The Hastings Trawler — 3 (February 2006)

IN THIS ISSUE

WELCOME ‘Machines for living in’, they maybe, but homes and housing generate quite passionate responses in people — from the postwar prefab which, as ‘a machine for living in’, was less then perfect, yet made a happy home to many families, to the mock Tudor and Georgian semi, reviled by the aesthetic and aspired to by so many — and so this emotive issue leads to quite irrational ideas being suggested, like the one proposed by residents of the Old Town of Hastings.

February 2006, Vol II, Issue 2 ISSN 1745-3321

THE TALK OF THE OLD (AND NEW) TOWN

A public arena for news, views, gossip and tittle-tattle about goings-on in Hastings, St Leonards-on-sea, and far beyond.

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Right next to the fishing boats and fish market is an area set for development. They propose a ‘library of the sea’ with gallery of pictures and displays of sea life. A ‘machine for improving the mind’ along with the three other similar buildings already in that area. The ‘machine for living in’ should reflect and react to its environment and the needs of those it seeks to house. With the harvest of the sea at hand, the fleet drawn up on the beach and the fish market next door, plus visitors anxious to relax and enjoy seafood, other than cod and chips, what the site needs is a restaurant which exploits that harvest, capitalises on the location, engages with the wishes and desires of those it is intended to house ,and celebrates the one feature that sets Hastings and St.Leonards apart — the good old Hastings Trawler.

Graham Frost Publisher

Info Panel Publisher Graham Frost Editor-in-Chief Francisco Ferrer i Guardia Production Editor Bobby Cramp

Published by Boulevard Books 32 George Street Hastings TN34 3EA ✆ +44 (0)1424 436521 www.thehastingstrawler.co.uk editor@thehastingstrawler.co.uk

Except where indicated otherwise, the copyright in all articles, photographs and illustrations remains with the author, photographer, artist, etc.

Cover portrait of Liane Carroll by Robert Sample © sample_robert@hotmail.com

© 2006 by Boulevard Books.

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced or retransmitted without prior written authorization from Boulevard Books.

Contributors Rachael Glazier, Jan Goodey, Anne Mason, Joy Melville, Pauline Melville, Ted Newcomen, Steve Peak, Peter Roe

Abbot Print, The Applestore, Workhouse Lane, Icklesham, East Sussex TN36 4BJ ✆ +44 (0)1424 815111 F +44 (0)1424 815222 @: sales@abbotprint.co.uk http://www.abbotprint.co.uk

Thought for the month: If you find mistakes in this publication, please remember they are there for a purpose. We publish something for everyone, and some people are always looking for mistakes!

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Illustrators Lester Magoogan, Lesley Prince Robert Sample, Richard Warren Photographer Scott Ramsey

TRANSPORT: On the buses! Peter Roe examines the state of Hastings bus service.

10-11 PROFILE: biographer Joy Melville talks to Liane Carrol, Hastings’ own ‘granny’ of musical invention.

12-14 FOOD: Rachael Glazier brings a critical eye to bear on organic food. Is it just a middle-class indulgence? 16-17 PLANNING: Ore Valley Regeneration — Steve Peak asks if cramming 700 new houses into this overcrowded area will degenerate the valley rather than ‘regenerate’ it?

18-20 Ore Valley Poorhouse

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The Stade: report on the latest consultation on developing the Stade Coach Park.

22 PEOPLE: Ted Newcomen talks to Maya Evans, recently convicted and jailed under the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005).

23 SOCIETY: Hastings — is it the new Brighton? Jan Gooday investigates the Exodus from Brighton to Hastings 25-26 FICTION: The Note

by Pauline Melville

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LETTERS: Your opinions matter!

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HASTINGS TRAWLER THE TALK OF THE OLD (AND NEW) TOWN They’ve had their chips!

FISHERMEN NETTED!

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our fishermen have received A.S.B.Os (Anti-Social Behavioural Orders) after being caught on CCTV landing fish on Hastings Stade. The culprits are thought to be part of a bigger gang that has been terrorising local fish for hundreds of years.

