including a floodlit sand-dressed pitch and pavilion to be developed at Hastings Academy (the former Hillcrest school in Ore). There should be enough space at Horntye to consider adding a couple of floodlit padel tennis courts and a new boule pitch. The first improvements have already been implemented there in the form of an upgrade of the all-weather pitch floodlights to LED.
ENTHUSIASTIC SUPPORT
The Sports Trust has already lodged a planning application for the hockey pitch relocation, which is enthusiastically supported both by UBAT (the University of Brighton Academy Trust) which runs Hastings Academy and by the management of South Saxons Hockey Club. The club’s five adult teams in the South East Hockey League (three male, two female) and busy junior squads have been desperate to move on from the 25-year-old pitch at Horntye: it’s in poor condition, and long past its viable end-date. Development of hockey as a major team sport at the school should not only provide educational benefits in itself but promote links with the club that are likely in the longer term to boost the intake of future young players: it looks a win-win for all.
The finance for the move is still dependent on the success of the now more modest housing plans at Horntye, as are the other sporting initiatives. Discussions with the prospective developers and perhaps with representatives of HBC are likely to take place before the end of this month, after which the way forward in terms of a formal planning application will become clear. Thus the cricketers of Hastings and St Leonards Priory, arrayed in three adult male elevens in the Sussex League plus more occasional women’s and junior teams, will have to wait a while longer to hear whether their future at Horntye can be assured. However, in the meantime, the club has been informed that not only will the ground be available again to its first XI this summer; its 2nd XI will also be able to return there for their home matches after three years’ exile at Claremont.
The potential advent of a full-size 3G football pitch – the first in Hastings and long overdue – will be of major interest to community clubs, e.g. those playing in the East Sussex League and junior clubs in the Rother Youth League. Both adults and juniors will surely welcome the possibility of playing there rather than on the wretchedly under-maintained grass pitches of Tilekiln or Bulverhythe. It could also prove a boon to Hastings United, whose players suffer from the lack of a decent training surface. Is this a new sporting dawn for the town?
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