The Trouble With Women opens as part of Coastal Currents Festival on 5-6 and 12-13 September in the artist’s own home in Hastings Old Town.

We’re told we can have it all – but at what cost? If you have children, you’re expected to sacrifice but also to bounce back. If you don’t, people question why. If you work full time you feel guilty for not being there enough. If you stay home you’re asked when you’ll get back to work. Whatever choices you make, someone always has an opinion, as if your worth is up for debate.

That question sits at the centre of The Trouble With Women, a new body of work by documentary photographer Lauren Joy Kennett. Over the past year, across Hastings, she has photographed women in their own homes. Each figure is then hand-cut from the print and collaged back into the room she came from – altered, distorted, displaced. Her life, but not as it should be.

Each woman was asked a single question: “What has been hardest to hold together?” Their answers are written by hand, in gold pen, directly onto their own portraits.The women who took part include single mothers, women who have lost pregnancies, women who have chosen to remain childless, those who have ended toxic relationships.

Kennett herself lost an unplanned pregnancy during the making of the work. “The women in this project were so brave,” she says. “To let a stranger into their home, to sit in front of a camera and write their own truth on a photograph of themselves.”

A woman’s peak earning years are the same years she is expected to have children, but even in these times, society isn’t built to support either. Whether she’s raising a child, longing for one, or choosing a different path entirely, the weight of expectation follows her everywhere.

The work is shown in the artist’s home so visitors stand inside the subject matter rather than looking at it from a distance.

Exhibition shows 12-13 September at 6 Old Humphrey Avenue, 11am-6pm. Lauren Joy Kennett, photography and handcut collage.

Local band Afrit Nebula have been gigging mainly around Hastings, St Leonards and Brighton (but also as far afield as the Czech Republic) for 12 years. They have worked with dancers and film-makers, most recently composing the original music for Sleepwalk: The Dream of Lady Macbeth, a dance performance film by Mark French. What Next? is the band’s fourth release, and the second with the present lineup.

They are known for their eclecticism: the improvisatory tracks are inspired by Japanese Noh flute, mediaeval Hispanic (Muslim/Christian/Jewish) folk tunes, Middle Eastern popular music, African landscapes, Monteverdi, and the blues.

This is true World Music – not just a marketing tag but three human beings’ original response to the world.

What Next? was recorded in 2026 by Aram Zarikian at RavenFish. Orders and enquiries: ken@realitystreet.co.uk 07706 18/9253. Limited free streaming/download: afritnebula.bandcamp.com/album/what-next 

PhotoHastings’ collective of photographers aims to inspire an appreciation of contemporary photographic art through its annual festival programme. It is directed by Tracy Jones and Neale Willis, with talks, exhibitions, workshops and mentoring throughout the year. 2026 sees PhotoHastings celebrate 16 years of exhibitions and activities throughout October and November. This year’s show includes over 60 photographers, seven exhibitions and two internationally-known star exhibitors.

The exhibition programme is centred at Electro Studios, with group and solo shows in the main gallery and upstairs ‘Landing Gallery’; it’s a heady mixture of themed and personal work; stills, moving image and film.

As a highlight exhibition, PhotoHastings are privileged to welcome the celebrated artist Tom Hunter (Saatchi Gallery, Purdy Hicks, V&A), known for his reimaginings of classical paintings, many of which are works of social and political commentary. He was the first photographer to have a one-man show at the National Gallery.

A curated show, Tom Hunter – A Dialogue, will form a response to his large piece, Greg: Powdermill, itself created in reference to the work in the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery Collection, Harmony Cattle Watering, Pevensey, East Sussex by Sidney Dennant Moss (1885–1946). Tom will also give a talk about his work and a review of the resulting exhibition.

At Solaris Gallery, St Leonards, Grace Lau (V&A, Tate Britain, Tom Blau, Arts Council, gracelau.co.uk) will exhibit her journey through the world of sexuality, gender identity and sado-masochistic sub-culture in Adults in Wonderland (see opposite page here for full details and interview).

Editorial and advertising photographer Tim E White will curate As Above, So Below at Hastings Arts Forum, to showcase further the richly diverse talents of the members of PhotoHastings.

A group show, Flux, will occupy Barnaby’s Lounge for two weeks. The trademark Photology series of talks and discussion, organised by Alexander Brattell and featuring celebrated practitioners, is also in the planning stage.

All exhibitions are free. Exhibition spaces are Electro Studios Project Space, Seaside Road, Solaris Print, 76 Norman Road, Hastings Arts Forum, 20 Marine Court, and Barnaby’s Lounge, 46 Robertson Street. More details: 2025 festival, photohastings.org. Instagram: photohastings

The book combines original artwork, colouring pages and reflection prompts. The idea grew from Thomas’ professional experience supporting people through trauma and difficult life transitions, as well as from her understanding that creativity can be a way of processing experiences that are difficult to articulate.

Although its main relevance is to women going through challenging times, it may also be useful to therapists, coaches, wellbeing practitioners and community organisations supporting people affected by anxiety, trauma, burnout, bereavement, workplace upheaval or creative block. The book has particular significance at a time when many people are struggling with stress, isolation, and/or constant digital stimulation.

Since the early 1980s, Grace Lau’s photographic journey through sexuality, gender identity and sado-masochistic subculture has explored a world largely hidden from mainstream view. Fetish Stories brings together a selection of works from a ten-year period in which Lau immersed herself in these subcultures, from her earliest male nudes and documentation of ‘Skin Two’ events and dominatrices’ dungeons, to later work exploring cross-dressing and changing ideas around sexuality and identity.

“That period was an extraordinary journey into the subversive world of fetishism, when I visited specialised clubs and dominatrix dungeons and entered the private lives of ordinary people to document their performative fantasies. Fetish Stories is a small selection of what I observed and participated in with my camera,” she writes.

“I never actually took part myself, although I dressed up because it’s easier to get in with the people when you’re dressed up. I did six-inch high heeled shoes, leather gear. It looked fine,” she told me. The “scene” she photographed was during the 1980s and 1990s, and she doesn’t think that it’s the same now as it was. “There were clubs, underground clubs, all throughout London and most of the bigger cities – Bristol, Manchester. They had annual balls. I think they still have parties where people dress up, because a friend of mine gets paid money to make latex suits and fancy dresses, particularly for men.”

About the nature of their resulting fantasies Grace says: “The sex part wasn’t so important. What was in their heads wasn’t to do with sex, it was to do with their roles, their fantasies, and how they looked as a woman.” She interviewed many of them for (what was) her BA thesis, and “they didn’t mind as long as I didn’t reveal their identity, but they always wore masks anyway.” Some of them were prominent people – bankers, judges, teachers, police. They called themselves transvestites. Significantly, one banker “said he enjoyed the punishment in his public school more than anything else.”

Like her recent Chinese Studio series, this was a 20-year project. After 10 years she got her photography degree then continued, “because the photographs were wonderful.” Also, she made a living, because people paid her to come to the studio and have photos of themselves taken, dressed up. “It was mostly men … the routine, the ritual of getting transformed into a woman was the actual turn on bit.” And at the time (before mobile phones or digital cameras) there was no easier way of recording their fetish. Because she could do it, she was accepted on the scene as a photographer – “also, I think because I was non-threatening as a small, Chinese, middle-aged woman.”

The dominatrix dungeons too, Lau found fairly revealing. “A lot of men liked to shed their responsibilities and their daily routines, their ‘real life’, and act out fantasies of being enslaved by beautiful women.” She has dominatrices and ‘dungeons’ in this show, but not too many as she didn’t want the exhibition to be “just salacious.” And it was, Lau goes on, “99 per cent men.”

Small and non-threatening she may be, but Lau’s esoteric and courageous documentary work has been exhibited widely, including at Tate Britain, the National Portrait Gallery, Turner Contemporary, the Museum of London and Towner Gallery. Recent exhibitions include The 80s: Photographing Britain at Tate Britain (2024–25), which included some of the works featured in this exhibition. All the works are for sale – some uniquely, as the negatives have been lost in the mists of time.

This article appears with acknowledgement to Grace Lau’s bio at gracelau.co.uk. The exhibition runs until 31 October at Solaris Print, 76 Norman Road St Leonards, open Wednesdays-Saturdays.

Fell, ‘freely adapted’ from Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is a dramatic work which challenges both the audience and the actors. Writer and director Frances Viner has cut away the novel’s softening social satire and emotional tenderness to concentrate on its core: the horrors of the marriage of the idealistic and optimistic Helen to the depraved, alcoholic Huntingdon.

This is a short play, running only for fifty minutes, but it demands concentration for every one of those minutes.The language does not pretend to be plausibly ‘realistic’ but is rich, dense with metaphor. The weight and colour of the costumes, put on and cast off, are significant.The movements of the players as they dance, embrace, witness or refuse to witness, are stylised and call for a high level of collaboration among the actors.

The enclosed space of the Stables Studio enhances the intensity. Years of attending plays in the back rooms of pubs make me no stranger to the up-close-and-personal possibilities of theatre. I remember handfuls of tripe thrown into my lap. And in the more Establishment setting of Stratford’s Other Place, a King Lear in which a sexy Edmund stroked the faces of young women in the front row. Well, it was the 1970s. But in Fell the violence of Huntingdon to Helen, while stylised, was deeply disturbing and to be taken seriously. The other characters refused to witness, turned their faces to the wall. The point was made.

Language and movement make great demands on the cast too and their commitment and accomplishment were outstanding. The servants, significantly titled ‘housekeepers’, have an important level of narrative control. Ginny Beaumont, Kaye Gabriel, Pauleen McLaughlin, Sophie Schoenkrecht and Lou Whalan, with Lawry Rhodes as butler, frame the story, negotiating introduction and epilogue, witness and comment. Richart van Zyl’s violin music added to the emotional charge. Milo Ward as Helen, packed into layer upon layer of confining wedding clothes, demonstrated in her movements the terrible shift from lightness and love to terror and repulsion. First impressions suggested that Henry Smalldon looked too young and innocent to convey Huntingdon’s cruelty and depravity but by the end he certainly frightened me. Which, of course, makes another serious point. 

Café Franglais runs for just two nights: on 30 September and 1 October you can enjoy a generous menu degustation of songs from Novello and Schwartz to Piaf and Trenet – with all manner of tuneful crumpets and croissants in between.

BallyBest’s previous productions at The Stables have included Picture Perfect, performed by Olivier Award-winning Liza Sadovy and signed to producers Beckman Unicorn for a film. Here at Last is Love, directed by Jason Morel, won the 2022 NODA Southeast Best New Show. Kabarett, also produced by David Manners, is a Weimar-inspired night of music, satire and surprise, and was brought back by popular demand for a second sell-out production.

Details: stablestheatre.co.uk/cafe-franglais review of Kabarett: tinyurl.com/5epm47k5 

The project (with support from Arts Council England) challenges three writers to immerse themselves in the stories, folklore and forgotten histories of Hastings, before writing an entirely new short play. Rather than responding to a set theme, each writer has complete freedom to discover the stories that inspire them. Once completed, each play is rehearsed in just five days before being performed live.

Each evening then continues with pizza from local favourites Duke Harper Pizza, with a post-show party hosted by Remi Vibesman (Hidden Beach), transforming a theatre visit into a social event that reflects the character of Hastings itself.