A M.(a)F(i)A. spokesperson said ‘We’ve finally got the evidence after reviewing nearly six years of continuous CCTV footage. It wasn’t easy — we had to look through hours and hours of arson, vandalism, graffiti, and theft before we could actually catch someone working. It’s hoped that these ASBOs will act as a deterrent to work in the future and the poor little fishes will be left in peace and local criminals should be allowed to get on with their activities unhindered’.

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The above headline and ‘spoof ’ article recently appeared in the annual edition of The Christmas Rock-a-Nore Gazette — or as its by-line describes it, ‘the official, unofficial fish trade newspaper’ which is produced every year for and by the local fishing industry.

Tongue-in-cheek the article may be, but it hides a justifiable resentment among Hastings fishermen. They feel that they are ignored by the police and council when it comes to protecting them from crime and vandalism, but are being scapegoated and bullied by an over-enthusiastic government through its local stong-arm thugs in the MFA (not actually the Mafia but very close to it), the Marine Fisheries Agency.

For the past 25 years, both parties, Tory and Labour have been guilty of sacrificing the British fishing industry to European interests. So here is a history lesson that all readers should note and remember the next time they hear those mellifluous words ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help you’.

Approximately 86 per cent of EU fishing stocks were originally located in British territorial waters. When we went into the Common Market, as it was then known, our elected leaders made a deal to give the other European nations the majority of the fish quota in exchange for a large slice of the then generous agricultural subsidies available through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Had there been more fishermen in

both Houses of Parliament instead of farmers, landowners, and other members of the establishment, the outcome would, no doubt, have been very different and the British fishing industry would never have been sacrificed.

On their own, British fishermen would not, and could not, fish stocks to the current point of exhaustion. It is the introduction of huge factory ships from the continent that has swept our seas of stocks and led to the current unsustainable situation.

Typically, Hastings’ boats fish within a few miles of their homeport and use nets which allow the small immature fish to escape. In addition, there is a physical limit to how much two men in a 10-metre boat can catch in a few hours. Unlike continental vessels that stay at sea for weeks and indiscriminately ‘hoover up’ huge quantities of various species in a single trawl using small-meshed nets which catch everything.

The EU fisheries’ policy is a shambles of contradictions. Only a couple of years ago a newly commissioned vessel from Eire, partbuilt with subsidies from EU taxpayers (that includes you), was launched to catch more fish tonnage in ten days than the entire Hastings fleet takes in an entire year.

So Hastings fishermen who are part of a 600-year-old sustainable local industry are now being driven to extinction by rules set to govern an unsustainable business run at an international level.

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The good news, if there is any, is that the local fishing industry has obtained Marine Stewardship Accreditation for its ‘environmentally friendly and sustainable’ practices. But isn’t it just madness when public funds are used to help a local industry to survive while others are used to support non-viable practices at an international level? TN Hastings Borough Council

CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH?

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fter a delay of over 16 months the Audit Commission has finally given Hastings Borough Council a clean bill of health following local residents’ complaints concerning the possible waste of public funds in the development of its foreshore proposals.

The District Auditor looked at three main regeneration projects: The Stade; Pelham Place; and the Marina Pavilion to consider whether the Council had met its ‘fiduciary duties’. He examined various reports, sought explanations from Council officers, views from the Project Director of SeaSpace Ltd and SEEDA’s Area Director, and the opinions of Audit Commission staff with experience of planning and regeneration.

The Auditor noted that at the 28th July 2004 Council meeting it was revealed that since 1998 the local authority had expended £422,000 on the Stade project alone, mostly on feasibility studies and the preparation of proposals for public consultation.

He accepted that explanations for this expenditure were reasonable, but noted ‘a more risk aware approach to the development would have been for the Council to seek appropriate legal advice at the beginning of the scheme given that it states it was aware of the constraints of trust land and to share its broad vision and aspirations for the area with the Charity Commissioners to see if there was a match of the Council’s objectives and the requirements of the charitable nature of the trust’. If nothing else, the

Auditor clearly took a very deep breath before he came out with this statement!

He went on to say that he did not believe the Council’s approach could be classified as a failure of its ‘duty of care’, nor was there ‘evidence at the present time of a waste of public money’.

