The Hastings in Stitches community embroidery is currently being pieced together in time for the grand reveal at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery as part of Coastal Currents arts festival.

The project, led by Arts on Prescription, has commissioned 28 local women designers to create embroidered squares which celebrate the voluntary organisations working across our town. For the last six months, textile workers have been busy designing and stitching contemporary embroideries which pay tribute to the charities and volunteers that make a huge difference to life in Hastings.

The completed squares are currently being pieced together and framed by Denise Franklin of Carbon picture framing. The 67 local groups which are represented cover a wide range of organisations from Hastings: Jack in the Green, embroidered by Claire Buckley, through to Frock up Friday, represented by a rainbow-coloured flower embroidered by one of the founders, Bev Francis.

The unique approaches of the needlewomen mean it is almost impossible to pick a favourite square – there are styles to suit all tastes, from the pearl-necklace bling of The Posh Club through to the delicate detail of the St Michael’s Hospice square, which includes needlework by members of the Hospice’s Monday Art Club. The women who have created the embroideries bring their own narratives and styles to the sewing table, such as the squares created by Julia Maddison that use her signature chain-stitched lettering.

The Hospice, and some other organisations – including the Hastings Ladies Miniature Golf Club –  were included on the original Hastings in Stitches ‘quilt’ created in 1995. Other organisations like Afri-Co-Lab, Eggtooth, Playing the Race Card, Women’s Voice and the Wonky Women’s WI group are new to the town over the last three decades and have added diversity to the community. It has been a priority for James Matthew Thomas, the coordinator of the project, that women-led organisations are included in the community groups that are represented.

Hastings in Stitches 2025 will be on display at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery from Thursday 27 August to Sunday 7 September as part of Coastal Currents. Come along and spot some of your favourite groups and artists.

Join the crowd under trees adorned with glitzy streamers. Pick up a non-alcoholic cocktail, a box of popcorn, and receive a wristband from a local robot who reminds you that it is now 2124.

Through reproduction artefacts called ‘silent disco headphones’, music is playing: a friendly voice welcomes us to the museum, for a celebration of the Hero and to discover what took place 100 years ago…

Brutalist high-rise buildings, starkly posted on to the redbrick façade of Summerfields Gym, served as the backdrop to a factory where signs for large brands are being made – and remade. The fate of those living in 2024, working too long and too hard for too little, struggling to survive… performers wear light pastel shades, working in unity, and then slowly but surely fragmenting.

The music intensifies. Arguments break out and a riot follows. Then, the Hero appears, gives a speech, uses placatory language, speaking in nothings and everythings. The listeners are excited, hopeful for change.

We are led by our friendly guides in pink boiler suits, torch lamps in hand, ushering us as if guiding planes in to land. Now, in front of a hologram exhibit of everyday objects from 2024, the pastel-clad people move to animate household objects in perfect time to the music. 

Turn around to the flank of the museum and capture a scene dedicated to ‘home’. Each object is delicately carried and given to a happy recipient. She sits down and tells tales of gratitude for being part of a community, for having a home: a tribute to our wonderful Hastings Give-and-Takery. The great data loss of 2051 is mentioned… the fragments of story had been carefully pieced together in the aftermath – my stomach flips. 

Then people are arriving from the airport: smiling. Meandering through us, each of them lays out a piece of fabric from a suitcase. A beautiful tapestry of ribbons and colourful sheets are ceremonially placed on the ground and tied together by the pastel people. To utopian electro music, the completed canopy is raised into the sky, and we run underneath.

The tempo shifts, the Hero runs past.

Following slowly, sedately, to a sealed off courtyard. The doors open, and… welcome to a mash-up of all the wonderful carnivalesque, festival personas that make up Hastings and St Leonards! A beautiful Book Festival nymph, a Morris dancer, a yarr-ing pirate, someone with a pram on their head and a merry Jack-in-the-green spirit. Me: grinning! We are all dancing! The community of onlookers becomes our own community – sharing something special.

Then. Then. Then! Into the Museum. Colourful lights. Beautiful tapestries adorn the ramp that takes us down, down, down to the Durbar Hall.

Pastel people reappear. Holding boxes, different colours – jumbling, shifting them, in cooperation. A completely different movement from the disjointed and angry factory workers of the show opener. This community is in flow. And, the crescendo of the piece! Disco lights. Movement. Dancing. Euphoric music. Glitter falls to the ground as the Hero returns. 

Statuesque, the Hero stands at the stairway … and what a sight. SO still, so enigmatic. So strong. I wanted to cheer, shout, dance! HOORAY! The Hero removes her cape, and beneath, is dressed in pastel shades. She happily rejoins the group, in community and co-operation. And then, the pastel people open their boxes. Inside, a light – and the look of PURE JOY on their faces communicates home, hope, togetherness. 

I looked around. “The Museum is doing something special here,” I think, “and we – the community – have made it happen.” 