Creative Director Ross Drury says: “Pizza & Plays combines my three favourite things: plays, pizza and parties. But underneath that is a much bigger idea. We wanted to create something that reflects Hastings and the people who live here. Theatre shouldn’t feel like something separate from the community – it should be somewhere people come together, share food, have conversations and discover something about the place they call home.”

The first writer in the series, Chloë Lawrence-Taylor, is Spun Glass Theatre’s new playwright-on -attachment. Her previous work has been developed with the National Theatre and Hampstead Theatre. Her new play, Hannah, Jack and Tomorrow Too, follows two young people returning home to Hastings, drawing inspiration from festival mythology and local history. It raises questions about ambition, sacrifice and belonging. Lawrence-Taylor spent time exploring Hastings’ stories, from pioneering women doctors and Fairlight Glen to Jack in the Green and Hannah the Witch. “What interested me most,” she says, was “how history still echoes in young people’s lives today.” Actors are Helen Black and Seth Ringrose.

Each evening of Pizza & Plays features a different playwright responding to a different aspect of Hastings’ identity.

Spun Glass Theatre has designed Pizza & Plays to be as accessible as possible. Tickets are offered on a Pay What You Can basis (£5, £10 or £15), ensuring cost is not a barrier to attending. Dates (all at the Stade Hall) and writers are: Friday 18 September – Chloë Lawrence-Taylor; Friday 30 October – Anna Atkinson; and Saturday 5 December – Elijah W. Harris 

D-Punk, part of the We Crip film festival at the British Film Institute, was the closing feature on 19 July. Local resident Penny played a key role in this powerful exploration of the early disability punk movement and is often called its ‘spiritual matriarch’. The film also featured commentary from others with a local connection, including the daughter of punk icon Poly Styrene (former resident of St Leonards) and Jemima Dury (Hastings resident), daughter of mighty punk legend, disabled activist and influencer, Ian Dury.

Penny’s performance at The White Rock Theatre will bring audiences a 15-minute set of her signature blend of performance poetry with bite, provocation, humour and unique insight.

Penny has featured as part of the Book Festival on several occasions.She appears in the anthology, Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts. Penny is the first poet in the book, represented among several other locally and nationally well-known poets. She has also performed alongside Salena Godden at The Royal Albert Hall, and more recently at The Print Works, Hastings, at the Refugee Buddy Project fundraiser. As a performer at many Hastings events as a spoken-word poet, speaker and mentor, she has been proud to call this area her home since 2010.

Headliner for the event, Roger McGough CBE, is president of the Poetry Society and former host of BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please, and remains one of the UK’s most beloved literary figures.

Penny Pepper: pennypepper.co.uk; Hastings Book Festival: hastingsbookfest.org/our-events Sunday, 13 September, 4:45 – 6:00pm, Studio 27, White Rock Theatre. Single Session and All-Afternoon Passes available at: hastingsbookfest.org/events/roger-mcgough. Studio 27 and the main foyer feature level, step-free access, dedicated wheelchair spaces, accessible restrooms, and hearing loop systems. Features as part 3 of the Poets in Performance event.

On Saturday 19 September, for the next instalment of Creative Chill, their series of creative workshops, Afri-Co-Lab will welcome back local artist Elaine Mullings for a workshop called Care In Repair: Visible Mending. This will be a calming experience that creates space for caring, repairing and breathing new life into your well-worn and well-loved clothing.

No sewing or creative experience is required, as Elaine guides you. You leave with a little stitch reminder document and a lovingly repaired item of clothing.

On Thursday 24 September, Led by local musical talent Deanne Naula, Afri-Co-Lab’s community choir The Naulettes is ready for new voices to join.

They are working towards building a confident group of singers who can share their voices harmoniously and with heart. No perfection is required, just a love of singing. They recommend registering your interest early, as limited places are available.

Workshop details: Creative Chill: 19 September, 1.30-4.30pm; Naulettes Community Choir: 24 September, 7.00-8.30pm. Afri-Co-Lab: afri-co-lab.org

The second exhibition is Gathered Earth, showing between 16 and 27 September, with an open evening on 18 September. This is a collective exhibition by women ceramicists from East Sussex, with exhibiting artists Annika Aril, Fiona Dean, Sheila Hay, Izumi Maeda, Lorri Scott and Marina Wade.

Details can be found at hastingsartsforum.co.uk/category/exhibitions. Hastings Arts Forum gallery is at 20 Marine Court, St Leonards

Hackney in East London (nowadays a boho-arty des-res area, affordable only to higher-paid professionals) had a bad reputation in 1997. A number of its 1960s-built tower blocks were structurally unsound, in addition to the associated widespread socio-economic issues in the area.

I first saw Tom Hunter’s work in about 1998 when a couple of tower blocks in Holly Street (off the Queensbridge Road, and quite incidentally, the childhood home of Idris Elba) were due for demolition. As the residents were moved out or moved on, the units were closed and barred with thick metal prison-type doors, and the blocks eventually demolished in 2001. His exhibition was held in one of these derelict units on the 19th floor: brilliant photographs of departing residents in situ, six feet high, were placed all around the walls, and the dilapidated bath was filled with bottles of Beck’s.

The work was telling, powerful, and familiar to any long-term resident of the area. I felt at the time how significant it was – I suppose the Beck’s helped a bit – and it does seem to me now to have taken place at a kind of sociological turning point, of which it formed a part. Charles Saatchi bought all of it. Subsequently Hunter posed people from his squatters’ community as echoes of old Masters, and his work Woman Reading a Possession Order, composed after a Vermeer painting, brought him national and international acclaim.

This September, seven years after his last visit, he is coming here under the auspices of PhotoHastings. Most of his show is currently under wraps, but one will be Tom Hunter – A Dialogue. This will consist of responses to his large piece, Greg: Powdermill, which was created in reference to a Victorian work in the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery Collection, Harmony Cattle Watering, Pevensey, East Sussex by Sidney Dennant Moss. Dr Hunter will give a talk about his work, chaired by photographer Alexander Brattell, and will also review the resulting exhibition.

The talk will be held at Electro Studios Seaside Road St Leonards Saturday on the 24 October. For full details check photohastings.com.

One of the many kiss-of-death committees which blight the lives of all small towns decided at the planning stage that De La Warr Pavilion could do without a signature sculpture. For better or worse they spared us Frank Dobson’s Persephone, leaving a conceptual and actual void. With its tagline “Meet Artists Shaping Sussex” MASS (organised by ZEROH, the 3D-art studio who like All Caps) more than fills it with a brilliant and ambitious one-day sculpture garden.

MASS Gathering supplements Tschabalala Self’s seaside-postcardy Seated to visibly transform DLWP, and refract both human presence (how other people look when they interact with big art objects) and the environment (how you see the beach or Beachy Head; how light plays on the works of art and your brain). In the absence of what the building actually merits – a Moore or a Hepworth, say – it should become a regular, much longer annual event.

Among over three dozen works, Christian Funnell’s Single Use has the best spot, by the domed shelter. From afar it’s like a giant abandoned crown; up close its wire tendrils form a junkyard nest. From inside you can people-watch or look out longingly towards the distant cliffs. Monuments from Liz Wilson’s Of Confluence multi-media installation stand like heavyweight sandcastles, pebbledash navigation buoys that have somehow been beached on the sun-bleached lawns. The steel strands of Almuth Tebbenhoff’s The Hedge wave from the terrace towards a DJ who with nods and grimaces aplenty attempts to deliver a redundant party vibe.

INSIDE

Inside DLWP’s auditorium an Airbnb aesthetic abounds. The MASS Exposure art fair offers works in wood, paper, metal, clay, fabric, even Rachel Ring’s plastinated teabags. There are competent stabs at Hans Arp-like objets d’art for the second home owner’s mantelpiece; some Goth burnt offerings which one imagines Nick Cave might hang in his bathroom; plenty of clunky Perryesque pots of the kind that mistakes brash for bold. But there’s nothing on a par with the conceptually robust and technically exquisite work of Katie Boccaccini-Meadows, the best of Bexhill’s Common Clay potters; or with the wow factor of Cătălin Filip’s ceramic curtain, Petrichior, at Fresh Salad Art’s Pylos exhibition at Electro Studios last autumn.

Best in show: Isobel Smith whose Sunday Papers performance sees the artist transform herself into a work of art, a newsprint-bound gargoyle left sitting forlornly at a table of mute soft toys. Compelling, authoritative and hilarious, she should be featured in DLWP’s main gallery.

Providing the punters with a sophisticated but discomforting take on muzak is the day-long, collectively realised Passing Through, organised by James Wilkie, director of the pioneering SONO festival. The performers are hidden behind a gauze curtain through which can be glimpsed an ominous pendulum. Its dense pulsating cloudlike clusters of sound and contemplative ambulatory tonalities would work much better among the sculptures in the open air, to drift as we do weightlessly between and through solid forms.

MASS was at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, on 16 August 2026 as part of Bexhill Art Weekender. Visit zerohstudio.com.

Max Baillie, violinist, musicologist and entrepreneur, has been touring with his outstanding and unusual Lodestar Trio, who many of you will have heard when they played for the first time at Christchurch St Leonards in 2024. Folk Odyssey (with works by Bartok and Grieg) was recently recorded live for German national radio and broadcast at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, where the trio has appeared several times. The project was also recorded live for Belgian national radio last year, and there are plans for an album in November.

Other of Baillie’s concerts have included playing with celebrated cellist Laura van der Heijden at the Ryedale Festival, another programme seen first in St Leonards. He also played his first concert at the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie with star saxophonist Jess Gillam, in front of 2,600 people.

Upcoming concerts in St Leonards are on 20 October 24 November: two great programmes with fabulous guests. October will see piano quintets by Vaughan Williams along with Schubert’s Trout, featuring Simon Crawford Phillips and other special guests. The November concert at St John’s Church will be the majestic and complex Goldberg Variations, with acclaimed cellist Laura van der Heijden and internationally-recognized violist Hélène Clément. Not to be missed.

HASTINGS PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA AND CHOIR

Meanwhile Hastings Philharmonic Orchestra previewed their new season with a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute on 22 August. Coming up they have a trio performing works by three notable female composers – Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and Lily Boulanger. They have a program of John Williams’ film theme music at the White Rock in October, and in early November the Hastings Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra perform fabulous works by Saint-Saёns, Schubert, and Debussy, plus Aaron Copland’s glorious clarinet concerto. Full details on their website. 

Tickets and details: St Leonards Concerts: stlconcerts.co.uk/events, Hastings Philharmonic hastingsphilharmonic.com/2026-2027-season

Charles Dickens came to Hastings in 1861 to perform a public reading of A Christmas Carol in the Old Music Hall, now called Yates’s Wine Lodge. This event is celebrated during the Hastings Literary Festival in the autumn as Dickens Day during which other aspects of Dickens’ life are highlighted. He saw poverty all around him in workhouses and factories and described them in harrowing detail in books such as Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations.

When he came to Hastings, he may well have walked on the seafront and watched the waves shooshing the shingle from Eastbourne to Hastings in a slow rolling movement that has never ceased since the beginning of the world. However, the first recorded use of the precise term ‘longshore drift’ was not written down until 1893 by an unknown wizard of coastal geomorphology. It refers to the geological process by which sediments such as sand and gravel are transported along a coastline, parallel to the shore, by waves approaching at an angle.

