Wild Hastings photography exhibition
A free and accessible exhibition at Hastings Rail Station until 31 January 2019. Hastings’ urban areas are interspersed with and surrounded by many wild and green spaces. The photographers featured here have created images in response to their feelings of connection with these natural environments

Email: marybethhaas@ymail.com for access to the exhibition without a rail ticket.

Good example
A north London supermarket has become Britain’s first to introduce plastic-free zones in a move campaigners hope will spur the giant chains to follow suit.

Thornton Budgens in Belsize Park has converted more than 1,700 product lines to non-plastic packaging over the past 10 weeks in an attempt to take the store “virtually plastic-free” within three years. The supermarket claims to have become a “public experiment” in how to retail food more sustainably

Andrew Thornton, who owns the Budgens franchise, said: “We’re hoping that what we’re doing here will challenge the likes of Sainsbury’s, Tesco and others. As soon as one of them turns round to the big producers such as Coca-Cola, Heinz or Unilever and says ‘unless you stop sending us products in plastic, we’re not going to stock them’, change will come very quickly.”

Unique conifer
Hastings residents Max and Lee Colton have donated a rare Wollemi pine to Alexandra Park. This most unusual tree was discovered in Australia in 1994, previously only being known through fossil records. Thanks to a propagation programme the pine is now being grown across the world.

Reaching up to 40m in height it has a unique brown and knobbly bark and makes a welcome addition to the park’s already superb specimen tree collection.