I’m so blown away. Thank you, Afri-Co-Lab, Home Live Art, the performers and all those who created and supported this wonderful project. I can’t get over how BRILLIANT things can be when we work together with open hearts.

Set in 2124 at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, we travel a hundred years into the future to find Hastings awash with love, joy, and equity. Somehow we made it through, and the show takes us on a tour back to 2024 to meet the Hero, who set the ball in motion to this fairer future world. But as we know, history is selective and time will always uncover the truth. 

“To be involved in the creation of something that speaks so powerfully to the heart of humanity’s struggles at this pivotal time of increasing awareness and revolutionary change happening in the world, has been an opportunity I’ll always treasure.”

Ade Thomas, Community Participant

Afri-Co-Lab leads 37 community participants and 11 local and 3 local-ish arts professionals in creating this theatrical magic. The show is experienced on the move, around the grounds of the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery. The action unfolds through a company of actors, show guides, epic set and design with all the audio shared through silent disco headphones.

Community theatre often gets a bad rep as a lesser artistic endeavour. This group of theatre professionals, with experience in big-name productions across London and the country, are redefining the genre. They have created a piece of theatre about a town they now call home that stands up in its own right.

“This show is about all of us, where you may feel you are, where you may feel you aren’t, and taking a chance on ourselves.” 

Kim Batty, Community Performer

“We came to it knowing only the title of the show and co-created with the cast, directors and design team. I can’t tell you how much fun it’s been – experimenting,playing around with ideas and creating a truly collaborative event with the community in its very bones.”

Laura Dunton Clarke, Community Performer

The show lasts about an hour and is suitable for ages 12+. It’s a fun and heartfelt love letter to Hastings and all who reside in her. Captions and a number of hearing loops are available at every performance. The show takes place mainly on level ground, with the use of a lift in the main building. 

Tickets are available online & at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, with a sliding scale of £15/£10/£5.
Some free tickets are available for those who find the cost a barrier (email afri.co.lab.uk@gmail.com). We hope you join us!
Friday 14 June 9pm
Saturday 15 June 5:30pm & 9pm
Sunday 16 June 9pm
At Hastings Museum & Art Gallery

In the midst of the pandemic, with all my regular and non-regular work on hold or cancelled, grieving the recent deaths of both my biological and step father; in this bleak moment, the depths of winter, my sister, Lilly Babirye, and I signed a five-year lease on a shop space in Marine Court with no written or formalised business plan.

Some might say it was risky, foolish, irresponsible. Others – inspired, hopeful, genius. Looking back it was a healthy dose of all those things. Everything was impossible: travel, seeing loved ones, funerals, gathering; but in those days that saw every Pret A Manger in London closed, it felt like there was finally space. Space for something else. Space to dream a different reality. Lilly and I had always wanted to create a space to hold creative interventions, and in a time when so much was not possible – this finally seemed possible. 

Afri-Co-Lab was born a visible Black-run space, modelling what it is to centre the experiences of Global Majority folks, brokering relationships between white led institutions and at the heart of it offering intentionally held space for Global Majority folks and white allies to gather and dream.

Existence can be struggle as well as joy 

Being Black in a white majority seaside town has its ups and downs. Downs being the micro-aggressions that hit like a body blow, all the racist memorabilia and constant comments, are you on holiday? whilst walking through town, or I love your skin colour, when dancing at The Piper. The assumption that I must be on holiday as you can’t imagine a Black person living outside of the city. The absurdity that it is a compliment to draw attention to the levels of melanin in my skin, as if I had gone to Trade Paints and mixed the perfect tone for a Saturday night out on the town!

These reminders that you are other, are part and parcel of life down here for me as a Black woman; the same is true for many of my peers. However, after six or so years here, seeing a radical Global Majority and arts community grow and thrive in Hastings and St Leonards, and within that the co-founding and co-opening of Afri-Co-Lab: a Black-run, anti-racist creative space, slap-bang on the seafront, simultaneously speaks to the epic ‘Ups’ and what IS possible in our magical town! 

This is the community that created SHADE (St Leonards and Hastings Alliance of Diverse Ethnicities), which campaigned for care, activism and arts through the pandemic. Up In Arms – a multidisciplinary social practice, exhibition, film and performance work of mine that finally got a full commission at the De La Warr Pavilion. Playing The Race Card – exhibiting 25 Global Majority artists from across the country to varied audiences for two glorious weeks, followed by the annual MLK Day celebrations in the same space in January. A full and expansive Refugee Week led by the Refugee Buddy Project. We Out Here – an exhibition of six Caribbean local artists at the Hastings Contemporary, and full programme of wrap-around events. All this is epic – we are definitely punching up as a town! 

And I am proud to say Afri-Co-Lab is playing a big part of this radical momentum. The thing I think we offer that is most important, is supporting and giving space to folks to try things out – to experiment: the ‘Lab’ part of Afri-Co-Lab. And the ‘Co’ is doing this collectively. 