The word ‘long’ derives from the Old English word ‘lang’, meaning ‘having considerable linear extent.’ ‘shore’ comes from the Old English ‘scora’, meaning ‘land adjacent to a large body of water’. ‘Drift’ stems from the Old English ‘drifan’, meaning ‘to drive’ or ‘to force along,’ which evolved to denote movement caused by external forces.

But this article is not purely about shingle movement. Instead, it is about the drift of ideas along the shoreline from Eastbourne to Hastings.

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818, in Trier, Prussia (now Germany). His great friend Friedrich Engels was born on 28 November 1820, in Barmen, Prussia (now Wuppertal, Germany). They first met on August 28, 1844, when Friedrich Engels visited Karl Marx in Paris, where Marx was living in exile. They spent ten days discussing philosophy, economics, and revolutionary politics, forming an instant intellectual and political bond. This meeting led to their first major joint works, The Holy Family (1845), and later The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Much later, Volume 1 of Das Kapital (Kritik der politischen Ökonomie – Critique of Political Economy) was published on 14 September 1867 in Hamburg, Germany. The book analysed capitalism’s structure, introducing key concepts like surplus value, class struggle and commodity fetishism.

Marx and Engels both visited Sussex, coming to Eastbourne in the autumn of 1881 because Marx had bronchitis and pleurisy. In those days, the seaside with its alleged iodine atmosphere (really the smell of rotting seaweed) was recommended by physicians for its sea air and mild climate. Coming to the seaside was also an intellectual escape from the pressure of London.

Marx then died in 1883, but Engels continued to come to Eastbourne and other coastal towns to relax – but also to continue developing Marxist Theory. Engels died in London on 5 August 1895 aged seventy-four at his home at 122 Regent’s Park Road, Primrose Hill and, being a resolute atheist, he wanted to be cremated.

This growing movement away from churchyard internment had already become associated with radical freethinkers and secularists. He had his wish at Woking Crematorium in Surrey, Britain’s first crematorium established in 1878. A large group of colleagues and friends attended this ceremony, including Eleanor Marx, who was Karl Marx’s daughter. There were also Eduard Bernstein, a leading socialist for the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), August Bebel, co-founder of the SPD; and William Liebknecht, who was a Marxist convert and friend of Engels. There were many other people there from the British Social Democratic Foundation (SDF).

Part of Engels’ time in Eastbourne had been spent walking on the beautiful landscape of Beachy Head with its massive chalk cliffs, downland scenery and iconic Belle Tout Lighthouse – which became operational from 1834 with money from slave-owner and slavery supporter John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller. And following Engels’ wishes, most of the people who attended his cremation service at Woking then travelled to Eastbourne where Eleanor Marx and others, in a simple secular ceremony, cast his ashes into the westerly breeze – out over Beachy Head cliffs and down into the grey-blue sea where the longshore drift carried him ever so slowly towards Hastings.

With each angled wave, the tiny particles of Engels’ dust came along the coast, adding to patches of fine low tide sand as they settled in deep by Hastings Pier, opened in 1872.

The portion of Engel’s powdered remains that had embedded itself in the low tide sands of Hastings may have touched the toes of a man called Robert Noonan, an Irish-born socialist who was walking on the shore in 1901. The dust of Engels perhaps caused him to mystically author his famous book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, using the name Robert Tressel. This described poverty, exploitation, and harsh working conditions. By 1910 Tressel was ill, and poverty-stricken himself. He died of tuberculosis in 1911 in Liverpool on his way to Canada for a better life.

However, before he left Hastings, he and others formed the Social Democratic Federation (SDF): a Marxist group hoping to counteract the dominance of Tory capitalist ideology. The SDF in Hastings actively campaigned against local councillors who were perceived to be colluding with big businesses, particularly concerning utilities like William Murdoch’s invention of gas lighting and Michael Faraday’s electricity – inspired during his time at Pelham Place, Hastings. The SDF efforts sought to expose and challenge corruption, advocating for the rights and welfare of the working class.

Members organised public meetings, distributed literature, and engaged in discussions to raise awareness about socialist ideals. These activities aimed to educate the people of Hastings on issues of social justice, workers’ rights, and economic equality.

Although social hero Noonan was no more, his intellectual shockwave stirred the sea at Hastings and longshore waves that developed, still sparkling with the sunlit grains of Engels, flowed over the paddling feet of suffragettes, who did like to be beside the seaside – beside the sea.

So, here, like ornate shells collected by a seaborne swirl, were the Hastings suffragettes. Elsie Bowerman who lived in St Leonards and had survived the sinking of the Titanic via Lifeboat 6 and crested the wave of women’s protests by speaking in 1910 to an audience of 1,000 in Hastings on the subject of Votes for Women.

Then there is the great Muriel Matters, the suffrage icon, who lived at 7 Pelham Crescent, skinny-dipped at Pelham Beach and chained herself to the iron grill of the Ladies Gallery in the House of Commons that obscured the female view of democratic debate.

Another campaigner who dipped her toes was Barbara Bodichon of 9 Pelham Crescent – that great precursor of women’s suffrage who wrote: A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women.

And there was also the brave Mary Richardson, who toiled with Emily Pankhurst, was force-fed under the Cat and Mouse Act of 1913 and who managed to damage the Rokeby Venus, that very Roman Goddess who had been formed from the foam of the sea. Brave Mary later died in her flat at St James’s Road, Hastings, yet before she left us, she had told the Times of London: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas.”

Nowadays women are still not treated with sufficient respect for the wonderful work they do. Nevertheless, though the nature of the barnacle people of Hastings is edged with iron resolve, most of us steer sharply away from the excessive revolutionary radicalism of Marx and Engels – a vision ruined by Joseph Stalin.

However, we, men and women alike, the ever-present proletariat who keep safe the tides of life and home, still do wish, like Noonan, for social improvement and a great reduction in the gap between rich and poor – if you get my drift.

The 9th annual Hastings Book Festival will take place from 10 to 20 September, featuring 40 events and more than 80 speakers and performers. This year’s festival promises another fascinating programme of talks, workshops, children’s events and live performances for anyone with an interest in writing, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, and/or the spoken word.

The headline guests are: historian, writer and broadcaster David Olusoga (creator and host of the wonderful BBC programme A House Through Time), international bestselling author and broadcaster Kate Mosse; ‘the godfather of modern poetry’ Roger McGough; comedian and host of The Infinite Monkey Cage Robin Ince, and Luke Kennard, currently longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

Renowned historian Professor Tom Licence, whose revelatory research into the Battle of Hastings has made global news headlines recently, will feature in a Norman Conquest double-bill with Sam Davey, who is compiling an anthology of local writing focusing on the way 1066 changed our language. Spoken word artist Naomi Wood will perform her amazing one-woman show Monster, and a great line-up of poets of local and national renown will be taking to the stages: Henry Normal, Salena Godden, Andy Riley, Penny Pepper, Katie Taylor, Grace Pilkington, Della Reynolds, John Osborne, James Domestic, Tim Barlow and more.

The popular annual Book Fair will be held at the Observer Building on Saturday 12 September, with over 30 publishers, booksellers, authors and other stallholders. There will be workshops and panel discussions for writers covering routes to publishing, crime writing, horror, short story writing, playwriting with acclaimed playwright Owen Thomas, worldbuilding in fiction, collage and writing.

Scriptwriter, director and patron of the Festival Trix Worrall will introduce science writer Piers Bizony at a special screening of the sci-fi thriller Hardware at the Electric Palace. David Quantick will host a literary quiz at French’s Bar on Robertson Street, and 15 writers and poets will perform short works on the Feral Writers Tour, a Fat Tuesday-style peripatetic event which will roam around seven town-centre bars and cafés.

And there are also six events for children, a Polari LGBTQ+ night with popular local author Paul Burston, a poetry open mic evening at 1200 Postcards with the crew of A Load of Poets, along with published local authors including Jake Arnott, VG Lee, Alex Preston, Michael Smith, Sam Davey, Helen Jacey and David Quantick.

Finally, you can still enter the Festival competitions for short stories, poetry and creative non-fiction – the deadline is 31 August. To see the full programme of events, head to the Festival website at hastingsbookfest.org

14 October 2026 is the 950th anniversary year of the Battle of Hastings. From that point on, modern English would be permanently changed through the imposition of French. Ways of naming, writing and speaking evolved into the mixed syntax we have today. Grammatical roots have remained Germanic. The law and the church adopted Latin for formal occasions and French technical vocabulary, and French became the preferred language of the elite.

Since then, language speakers have benefitted from the contrasting associations of the two systems. Clever use of Anglo-Saxon words, say in a satirical monologue, can pack a punch, especially after a French or Latin set up.

Sam Davey, author and chair of the Hastings Writers Group, is editing an anthology of work by local writers that explore this linguistic shift. 36 writers, 66 pieces. “The French and Latinate words represent the paved tarmac of modern civilisation, corporate systems, but no matter how much polite, multi-syllabic refinement is laid over our modern lives, the raw, heavy, Anglo-Saxon mud is always waiting just an inch beneath the surface,” says Sam.

Dialect terms from ancient Germanic and local Sussex (fyrd, burh, twitten, lane, Stade) have been embedded inside contemporary narratives, creating vivid literary landscapes. Ben Bruges, whose poem Talking English introduces the collection, describes English as “the world’s greatest word-hoard”.

The themes are varied and surprising. Edith Swan-Neck, King Harold’s handfasted (non-church wedded) wife was depicted in medieval art gathering up his body parts from the battlefield. She appears in the book repeatedly, a metaphorical ghost with resonance for our times.

The anthology analyses the language roots of each piece. The standard split in contemporary English, in normal day-to-day usage, is roughly 65-70% Anglo-Saxon to 20-25% French, the remainder influenced by other sources such as Arabic, Indian, Greek, and many others. The writers consciously play with this vocabulary, and the balance tilts and shifts.

The anthology has been funded by the Norman Heritage Fund (HBC) and the Magdalen and Lasher Educational Trust.

Any monies raised from sales will
go to the Hastings Community of Sanctuary.
It showcases at Hastings Book Festival on 19 September, and will be launched on 16 October during Hastings Week.

The result of this period of reflection has been the finest songwriting of Reid’s career. Enter Now Brightness is a record of poise and great beauty, the sound of a cellular shift, of pain giving way to tenderness and joy.

Reid was joined in Port Chalmers’ Chicks Hotel studio by her long-standing guitarist Sam Taylor and producer Tom Healy. Later, the intricate processes of impending motherhood and raising her daughters brought a new focus to her songwriting.

On this latest album, Reid moves ever further from her earlier folk inclinations, establishing a sound that is distinctly her own. “I still feel uncomfortable about the word folk, and being a folk singer. It makes me sort of cringe.” she says. She writes in a way that is wide open, and she sought a similar unguardedness in the music.

This past year, Reid has finally relocated to the UK, settling in Manchester. With this move has come a reassessment of her career and her craft. Enter Now Brightness feels different. It is an album of departure and questioning that has reminded her how songwriting can be “the most useful thing to do with pain and joy and thoughts and feelings and anger.”

Nadia Reid: Live with Strings comes to Hastings on Friday 25 Sept at Henry Ward Hall, 7 pm. Tickets: alttickets.com/nadia-reid-tickets

After Dark, a striking new exhibition by latex artist Michelle Mildenhall, opens at the Electric Palace Cinema on 5 September, with Michelle on hand to meet visitors and talk about the inspiration behind the work.

Inspired by the unique atmosphere of the Electric Palace and a lifelong fascination with classic cinema, After Dark captures legendary screen icons in intimate, nocturnal moments. Suspended between glamour and shadow, each portrait invites viewers to wonder what happens after the cameras stop rolling, where hidden stories unfold in the shadows beyond the spotlight.

Renowned for her distinctive portraits created entirely from hand-cut sheet latex, Michelle transforms an unconventional material into bold, graphic artworks that blur the boundaries between fine art and alternative culture. Her work combines dramatic colour, layered composition and meticulous craftsmanship to create images that are both instantly recognisable and rich with intrigue.

Artist views: Saturday 5 and 12 September at The Electric Palace. The exhibition will also be available to view before and after every film screening throughout September as part of The Coastal Currents Arts Festival. All artworks will be available to purchase throughout the exhibition. Visit michellemildenhall.com for details and further work.

The exhibition opens on Saturday 29 August and will be open, free, from Thursdays to Mondays until October.

Julia Hilton, deputy leader of the council and lead councillor for regeneration, says: “We’re delighted that the Hastings Embroidery is out on display again to coincide with the Bayeux Tapestry being at the British Museum. It’s an incredible piece of work, covering 900 years of history and Norman heritage.”

She added that the exhibition was just one part of our celebrations of the Year of the Normans, marking the anniversary of the birth of William the Conqueror, and that there would be events with a Norman theme and flavour happening, across Hastings, to mark the anniversary.

Details: visithastings.co.uk/whats-on tickets: tinyurl.com/42344akh

TINA MORRIS

After the privilege of producing this festival for 15 years, one thing has become abundantly clear: this area is full of extraordinary people making extraordinary work. Every year, Coastal Currents offers a glimpse into that creativity, bringing together artists, musicians, performers, writers, makers, producers, organisers, volunteers and audiences from across the area. Some are established, some are just starting out, but all play a part in shaping the rich diversity of the festival.

This year feels particularly significant. As conversations about the future of our town gather pace, I hope culture continues to be central to that story. Creativity helps us understand where we are, who we are and what kind of place we want to be. It helps us solve problems, innovate, delight, surprise, play and connect. Whether through clay, paint, dance, sculpture, performance or poetry, there are endless ways we express our love for this place and share what matters to us.

For one month, we have a shared date in the diary – a reason to come together. To show our work, support one another, discover something new and celebrate the extraordinary creativity that exists here. Fifteen years on, I am still incredibly proud of what we achieve together as a community.

We’re delighted to have Arts Council England and Hastings Borough Council support this year for our young people and early-career artist programmes, helping us create opportunities for the next generation of creative talent. The rest, as ever, is home-grown. Whether you’re just starting out or have been doing this for decades, whether your work entertains, challenges, inspires or simply brings joy, it belongs here.

For more details visit coastalcurrents.org.uk

CHRIS CONNELLEY

Some musicians start early. Mozart, for example, is rumoured to have composed his first piece at the age of five, while Prince mastered the piano by the tender age of seven. Others take longer to get started, and join the party much later.

Hastings-based rapper, Noah Rockett, 20, sits firmly in the second camp. He spent his teenage years stuck in his room playing video games, but that all changed when he started listening to the old school hip hop so admired by his dad. It intrigued, then snared him, and led to his exploring more deeply, and getting passionate about epic performers like Wu Tang Clan and A Tribe Called Quest.

From here, it was just a (hip) hop and a jump, from listening to others to rapping along himself. This in turn led to him writing his own material, sharing it on social media and releasing five EPs (under different names) in short succession.

Like any new starter, it took time and effort to hone his craft and find his authentic voice, and reflecting back with ruthless honesty, Noah describes his early efforts as “pretty bad”. But, having gotten the bug, he kept at it, listening, learning and developing. Now, after a period out of the public gaze, he’s back with a new incarnation, Sun-z, and a stack of new material on a brand new EP, Who Am I? It’s been a year in the making, but he’s confident that the time is right: he’s now ready and “good enough to go back out there and go for gold”.

Against the backdrop of this summer of intense heat, he has pushed his new EP relentlessly on social media and has started performing live, which he admits has been a surprise highlight of his year and that he really enjoys.

Over recent weeks, he has formed part of the bill at the Kofi Stone gig at the De la Warr Pavilion, performed a short set on the overhead walkway at the intimate St Andrews Mews, and rapped to a sizeable audience of around 300 at the Oval as part of Remi Vibesman’s feted Hidden Beach Festival.

Looking forward, he is hoping to build his profile on social media, having recently notched up over 2,000 followers on Instagram. He would of course love to secure a record deal, and is busy making contacts with that end in mind. As an accomplished wordsmith, he’s also contemplating dipping his toe into the burgeoning local spoken word and poetry scene, recognising the potential for exciting collaborations and crossover in a town that oozes culture from every pore.

As he puts it: “The great thing about Hastings is that there are loads of cool, creative people and everyone is trying to build something for themselves and each other, with lots of support out there.”

Heading towards autumn, Noah is in a confident mood, in it for the long run, and clearly enjoying himself. All of which comes across clearly in his new tracks. If you haven’t encountered him yet, it’s time to check him out. So prepare for something sassy, soulful, authentic and grown up. And expect to be delighted.

To find out more, hear some of his tracks, and details of how to buy the new CD, go to Solsun-Z on Insta or to his website, sun-z.co.uk.

A few weeks ago we previewed Barbara Schultz’s memoir of her mother, who escaped from the GDR in 1953 at the height of the Soviet occupation. The very successful book launch took place at Crown House on 20 June.

There’s more to be said about it: It functions not only as a personal memoir, but also as an unusual window into the social history of East Germany. Memoirs and fiction, or autobiographical writing, about escape from Germany predominantly foreground the excruciating hardships of Jewish (and subsequently Polish) people managing to evade the Hitler authorities and escape death, leaving for Europe or the Americas. These extraordinary stories indicate resilience, courage, and ingenuity in the face of the alternative – extermination. From Anne Frank through Primo Levi to recent works by Michael Calvin and Naftali Schiff, they rightly document an appalling and unforgettable period of history.

Schultz’s book, however, highlights something perhaps less frequently acknowledged (at least by the Allied victors), the hardship and penury inherent in the lives of fairly ordinary residents of rural East Germany through two world wars, then afterwards in the restrictions set up by the Soviets in the name of Collectivism and enforced by the Stasi (Ministry of State Security). As in the Chinese equivalent, almost anyone in town or village communities could have been recruited or pressganged into secretly spying on their neighbours, resulting in an unimaginable lack of personal freedom.

PLANS FOR ESCAPE

These Machiavellian controls, and the ban on leaving the country, coupled with her (rather late) acknowledgement of the horrors of the Nazi administration and subsequent guilt at membership of the vile party that had once been thought to embody progress (Make Germany Great Again?), caused Schultz’s mother to organise an escape from her small village farming life. Her husband, captured as a POW by the British in 1945, had subsequently made his home here, in Basingstoke. So over two years, after being knocked unconscious and permanently wounded by the butt of a Russian soldier’s gun, her mother (Elzbeth) formed plans to leave the GDR, along with her three children, and join her husband. Her escape, her interrogation and knock-back, only to try again and succeed, are documented in the last few chapters.

An escape from a country where you are effectively a captive is necessarily laced with drama and trauma. But the prose description, in these latter chapters, is no more dramatic than at any other point. By the time Elzbeth actually managed her exit, the action was just one more in a long line of incidents in a life of endurance and rather gruelling subsistence.

PIGS AND POTATOES

There were undoubtedly people in the village who were worse off; her farmer husband Willi had been a paeon of individual enterprise from a young age. Elzbeth brought with her things from her own mother, from her old, relatively bourgeois, life in a small town. She describes good china, ‘good’ clothes, embroidered tablecloths, nice furniture. She has to adapt to pig farming, chicken cleaning, saving pig waste for manure, planting, sowing, reaping, and ensuring through the spring and summer that they will have enough supplies (particularly of potatoes) to last them through freezing winter months. Her children are all recruited to help as they reach ages four or five, and the elder sister Karin appears to have acted as a mother’s help in raising the two youngest, twins Barbie and Bernd. It’s interesting that though the book is written by Barbara, there’s some emphasis on Bernd, who is clearly marked out as his mother’s favourite. Whether this is true or mere authorial licence is impossible to know; it’s apparent from the narrative but documented, by his twin, seemingly without resentment.

Schultz writes predominantly from Elzbeth’s point of view, using source material from her mother’s journal. As her contribution to village life, Elzbeth had brought with her plays written by her father, and produced and staged them with the other occupants for a number of years. These are not further described in Schultz’s memoir but it does tell of the fact that she had friends and family in the village or nearby, to aid her eventual exit. Aside from personal courage and enterprise, the book documents courage, determination, hard winters, and (surprisingly, in the face of everything that needed to be done) an abiding love of the countryside.

PETE DONOHUE

the memory of rain upon this land

dragged from a cooler distance

called out several weeks beforehand

when times seemed somehow greener

squeezes a tear out onto my dehydrated face

barely enough to irrigate my feelings

at suppertime yesterday

a bold moon took issue with the sun

challenging its known ferocity

altering the skyline & silencing animals

to the general delight of most

albeit only temporarily

we will have longed-for water

upon this land once more

only how then we choose to use it

& how long it may this time last

becomes the burning question

for each & every one of us.

Staged within the space of Tawfik Nas’s installation at Flatland Projects in Bexhill, the 17-piece incarnation of the Statue of Liberty Big Band (SoL) was brimming with inchoate noises – and this is a small format for them.

As before, SoL performed to raise funds for the local Refugee Buddy Project (see details below). Arriving early at Flatland to browse some of the art installations and exhibits, I could hear the band settling themselves, although it occasionally sounded like some contorting machine, freewheeling electronics running against clusters of horns.

Produced and conducted by Ed Baxter, the group capped off the first day of Bexhill’s Art Weekender, performing a particularly inspired, inclusive selection of glorious tunes, many politically motivated. The works of composers and musicians from Chile and Peru were represented, as were some from Sweden and Japan (composed by the fiercely improvisational saxophonist Eiichi Hayashi), among other gems such as Pretty Fly, Walter Schumann’s eerie, premonitory theme from The Night of the Hunter.

Moving closer to home, they played Another Green World (the Arena tune) by Suffolk-based ideas genius and producer Brian Eno. Eno was/is seminal as a musician in Roxy Music and with Robert Fripp, and producer of class acts Talking Heads, Devo and Coldplay, but achieved immutable world-wide fame as composer of three-and-a-quarter seconds of Windows 95, bing-de-bang-bong, bang-bong – you know the one!). Hastings-based improvising minimalist from Slapp Happy, Anthony Moore, generated the electronics. Baxter clearly carefully chose the set for its universality, its radical nature and its inclusiveness, characteristics which also exactly represent the ethos of the Refugee Buddy Project.