“You feel safe when you are taking yourself out of your comfort zone there.”

Ted Barrow 

“Doesn’t matter what the event is, I always feel there’s a space that’s created with my needs in mind as a Black woman, and not just my needs, but the needs of a wide range of people, Black Queer people, people who may belong to several different identity margins.” 

Dorcas Magbadelo

A community-led open space

Setting up Afri-Co-Lab has been a real rollercoaster, especially as Lilly and I have been working on a volunteer basis, only paying our facilitators and admin support. This is something we want to change, to secure the space’s future and to help it live the life it so desperately wants to live. Like so much of our event programming, the drive to maintain and expand is only born from a living need or desire in the community.

I remember Darragh, before becoming our resident dance teacher, walking into the space to browse some beautiful locally-made crafts (we had an artists’ shop then) and inevitably staying for a cuppa. If you were in the space for more than four minutes, co-founder Lilly would offer you a cup of tea or a ‘fun drink’. That’s our open house policy – you come into the space and we treat you like family – a very Ugandan cultural norm.

This culture allowed for long, dreaming conversations to take place, and through these conversations grew ideas, plans and healing offers which came into fruition, like Darragh Dance or Every Body Positive Yoga. We’re about providing opportunities for local artists and creatives to share their talents locally, with the communities they live alongside, rather than having to go to further afield.

So many of our relationships and workshops have come about from conversations, or chance meetings when someone pops into the space – which is why we are so keen to open again for no other reason than to connect. Meeting, talking – connecting – is reason enough. This town is special, and when we connect magic happens: whether that is Jack in The Green, Playing The Race Card, Pirate Day, or We Out Here.

Safety isn’t just walls

As a person of Colour, having a space that you know you will be welcomed into, a space where you will not have to navigate well-meaning but problematic conversations, where you will see yourself reflected in the people, the space, its ethos and cultural context – that is respite, room to freely exist. We love being able to offer this and to model this for our community and our white allies.

It’s important for us that we offer space that is intentionally held only for Global Majority folks, alongside programming for all. It’s about creating an us culture, which sometimes means not everyone is invited into everything, in order to acknowledge different lived experiences. 

There are times that we as a Global Majority community – diverse as that is – need to come together when whiteness is not centred. Not because specific white people are up to racially motivated shenanigans, but because whiteness as a systematic culture – white supremacist culture – is tiring and painful. 

I know that can feel unfair to a white person, but as carriers of inherited systems and trauma, we must be aware it is present no matter how supportive the person or good the intention. 

Even writing this is nerve-wracking: by taking up space to speak authentically from my lived experience as a Black person, will the sentiment be heard or vilified? What in turn will that mean for myself individually or Afri-Co-Lab? It’s these mental gymnastics that we enable folks to take a break from, find unapologetic space to breathe, let their shoulders lower – this is rare.. It needs to be nurtured to support moments of collective allyship across all racial intersections. This uncomfortable situation is where we are now – but hopefully it’s not where we’ll stay.

This is why creating Global Majority only spaces and why Global Majority owned and run spaces are important in the ecosystem of our town. 

Crowdfunding To The Future

We miss our Open House days and whilst the shop wasn’t financially successful enough to keep it open, the conversations and chance meetings were riches beyond measure. So we are crowdfunding to be able to pay a staff member to open the space one day a week every week for no other reason than to gather and dream. Pop in for a quick cuppa, or stay all day and chat. Bring your laptop and jump on our wifi, or read and use our growing collection of books. The space will be open to all.

We have a crowdfunding target of £10,000; if we can raise £5,000, then East Sussex County Council will match us up to £5,000. This fund will help us open the space to support our community by inviting more people to become part of the Afri-Co-Lab family: we’ll be sharing more of our space, with more people, more of the time.

We’re holding three free events this July where you can come and meet the Afri-Co-Lab family, sample what we do, have a great time, and if the spirit takes you, donate to help us on our journey.

Afri-Co-Lab started in a very difficult moment but it has created so much joy and healing in its time in our community. We deeply understand the complexity of poverty, racism, and displaced trauma. We also understand and have experienced the power that community and creativity can have in overcoming obstacles. This is the “why” at the heart of everything Afri-Co-Lab does.

POTLUCK PARTY:
Thursday 13 July, @afri.co.lab, from 7pm-when it ends. 
DARRAGH DANCE PARTY:
Monday 17 July, @thenest, from 6pm-9:30pm. 
IMPROV COMEDY – GAMES FOR GROWN-UPS:
Thurs 20 July, @afri.co.lab, from 7pm.
ARTS AUCTION:
Friday 29 July, @afri.co.lab, from 7pm.

BOOKING REQUIRED. Please visit www.afri-co-lab.org to book or RSVP.