The band’s personnel is employed comprehensively, to great effect. The work of the percussion section – Kit and Julian – was particularly impressive. It brought strong momentum and some lively, Latin-tinged grooves like Entradita de la Cabana, whilst Adam’s vibraphone feature on the classic Left Bank Two theme perfectly fitted its art environment. Music of political resistance was expressed through the words of Chilean political martyr Victor Jara’s El Derecho de Vivir En Paz (The Right to Live in Peace), sung passionately by Spanish-speaker Otti Albietz.

The closing suite (combined Sun Ra and Anthony Moore) ensured plenty of rebellious, free-form wailing by horn players Toby Bula and Stuart Griffiths. A fitting end to a marvellous afternoon’s music.

On 15 August, The Statue of Liberty Big Band was: Ed Baxter: producer and conductor, Otti Albietz guitar, voice on El Derecho de Vivir en Paz, Matt Armstrong: bass, Ted Barrow: electronics, Kit Bula: drums, Toby Bula-Edge: sax, Adam Bushell: vibraphone, Julian Humphries: percussion, Anthony Moore: electronics, feedback generator, Lucy Griffiths: oboe, sax, Stuart Griffiths sax, Helen Heleni: voice on Pretty Fly, Kitty McCarron: voice on Bad Samaritan, Love in Outer Space and Slow Moon’s Rose, Vladimir Miller: piano, Jude Montague: keyboard, Robbie Robson: trumpet, Eoghan McCarron: mixdown. 

Refugee Buddy Project: therefugeebuddyproject.org.uk/; Flatland Projects: flatlandprojects.com. Review by Resonance fm: tinyurl.com/yc2x2amy

MARK FRENCH

This is a unique opportunity to take part in the annual Trash Cannes Film Challenge and Coastal Currents Arts Festival during September. The challenge is to make a short film on a given subject in just five days. Your film will be entered for the competition screening at The Printworks, Hastings on 20 September with awards and prizes for best film, best actor, best cinematography and audience choice amongst other categories.

Originally known as ‘The Hastings 5-Day Film Challenge’, this event has been a staple in the Hastings art scene for over twenty years. Twelve years ago, it was revitalised by Trash Cannes, a collective dedicated to promoting events that have a DIY ethos in the Hastings area. Today, it stands as one of the highlights of the local calendar, attracting filmmakers ranging from complete novices to seasoned professionals. The challenge provides a unique opportunity to unleash your creativity and discover what you can accomplish in just five days.

You pick a title, a genre and a prop out of a hat, then you have five days to make a three minute film on that subject. Online applications will receive a random selection. If you’re new to film making, we can help you get started, and we especially encourage young film makers. Any format can be used, from mobile phones to professional equipment, and free editing software is widely available. It’s never been easier to make a film your way.

Sign up at Reel Cafe, Kino-Teatr, Norman Road, St Leonards on Saturday 29 August 10am – 4pm, or online at trashcannes.co.uk.

In the latest exploration of trailblazing women who travelled great journeys around 1000 years ago, Explore The Arch Theatre explores Agatha of Hungary at Pevensey Castle. Early-career team member, Zoë Zics, channels this politically significant female decision-maker from the eleventh century who mirrors Zoë’s heritage.

In Agatha in the Wind they have re-imagined Agatha at Pevensey Castle. It isn’t actually known where she lived in England, after she arrived from Hungary and settled for more than a decade before migrating again to Scotland. William of Normandy’s landing at Pevensey on 28 September 1066 would have had particular significance for her, and this act of the imagination helps us to step inside her shoes.

The installation, with music by Alice and Juliet Beadle is located in the base of the North Tower. Ten years ago, Explore The Arch was supporting Juliet and her sister Alice as they started out on their creative journeys. Juliet and Alice spent much of their time performing in a cupboard or on a shelf at Archer Lodge – which seems to have stood them in good stead: Juliet has just become Sussex Young Musician of the Year!

She and her flute now enter the final year of a Masters degree in music at the Royal College of Music and will be playing with the Sussex Symphony Orchestra in 2027 as part of the prize. We congratulate her and wish her every future success.

The installation will be at Pevensey Castle until October 2026. Tickets to Pevensey Castle are required book at english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/pevensey-castle

The result is Unravelling Twins, a brand-new, comedic, autobiographical play written and performed by the sisters, premiering at the White Rock Theatre’s Studio 27 on 16 September.

Anna and Georgina initially started writing together to dispel the twin-myths propagated by films like The Parent Trap, Sweet Valley High, and the 90’s classic Twins, before life took an unexpected turn. Just a couple of months after their 40th birthday, Anna was unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer. The writing project soon turned into the sisters’ exchanging letters to keep their spirits up and to pass the time during endless hospital appointments.

Then, in 2024, and six months into her treatment, Anna saw a message in a Hastings WhatsApp group spreading the word about a free playwriting course. “I remember the date well because I was in hospital, recovering from a bilateral mastectomy,” Anna recounts. “Was it a sign? Maybe. Was I high on morphine? Definitely. In any case, the idea piqued my interest and I applied. I’d never written a play before, but I had an idea that I felt could work.”

The sisters’ earlier writing, combined with their letters and short dramatisations of their hospital experiences, became the foundation for Unravelling Twins.

Unravelling Twins is a play about twins. It’s a play about cancer. There’s also quite a lot about boobs in it. It’s also a comedy, proving that finding the humour in a dark situation is often the only way to stay sane. But, as Anna and Georgina are keen to emphasise, it is ultimately a love letter to everyone who has been there for someone else going through something incredibly difficult.

The project has been truly incubated and nurtured by the Hastings community. The sisters raised an impressive £3,700 through a Kickstarter campaign backed by 80 supporters. This funded collaboration with local creative professionals, LightSpaceColor and original music composed by Helen Riley.

Co-produced by Hastings Theatre Project, the twins have received ongoing mentoring and direction from Dan Hutton and Poppy Rowley. The production was also developed with support from Ellie Westbrook (TUFT Arts), who instigated a new work night at the Stables Theatre in December, the team behind a new writing showcase at the Scene and Heard festival in June.

The sisters feel incredibly lucky to be based in this area, noting the extraordinary support of local friends and family – from love and care packages at the school gates to joining them for the local Race for Life while Anna was undergoing chemotherapy. Now, thanks to the programming team at the White Rock, the fully developed script will make its stage debut, with hopes of touring the production elsewhere in the future.

Unravelling Twins will be performed at Studio 27, White Rock Theatre, Hastings on Wednesday, 16 September 2026 at 7:00 pm. Tickets: £14.80: whiterocktheatre.org.uk/whats-on/event/unravelling-twins-2026

Artist Jude Montague, ever interested in the history of radio and TV, has produced a lively and sometimes extraordinary graphic novel, detailing the beginnings of radio in Manchester. It’s a personal story, featuring (among a cast of dozens) her grandfather Sydney Wright and his wife Marjorie. Sydney was a cellist in a trio (playing in a Manchester picture house) who were recruited to take part in the second BBC broadcast from Metropolitan Vickers, which was the next broadcasting base after Marconi’s and named 2ZY.

It was a unique era – four years after the end of the unspeakable carnage of WW1, launching radio all over the country in a year that was, internationally, exceptionally creative in all the Arts, 1922 being an annus mirabilis for so many literary, artistic and social pioneers. A handful of these intrepid innovators broadcast live music, the first children’s programs, news, and French lessons, all from a tiny makeshift studio at an engineering works with a dominant, newly-built radio tower.

Montague has re-imagined her grandparents’ history in the context of the cultural history of the era, from the crackling of an aerial in 1920, and the birth of experimental wireless stations, to the first long distance ‘radio relay’ transmission, inaugurated at 2ZY and represented in Jude’s book with comparative sketches of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the radio tower at Metrovicks. Her rapid drawings and text cover the pages in a random format, plentifully interspersed with dream sequences, word associations, vignette sketches of Manchester (a Lowry-like depiction of the entrance to Metropolitan Vickers covers a page, for instance), old train carriages, war tombstones (with a list of first names), a sequence of a woman chatting and cutting her hair into a bob (so significant for the flappers of the time), woman-to-woman conversations about the replacement of silk stockings and lingerie by exciting man-made nylon fibre equivalents, and the then thriving tailoring business in the North. At one stage the protagonists fly in a biplane – presumably a Vickers.

NO FEAR OF FLYING

It’s an unashamed, fascinating, and rather wonderful brain dump, arising out of Montague’s undeniable facility with pen, brush and design straight on to the page, and some cogent research. There are scans of newspaper articles and old photos at the back, which for me could have done with enlarging, as they look as though they might help to indicate the trajectory of the narrative, but only the headlines are big enough to read. Even the title has a generous assemblage of meanings – the ‘air’ as in broadcasting ‘on the air’, the network, the ‘air’ as in the surrounding culture, the ‘air’ as in the general Zeitgeist, the anxiety and exhilaration of creating a New Age. And there’s flying in the air too – a proliferation of owls, dreams of flying, and (when listeners started to write in to the station) a reference to a local story about a flamingo lost from the park. There are incidental chats about spiritualism, the opening of a box radiating the ‘energies’ of jewels (remember crystal sets?), the ‘crackle and the static of the air that waits’ – ‘so luscious – a spirit language’, all rapidly and copiously illustrated. And there’s a page on which the rows of Manchester terraces ‘seem to know a New Age is dawning’.

The introductions, by broadcaster and radio historian Paul Kerensa and musician Alan Hempsall, ex Manchester band Joy Division (now of Crispy Ambulance), are essential reading. They help to ground the reader in the narrative, which digresses so plentifully (sometimes wildly) through local and national culture of the time. The novel’s form, however, exactly echoes the content: it was the age of random and sometimes unintentional discovery, of burial of the past and celebration of the new, of an incorporation of science and technology into art (partly via the Futurists and the Vorticists) and the dismantling of representational tradition and the re-evaluation of Art itself. And if you get slightly confused about who’s who in Montague’s plethora of characters, and whether the illustrations are about imagined conversations or real social history, well then you’re into the moment of creation, as they all were.

What’s In the Air can be obtained from Montague Armstrong on 15 Kings Road (open Sats) any time, or online at montaguearmstrong.com. Book launch, readings, and presentations at Hastings Book Festival, 3 September

For all of you who have seen Bob Log III live before, you will know he defies description. For any of you who haven’t, that makes my job tricky, given that the main purpose of a review is, largely, to describe what you’ve seen. And I’m not entirely sure what I have seen.

But it was, certainly, transcendentally eccentric. Perhaps as a shorthand, I’ll start by describing Bob Log as a cross between late-period Tom Waits – the ragged discordant Tom Waits of Hoist That Rag – and Frank Sidebottom, with his large papier-mâché head swapped for a motorcycle helmet with an alien-looking breathing nozzle. Or maybe Elvis Presley reimagined by David Lynch, dark and impish. Bob wore a glittery one-piece jumpsuit beneath his silver helmet and emitted the frenzied sounds of a carnival barker on acid.

He also had stage props: a giant inflatable duck whom he introduced as his angry stage manager, then later reintroduced as a large yellow inflatable goblet for passing prosecco around the crowd – something I would describe as impractical. He also had a yellow working toaster on the corner of the stage, which was fed sliced bread throughout the show so the audience could listen to his music while enjoying the soft aroma of toast – which brings me to the music.

Without having heard it, you could be forgiven for thinking that everything described so far veers between self-consciously oddball and, well… gimmicky shit. But Bob’s special talent is that it doesn’t. It works perfectly together with the bizarre stage presence, and if anything, acts as a sleight-of-hand misdirection to show how virtuosic a slide guitar player, and effortless one-man band, he is. His music is all clang and stomp and driving rhythm with the sound of Delta blues mixed with hillbilly electronica, beneath a muffled rasping voice distorting into the microphone down the black funnel of his crash helmet.

INTIMACY AND ENGAGEMENT

The effect of this oddly funny lunacy was unique. I’d seen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds two nights before in Brighton: they are a force of nature, but so is Bob Log III in a way you’re just not going to get from big stadium acts. There was an intimacy and a real engagement with everyone in the room. People were invited up on stage to be anointed with little gold stickers, or to take selfies sitting on his lap (as long as they had a piece of toast). They shared the sacrament of a giant inflatable duck, and everyone danced and smiled.

There was a rare sense of real joy, an ode to eccentricity and community and fun, that was both about the music and not about the music, yet only really worked because the music was so good and everything was done deftly so that nothing jarred or took you out of the moment. When it was all over, everyone poured out of The Piper into the dark summer night with the kind of smiles on their faces that only come from having shared in the strangeness of what it can mean to be human.

Colin Booth explores mortality and minimalism in his new exhibition titled I talked with you in a dream at Electro Studios project space. Booth is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work explores material transformation and the poetic qualities of objects.

Touching upon fragility and transience (metaphors for our own mortality), Booth’s practice turns discarded or found objects into precise, highly-finished conceptual objects, all imbued with minimalism and a touch of humour.

Working across painting, photography, print, sculpture and installation, I talked with you in a dream is an eclectic survey of Booth’s new work: his recently-completed powder-coated aluminium fragments, interspersed with a number of older pieces – including a painting from his art school foundation year.

“Artists only have one way of working,” Booth states. “Their aesthetic doesn’t change, even though the material they work with does. This consistency, in the end, becomes their identity.”

The exhibition highlights a career-long dedication to consistency of vision. Influenced by Arte Povera, the collection balances heavy conceptual themes with a lighter touch.

Opening Celebration: Friday 21 August, 6.00-9.00. Galleries open Saturday and Sunday 22/23, 29/30 August, 12.00-5.00 Insta:
@electro_studios_project_space, @colin_booth

Her vision is growing the space into something much bigger than a studio—a flexible, community-led place that could become home to exhibitions, workshops, artist meet-ups, creative projects and, she is hoping, a Scrap Zone: a working reuse store where donated art and craft materials can be redistributed to artists, makers, schools, and community groups.

COASTAL CURRENTS

Emma Law will be exhibiting as part of the Coastal Currents Festival this September, and the space will be opening its doors as one of the festival venues. Enthusiasts can come along, see the exhibition, have a chat, and take a look at what’s beginning to emerge. If you’ve ever wished Hastings had another space for creative collaboration, she would love to hear your ideas.

FANCY GETTING INVOLVED?

As the project develops, Emma is hoping to gather a small team of enthusiastic people who’d like to help shape it from the ground up.

She is particularly interested in hearing from people with experience or enthusiasm for:curating exhibitions, gallery invigilation, volunteer coordination, community engagement, marketing and social media, fundraising and grant applications, administration and project organisation, workshop facilitation, creative reuse and sustainability, and building local partnerships. Whether you can spare a few hours a month or are interested in helping steer the project longer term, Emma would welcome connection.

Artist contact details and studio details: hyphastudios.com/emma-law/. Hypha Studios is a national charity project that works with landlords to match artists up with available spaces. More details at hyphastudios.com..-

Electro Studios hosted Kim Wan’s new exhibition Hybridity on 8-9 August, with an open view the evening before.

Shown to a soundtrack of avant-jazz/hip-hop, Wan’s art was perfectly at home in the slightly rustic space that is Electro Studios. He aims specifically to blur the line between fine art and graffiti, something which stems from his having become obsessed, in the 80s, with spray painting – “I just fell in love with big letters on walls,” he writes. Later he went on to study at the Winchester School of Fine Art.

The art on display was a mixture of his portraits and his graphic pieces. The portraits (some of which may be seen on his own website) are intentionally distorted. Painted quickly and heavily re-worked later, they move between the traditional and the technological. The process, and that movement, are clearly an integral part of the finished work. He cites Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon as influences, with a bit of DC and Marvel comics.

Apart from the feeling of the paint hitting the canvas, there’s an even greater sense of movement in the graphic pieces, where the combination of graffiti and fine art is most apparent. Swirling and violent lines sit atop a spray-painted background. The more violent images (one particularly resembled blood splatter) call very strongly to mind Wan’s other passion, which is boxing.

Wan is locally based, having fallen “into the underbelly of Hastings, with its artists, musicians and bohemian lifestyle” and completed his art foundation course at Hastings College 30 years ago. Judging by the details on his website, his subsequent career has lifted him from the underbelly into the art establishment. Nevertheless, the work maintains a surprising rawness and an immediacy that render it absolutely authentic, with a hybridity that stems not only from technique and intent but now, like that of his art heroes, the familiar tension between the eccentric and the establishment.

More details of Kim Wan and his work can be seen at kimwanart.com, particularly his extensive CV of exhibitions, films, and performance pieces. 

A look into the past was on offer on August 8 at the first Television Museum pop-up. The event, run by charity Screen Culture UK, aimed to give the public a flavour of what a TV museum might look like in Hastings. It also gave an opportunity for people to suggest what they might like to see in such a museum.

Hosted at the Tea Museum on George Street, the pop-up featured two reconstructed living rooms: one from the 70s, the other from the 00s. Both had the TV as the centrepiece – a position it has occupied for decades.

A virtual tour of a BBC mobile control van was also on offer. It showed the museum’s interest, not just in the cultural impact of TV, but also in the relevant technologies. The van had been used to film the 1966 World Cup Final – which, virtual tour operator Jon reminded us, was unfortunately the last time England won the competition.

Children’s TV was represented with some classic toys – The Wombles, Kermit the Frog, Noddy and the Teletubbies. The mood of the whole place was set with music – a long set of classic TV themes.

People were eager to get in before the doors had even opened, and a steady stream of people flowed in and around the room.

Another pop-up will take place on 22 August

A fresh wave of emerging talent will take over Studio 27 at Hastings White Rock Theatre on 23 August, as Skinny Sunday – the one‑day festival curated, produced and run by the young people of the Hastings Fat Tuesday Club – returns with a vibrant line‑up of rising regional artists.

Running from 3pm to 9pm, the event showcases the best new bands from across East Sussex and beyond, selected by the club’s young musicians as part of their year‑round youth music programme.

Supported by Youth Music and Love Hastings, Skinny Sunday gives young people hands‑on experience in event management, at the same time offering audiences a chance to discover the next generation of local talent.

Snapshot of Rising Artists

This year’s line‑up brings together a mix of indie‑pop, alt‑rock, grunge, synth‑driven dance rhythms and fresh songwriting. Amelia & The Housewives are Brighton’s shimmering indie‑pop outfit, currently riding a wave of excitement ahead of their debut album. They are known for sharp wit, chiming harmonies and infectious, sun‑soaked songwriting.

Cicadia are a 3‑piece alt/indie rock band from East Sussex whose debut EP blends confident riffs, tight musicianship and a growing catalogue of original material. Also from East Sussex, Fresh Air are a Mathrock/Midwest emo 3‑piece, formed in late 2025 and already making waves with their debut single released this year. They are known for intricate rhythms, emotive guitar work and a growing presence on the regional live circuit.

WaveMachine are Hastings’ own grunge‑punk‑surf fusion band, driven by gritty bass lines, high‑energy drums and powerful harmonies. From Bexhill, Tellums are an upbeat synth‑and‑guitar‑driven outfit, blending dance rhythms with indie sensibilities to create bright, energetic live performances. Sam Senior is a compelling songwriter whose recent EP showcases raw, emotive alt‑folk storytelling. A Platform for Young Creatives

The Fat Tuesday Club Performers are the young musicians who produce Skinny Sunday, taking to the stage and presenting original work developed through the club’s year-round programme. Skinny Sunday is part of the Fat Tuesday Club’s mission to give young people real industry pathways. The event has become a key moment in Hastings’ music calendar, celebrating creativity, confidence and community.

Tickets are available now, with free entry for under 18s (ticket reservation required) and £5 tickets for adults, keeping the event accessible for families and young music fans. .Tickets at tinyurl.com/SkinnySunday. Contact: Hannah Deeble at hftuesday@gmail.com for more information.

Something extraordinary has happened. Hastings Old Town has reached the last six of a European competition. To be more precise, Hastings Contemporary is the only UK gallery selected as a finalist in the competition to win the prestigious European Art Museum award for 2026.

The Contemporary finds itself in illustrious and daunting company. For example, one of the other five finalists is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which is actually the National Museum of the Netherlands and has a range of works that covers 800 years of Dutch history. The idea of the Contemporary up against the Rijksmuseum in a competition has the feel of a diminutive David up against an art-gorging Goliath. And there are four more finalists, all of which are quite big hitters.

A UNIQUE ANGLE

Amongst the criteria for selection is how the museums or galleries find “innovative ways to engage with issues facing society today”. All of which sounds like the panel of judges will be looking to see if the institutions offer some sort of ‘relevance.’ The Contemporary has arguably seen that its very position perched on the sea amid a working fishing community gives it a unique angle on the world. After all, the sea is always both local and global: a fun spot and a vast atmospheric engine. Consequently, recent and forthcoming exhibitions have been soaked in sea themes.

The Director of the gallery, Kathleen Soriano, and her team, have pushed hard for this, hoping to bring artists, scientists and fishermen together to explore the sea in all its myriad complexity. The recent Meet the Fleet programme (showing until 13 September) is undoubtedly an innovative move in trying to engage with the local fishing community.

On top of this, the Contemporary tries in many ways to reach out to the people of Hastings and surrounding areas by offering family days, drawing classes for carers and those they care for and the Pearls of the Sea outreach project which works closely with local schools. Also, the Coquina café upstairs, with its delightful view, is now free to access for all. And there’s so much more that there isn’t the space to mention here.

Whether all of this will enable an act of cultural giant-killing, we shall have to wait until late September to find out.

An ever-present reminder of the power of storm and tide for the last 277 years, something sits at St Leonards. At the lowest tides of the year, when the sea retreats from the Sussex coast at Bulverhythe, an extraordinary hulk appears. Dark, ancient timbers, the ribs of a ship long lost, emerge briefly from the sands before the Channel closes over them once more.

This is the wreck of the Amsterdam, a Dutch East India Company ship driven ashore in January 1749. For many in Hastings and St Leonards, it is both a local landmark and a source of fascination. People wonder about what lies beneath – does it still have treasure aboard? In recent years, a persistent rumour has circulated: that the Dutch intend to recover the wreck and take it back to Amsterdam. It is a story that captures the imagination. But how close is it to reality?

A REMARKABLE SURVIVAL

The Amsterdam is no ordinary wreck. Unlike ships lost in deep water, she lies close to shore, embedded in anaerobic fine clay sand and quicksand that has preserved much of her structure for more than 270 years. At exceptionally low tides, sections of her hull can still be seen.

“It’s one of the most accessible historic wrecks in the country,” says a local coastal observer who has monitored the site for years. “But it’s also incredibly fragile. What you see is only a small part of what’s still buried.”

The wreck is legally protected under UK law. Yet its visibility and vulnerability have made it a focus of both public interest and archaeological concern.

KNOWN CARGO DISPUTED OWNERSHIP

On its outward voyage, the Amsterdam was carrying silver bullion (approx. 2–2.5 tonnes), textiles, wine, tools, weapons, and domestic goods. The silver alone would be worth millions today, but much of it was recovered or looted in 1749. Immediately after grounding, local people and authorities recovered much of the bullion. Some was looted by smugglers, which authorities attempted to reclaim. Archaeologists believe a very large quantity of material remains sealed inside, including personal belongings of crew and soldiers, tools, weapons, plus ship equipment and cargo items (textiles, trade goods, wine, ceramics).

The ship was built for the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the powerful trading company that dominated global commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Amsterdam is considered part of the Netherlands’ national heritage. At the same time, the wreck lies within British waters and has been protected since 1974 as a designated site. This unusual dual status, Dutch ownership but British legal protection, lies at the heart of the debate about its future.

THE RECOVERY DREAM

The idea of recovering the wreck is not new. Dutch archaeologists and heritage organisations have studied the Amsterdam since the late twentieth century, and at various points have explored the possibility of raising it. More recently, proposals have emerged, largely from Dutch academic and design circles, for an ambitious solution. Rather than dismantling the wreck, the plan would involve enclosing it within a massive steel structure, lifting it intact, and transporting it, still submerged, to Amsterdam.

Once there, it could be housed in a purpose-built museum, allowing visitors to view the ship while archaeologists continued to study it by installing it in a glass-enclosed tank museum in Amsterdam. The idea was to create something comparable to the Vasa Museum (Stockholm) or the Mary Rose (Portsmouth), but with a crucial difference – the ship would remain underwater, and archaeology would continue in public view.

“It’s a brilliant idea in theory,” says a local historian familiar with the proposals. “You’d essentially create a living excavation in a museum setting. But the scale of it is enormous.”

RUMOUR VERSUS REALITY

Despite the persistence of local rumours, there is no evidence that such a project is currently underway. No funding has been publicly confirmed. No excavation licence has been granted, and certainly, no engineering work has begun. What does exist is a series of feasibility discussions and conceptual designs that are serious, but still at an early stage.

One of the main reasons for caution is the condition of the wreck itself. The Amsterdam has survived because it is buried in oxygen-free clay sand. This environment has protected the wood from decay. Remove that protection, and the situation changes rapidly. The danger is that once those timbers are exposed to air, the clock starts ticking.

The experience of other famous ship recoveries offers a warning. The Mary Rose, raised in 1982, required decades of conservation work and continues to be treated today. Sweden’s Vasa, lifted in 1961, remains an ongoing scientific project. The Amsterdam presents additional complications. The seabed at Bulverhythe is unstable, subject to tidal scouring and shifting sediments. Parts of the wreck are deeply buried; others are already exposed and eroding. There’s a real risk that if you try to move it, you could lose more than you save.

A QUESTION OF PRINCIPLE

Modern archaeology has increasingly moved towards a principle of preservation in situ; leaving sites undisturbed unless there is a compelling reason to excavate. In the case of the Amsterdam, many specialists believe that the wreck is safest where it is. This view is not universal. Some argue that controlled recovery could secure the ship for future generations and make it accessible to a wider public. But the balance of opinion remains cautious and moving the ship will cost a lot of money.

Even if the archaeological concerns could be addressed, significant legal and political obstacles remain. Any excavation would require approval from UK authorities, as well as cooperation with the Dutch government. Questions of ownership, transport, conservation, and display would all need to be resolved.

SO WHAT NOW?

For the moment, not very much. The wreck remains in place, monitored and protected. Research continues, both in Britain and the Netherlands, and interest in the Amsterdam remains high. In the Netherlands, artefacts recovered in earlier excavations are studied and displayed. In Hastings, the wreck continues to draw attention whenever it appears on the foreshore.

“It’s part of our coastline,” says a local resident. “People come down to see it when the tides are right – as individual viewers or on guided tours. There’s a real sense of connection.”

The Amsterdam occupies a unique position, physically in England, culturally in the Netherlands, and historically in both. For now, the grand vision of lifting it and returning it to Amsterdam remains just that: a vision. It would take a huge amount of money, political will, and technical confidence. None of those are in place yet.

As things stand, the Amsterdam is not going anywhere. There is no active recovery project, no agreed timetable, and no immediate prospect of excavation. The risks, archaeological, financial, and legal, remain considerable.

For the people of Hastings and St Leonards, that may come as a relief. “It belongs here as much as anywhere,” says a local voice. “It’s part of the story of this coast.” And so, for now, the Amsterdam remains where it has lain since 1749 – hidden in the sands, revealed by the tides, and watched over by those who know where to look.

“Docking the Amsterdam”

The proposal – by Dutch architects ZJA – is unusual in that the wreck wouldn’t leave the water at all. Waterlogged wood deteriorates rapidly in air, so the idea would be to keep it in seawater throughout the 250-mile trip in a semi-submerged salvage dock that holds the wreck while being towed across the sea.

On the coast near Amsterdam, the Amsterdam’s whole 131-foot-long remains would be encased in a steel-and-glass capsule that visitors could visit.

The plan has been commissioned by a foundation, helpfully named Docking the Amsterdam Foundation led by Amsterdam city archaeologist Jerzy Gawronski. As well as ZJA, Deloitte is involved for funding and grant raising, Mammoet for heavy lifting, Amsterdam Shipyards, and the City of Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Office advising.

There are no published costs for either the preparation work so far, and they don’t include an estimate for how much the plan would cost to implement. There’s a suggestion that the medium and big firms involved are doing this pro bono as part of their community commitment, rather than a commercial project.

In addition, rather than put this plan into action, the Foundation has now implemented a feasibility phase of 2027-2030, which suggests that the plans set out here may not be as worked through as they claim. It looks like the VOC Amsterdam will be with us for a while.

Forty-odd years ago, the most important gay artist of that era, John Yeadon, suggested that the then New Painting should be boldly confrontational and transgressive. His luminous depictions of young men with oversized erections, snogging rent boys and the occasional ape with a pitchfork (The Shining City on the Hill, 1986) were denounced, pre-Section 28, as “smut”.

Yeadon retreated into teaching and the creation of more oblique artworks – latterly, portraits of ventriloquists’ dummies, entities requiring others’ tongues to give them life. A retreat into silence then; but still suggestive of a primarily physical instrumental engagement with the artwork.

It’s a form of engagement largely missing from Queer Art, a new ‘Art Essentials’ handbook from Thames & Hudson written by curators Mollie E. Barnes and Gemma Rolls-Bentley. Their brisk introduction grandly eschews the depiction of “bodies, specifically sexually explicit bodies… That approach feels outdated and reductive.” Displays of genitals are no longer desirable; and today’s art-lover should instead engage intellectually with “a queerness that may have been unconscious or coded.”

Though it makes claims for universality (“queer art has always existed”) and provides a nifty globe-trotting overview of current practice, theirs is a strangely British position, an aesthetic austerity which insensibly appears as a concomitant of recent economic policy. Obliged to walk a thin line between the 21st century’s torrent of internet porn, the entrenched juvenility of the YBA-led market and the populist panic over paedophilia, Queer Art sidesteps many of the knottier issues raised by Laura Guy and Theo Gordon in last summer’s queer art edition of British Arts Studies. Here prurience appears as sober sophistication, self-censorship as a prerequisite of solidarity.

Through the Queer Lens

It’s a stance which speaks of the increasing power of the curatorial class. Meaning that artists are placed firmly in the hands of entrepreneurs and that discourse is foregrounded while the artwork offers a screen on which to project one’s ideas. This approach takes attention away from content or technique and from one’s encounter with the work itself to focus on the ‘queer lens’ through which images are not just interpreted but reconfigured. From it arises a certain aesthetic incoherence which, by laying claim to encyclopaedic reach, pitches globalising vision against individuated and localised lived experience.

Queerness, the duo write, “can be expressed through unconventional aesthetics, subject matter or artistic strategies that challenge dominant and artistic norms. The scope of queer art is expansive”. By this definition, perhaps of those mentioned in the text, only Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Hélio Oiticica truly articulate a queer trajectory, working widely across media and in multiple contexts – circumstances surely only afforded to them as men.

Even they are ultimately framed by Art History and the Art Market, the latter forming the over-riding ‘dominant norm’. And you’d be hard pressed to find an artist who wouldn’t swap their place in history for a place in today’s market. Most badly want both.

Quagmire of Kitsch

Multifaceted Mexican modernist martyr Frida Kahlo is inevitably on board in her role as the world’s new favourite artist and (dominant norm alert) “internationally recognised commercial icon,” to quote Tate Modern. Alongside her is the sine qua non of queer qulture’s fine art wing, Claude Cahun, whose oeuvre puts pretty much everything else here into perspective if not into a cocked hat.

Her vividly oneiric tableaux, realised as tiny monochrome photographs, articulate not just a refined sensibility but an entire more-than-real double life realised through art. Hers is a benchmark that others featured simply do not meet. The stale flatness of their output becomes readily apparent, the two-dimensionality of their artworks a sign of their essential ornamentality.

Other symptomatic figures are omitted, including Apollonian/Asclepiusian actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler; kinky video trickster Ryan Trecartin; materially promiscuous sculptor Ty Locke; and boring AI bot botherer Emily Martinez. Performance Art, the queer practice sans pareil (Anne Bean, Franko B., Loo Zihan) is almost entirely absent.

Absent too are such national treasures as gimmicky inappropriate kidults Gilbert & George or ham-fisted polymorphous TV personality Grayson Perry. They, and other apparently all too heteronormative-adjacent has-beens, are in a stroke consigned to the naughty step of history. But if, in the wake of woke, they’ve unloaded a lot of dead wood, our curators sink all the same in a quagmire of kitsch, of bowdlerised Classical and Renaissance imagery repurposed as narcissistic mock-heroic schmaltz not a stylistic stone’s throw from the iconography of mid-20th century fascism.

This comes via a vanguard of fig-leafed feminist figureheads: one trick pony Gluck; self-infatuated fashionista Tamara De Lempicka; third-rate surrealist Toyen; and Groucho Club-grizzled syrupy schlocksmith Maggi Hambling. In the interests of balance, and demonstrating they can easily eclipse the womxn when it comes to bad taste, Tom of Finland, Erwin Olaf, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Paul Cadmus bring up the rear. Literally.

At Intervals

The publication coincides with a recent exhibition at Amici Studio. Queer Painting: Intervals, curated by Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson, both painters and lecturers, provides a timely textbook illustration of the theoretical parameters of Queer Art and indicates their limitations. David Harrison’s magic realist nocturne Blue Hare, with its shades of Palmer, Dadd and Watership Down, lacks the satirical bite of his earlier work (2004’s Bad Fairies with its naked David Blunkett and John Prescott) and after a century of surrealism, after Garbo, Genet, Bowie, Gaga and Beckham, it’s hard to discern anything tangibly queer in it. Garth Gratrix’s Flamboyant Flamingos, Cheeky Felicia meets the layperson’s expectations of a standard abstract, but also conforms to Queer Art’s intellectually convoluted dictum that such impersonal works positively “resist the demand for visibility that is often placed on queer artists”. That’s a sleight of hand too far.

Paul Harfleet’s “F***ing Fa***t” (Hastings) is an exquisite pansy painted on the wall, a dislocated memorial. It’s the most significant piece in the show, a quietly radical work which refers in its subject matter not to classical models (touchstone for all the aforementioned purveyors of kitsch) but to the domestic paintings of flowers typically undertaken anonymously, as far as Art History is concerned, and by women; and having a low- or folk-culture status. It’s fugitive, site-specific so can’t readily be bought, but also allusive and pointing towards the reality outside the gallery. Its power derives from its metonymic status; and it’s this too which cuts through Queer Art’s inchoate thesis around gesture and perception.

Through its absurd title, Victoria Cantons’ Untitled (If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done) (after Velázquez) takes a tendency towards supplementarity to an extreme, but the art-about-art image itself barely merits attention. Olivia Sterling’s Bar Maids is sub-Beryl Cook trivia while Chester Tenneson’s Untitled (A sandwich) offers a weak joke about acronyms. It’s all so bloody polite. Only James Cabaniuk’s Piggy which, in a riot of flesh and blood and shit and piss impasto, recalls Leon Kossoff’s excremental outpourings of existential angst (seen a while back at Hastings Contemporary), manages to transcend the overly restrained qualities that characterise the exhibition.

Queer Painting: Intervals, curated by Katie Tomlinson and Chester Tenneson, showed at Amici, 12 Claremont, from 26 June-11 July. Images of most of the work are still on view, however, at the Amici website at amici.art/collaborations/queer-painting-intervals-curated-by-katie-tomlinson-chester-tenneson along with details of the gallery and studio. A highly recommended gallery, combining collaborative exhibitions with a community studio. 

With the recent Blue Flag and Seaside Award given to Marina and Pelham beaches respectively, many residents will have a little less trepidation about taking a relaxing dip in our salty stretch of the Channel. Questions remain, however, about our town’s persistent difficulties with nature’s greatest resource. 

Southern Going South

Water outages remain common, despite chipper emails that land in my inbox every few months from our supplier insisting improvements are being made to the creaking infrastructure. However, it has been a while since I encountered the kind of unspeakable detritus which was once common near the overflow pipes between Bexhill and St Leonards. 

Having moved to Hastings a week before the devastating floods that caused widespread water outages in October 2023, I was initially unfamiliar with the spectacle of a gent from the water company dropping off a multipack of 2L bottles at my door and assumed the whole thing must be a one-off. Three years on, that same gent now knows to crouch down and prevent the escape of two exuberant Samoyed dogs every time he stops by. 

Hastings and St Leonards are currently served by two large water supply works, and one major sewerage treatment works, and it’s not about the age of the facilities: the burst pipe that left 32,000 homes without water for days in 2024 was installed in 2007.   

But with credible mutterings in the corridors of power that Thames Water could be brought back into public ownership, and multi-million-pound improvements promised for both Brede and Beauport supply works, could the tide finally be turning on a particularly crappy chapter in our town’s history?    

Southern Water itself has admitted that pollution remains a problem and that it has fallen short of standards at several wastewater sites. While the vast majority of incidents listed for the region in the government’s 2024-25 data are category 4 (spills the environment agency claims have ‘little or no impact’), anyone who watched Channel 4’s grisly docu-drama Dirty Business will know that downgrading sewage leaks which should have been given a category 1 or 2 rating is a practice that can and does go on behind the scenes. 

Either way, the sheer number of incidents listed makes for depressing reading, as does the £7 million fine Southern Water was recently issued for repeated instances of sewage dumping in Kent four years ago. 

Those Plastic Beads 

However, it would be optimistic and naïve to assume Southern Water has entirely cleaned up its act. When ten tonnes of plastic beads washed up on Camber Sands in November of last year, the company initially failed to alert anyone of the incident; it was left to community groups to instigate the clean-up. Even after Southern accepted responsibility, the company provided no further information to residents about the potential risk to dogs or wildlife from ingesting the beads. 

It was the worst instance of plastic pollution ever to hit the Sussex coast. The beads tested positive for lead and arsenic, and our MP knocked on the door of 10 Downing Street with a 10,000-strong petition. The clean-up crews eventually dispatched by Southern Water did a half-arsed job (with beads still being found at the Dungeness and Rye Harbour nature reserves long after). Outdated infrastructure was apparently to blame, but most of the treatment works in our area are not, as the water companies would have us believe, ‘Victorian infrastructure’ (Freshfields was commissioned in 2003).  

I had hoped that a disaster on this scale would force someone, somewhere to do something (and I wouldn’t count the Environment Agency releasing a statement confirming they might upgrade the spill to a category 1 event as that ‘something’). I had hoped the same when the company received a £90m fine for nearly 7,000 incidents of illegal discharge across the Southeast in 2021. Southern has claimed repeatedly, while being handed further convictions (now totalling 174) that a change of leadership in 2022 has led to an overhaul of these negligent practices, but the signs are not promising.  

Surfers to the Rescue

It has therefore fallen largely to our friends at Surfers Against Sewage to keep the community alert to any hazards posed by swimming on our local beaches. The group maintains an active presence in East Sussex and in May staged a huge ‘paddle out’ demonstration, in both Hastings and Seaford, against the continuing pollution. Corresponding similar events in coastal communities up and down the country received favourable coverage across both local and national media. 

Many of us have chosen to make our homes here beside the sea despite the highly seasonal economies and reduced job prospects of most English coastal towns.  Beyond being a fitting reminder of this love for our waterways, the recent Walking on Water event welcomed not only members of Surfers Against Sewage, but another champion of holding Southern to account, in the form of our MP, Helena Dollimore. 

Action from our MP

Though Helena’s had a busy month securing priority tickets for residents to see the Bayeux Tapestry and hosting a public consultation on improvements to our seafront, her persistence goes above and beyond expectation. Even if you’re not a keen enough political aficionado to be keeping tabs on her crucial Select Committee work, when Southern were unwilling to investigate reports of sewage pollution at Hollington stream, Helena was happy to head down there and spotlight their negligence. 

Helena told a recent Clean Water Action Group demonstration: “It’s only because of the work of those citizen scientists, because of the volunteers, because of people in towns like this, that we have been able to expose the scale of this scandal.” 

Other factors have contributed to improved conditions on our beaches. And while we may feel powerless in the face of the endemic criminality blighting our water supply chain, it’s heartening to know that smaller steps, like the increase in seafront bins, particularly during the summer peak, have made a big difference.

Excluding Dogs? 

Among the council’s more controversial measures are two large dog-exclusion zones, which between them encompass about a kilometre-and-a-half of beach (and roughly line up with the areas awarded). The St Leonards stretch, which reaches from Bottle Alley to the Royal Victoria Hotel, is around half the size of the Hastings section, which extends across the whole of Pelham beach, from the Pier to the Harbour Arm. In place since 2024, the measure is likely to have had an impact on the recent Blue Flag and Seaside Awards, but remains controversial and poorly enforced. 

The use of dog-exclusion zones on British beaches can be traced to an Irish study monitoring their impact, and it makes a solid case. Dog-fouling is a huge problem in many areas of Hastings, and the risk, particularly to children, cannot be overstated. That said, the solution the council has reached isn’t without its problems. 

There’s the risk of discarded fishing equipment embedding itself in paws or toes. Despite the risk of a £1500 fine for leaving fishing hooks unattended, I still found myself having to remove a vicious hook from my dog’s tongue with a set of pliers after some idiot felt the need to leave it, baited, just below the tideline. 

We’ve tried the mercifully small sliver of beach between the pier and the east end of Bottle Alley, but unlike Rock-a-nore, it lacks any clear barriers to mark the start and end of the exclusion zone. Faced with the risk of an on-the-spot fine and a dog whose recall depends entirely on whether there are gulls nearby, we resolved not to return until October. 

Dog vs Human Mess

Dog-fouling on our beaches will never be acceptable, but it’s also a literal drop in the ocean compared to the amount of raw sewage that has been discharged into the same stretch of seawater over the past few years. After all, when Pelham and Bulverhythe beaches were closed to the public in 2021 and 2022 respectively, it wasn’t the fault of anyone’s dog.       

Going Swimmingly?     

At this point, you’re probably thinking “that’s all well and good, but should I be worried about dunking my head under when I go for a swim or not?” to which I can only repeat the guidance of the borough council: check conditions on the day, particularly through the Surfers Against Sewage app. 

Calm conditions at the end of June allowed the silt to settle, making the sea appear much clearer, but appearances can be deceptive; following reports on the app of a 5 am discharge within walking distance of the lifeguarded zone, I decided not to risk it. A few days later, the lure of the azure proved too great, but I kept my head firmly above the surface. 

Joseph Stannard loves music and he loves film. When he isn’t carrying out his duties as deputy editor of long-running music magazine The Wire, he is investigating the paranormal in sound, vision and real life. “I’ve always been interested in the supernatural, the occult, weird films and music,” he says.

While living in Brighton, Stannard noticed that a lot of contemporary music was influenced by horror, and that many horror films featured experimental soundtrack music. Accordingly he organised The Outer Church, a series of events which combined the two. The event ran, in the UK and abroad, for about five years, and a compilation was also released. After a spell in London, he wanted to get back to the sea and was eventually attracted by the rich occult history of Hastings.

Watching The Stimming Pool at a screening in London, Stannard noted that the Electric Palace cinema, which appears in the film, was a Hastings institution and a perfect venue, and began planning an event series to happen here. His event names are inspired by the work of comic book writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison, who drew and scripted the Vertigo comics series The Invisibles.

The Outer Church and The Invisible College are conflicting forces within the series. Historically speaking, The Invisible College was a name for the group of individuals, including Robert Boyle, who eventually founded The Royal Society. “It’s good to pay attention to synchronicities,” continues Stannard. On his move from an outer church to an invisible college, he remarks “You could say I’ve moved from the ecclesiastical to the educational.”

The first event will screen the 1993 film Body Melt (“There’s a lot of slime and gruesomeness… it’s very splattery, very DayGlo”, he explains) directed by respected film writer Philip Brophy. The film has been called ‘The Substance before The Substance’ – though on a much lower budget – and addresses the horrors of Big Pharma. One highlight of the film is Ian Smith (Harold Bishop from Neighbours) on a gun-toting rampage.

The evening will also feature live electronic sets from US artists Trigger Object and Dream Skills, both of whom make music that is thoroughly in keeping with the themes of Body Melt. “Everything I book is stuff I genuinely love, and hopefully there are like-minded freaks out there who’ll love it too.”

There is also, of course, a considerable tranche of avant-garde musicians in Hastings who might well be interested in this series, which with Stannard’s combination of enthusiasm and expertise, is sure to be a success.

The Invisible College will present as a special event at the Electric Palace Cinema on Sunday 16 August. For more details see electricpalacecinema.com. For a mixtape of some of the music he will use and a track listing, see the version of this article on our website at tinyurl.com/ysc692pt