Investigations into the Marina Pavilion and Pelham Place were limited by the fact that both schemes are managed by SeaSpace Ltd on behalf of the Hastings and Bexhill Taskforce. Both organisations are accountable to the South East England Development Authority (SEEDA), not the Audit Commission.

However, the Auditor said he had ‘not been provided with any written evidence to support’ the council’s claim that at the inception of the Taskforce it had informed its partners about the legal constraints imposed on the trust’s foreshore land. Nor is the matter ‘specifically mentioned in the early minutes of the Taskforce’. But evidence was found that the restrictions on the land were first drawn to the attention of the Taskforce in documents dating from December 2002.

The Council has acknowledged that ‘ … the full implications of the land being held on charitable trusts was not appreciated until 2002, inasmuch as the strict approach of the Charity Commissioners as to what was and was not a charitable use was fully understood’. Although the auditor thinks ‘this constituted a weakness in the Council’s arrangements at the time’, he doesn’t believe ‘the evidence suggests a breach of its duty of care’.

To readers this may all sound just like a lot of legalese exonerating the Council. But if the projects continue to fail to materialise and further hundreds of thousands of pounds of public funds are expended, then lawyers will be crawling over all these statements with a fine tooth-comb seeking ammunition to bring those responsible to account. TN

Little Boxes

IS THIS THE FUTURE OF BRITISH HOUSING?

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oliticians are forever telling us about the housing crisis, especially in London and the overcrowded South-east, but for some reason they never appear to do anything more than just talk about it.

In more than half of Britain’s council zones, an income of £30,000 is required to become a first time buyer — more than the average salary in 120 of the 171 local authority areas. In fact, over 30 per cent of their residents can’t even afford to buy a property with a partner.

Just in case you missed it from the Earls Court Ideal Home Show the other year, I will regale you with just one of the solutions that our leaders would have us embrace. They are called Mini-suites or more accurately ‘self-contained studio apartments with a balcony and stylish furniture, factory-built and designed to be slotted into place on disused car parks and playing fields’.

Sounds quite good doesn’t it? Apart from the bit about car parks and playing fields. Clearly the designers expect us all to dump our cars for an efficient but sadly fictional public transport system and our kids are presumed to no longer want to play outside — too busy with

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their video games inside their own Mini-suite bedrooms, perhaps?

Many so-called ‘regeneration’ projects appear to forget that without teachers, nurses, firemen, and other essential workers, any plans for urban renewal are dead in the water. Yet, one suggested answer to this serious housing problem is to provide Mini2 suites of 26m in floor area — that’s about the size of three suburban garages!

What’s even more depressing than the ‘chicken-coop’ dimensions of these homes is that some people may be so desperate to find affordable housing that they will actually welcome these ‘innovative’ designs, and what’s worse, may be willing to rent or even buy one.

This doesn’t altogether surprise me — a glance at any estate agents’ window reveals ridiculous house prices. In Bath I even saw a oneroomed studio flat with a bed placed on a shelf (accessible by a vertical ladder) for a mind-blowing £110,000!

Mini-suites, by comparison, could sell for about £65,000 in central London, or rent for about £70 a week.

Superficially, they begin to look very attractive.

However, unlike most politicians, I’m old enough to remember when public housing was all designed to what was then referred to as the Parker Morris Standard, with minimum criteria for room sizes, kitchen layouts, quality of finishes, etc.

Yet here we are, over a quarter of a century later, suggesting that the proletariat live in tiny spaces that would outrage animal rights activists!

Environmentalists will tell you that ‘small is beautiful’, but when it comes to housing that’s simply not the case — not British housing anyway.

Despite the trend towards singleperson households, most young people will eventually want to cohabit with someone else and invariably this may lead on to starting a family.

So fast-forward a couple of years and we may find that our nurse who 4

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first moved into her new Mini-suite has installed her live-in boyfriend as the housing shortage still hasn’t gone away. We now have two people living in a space that was originally designed to be adequate for just one.

A few more years on and our couple have their first child. The inflated housing market has continued to outstrip their combined earnings. Our nurse would love to give up work and take care of her child and, sadly, the couple have had to sell their car — no available parking in the neighbourhood due to the proliferation of new Mini-suite estates.

The family are forced to stay in their home where there is no room for their sprog to play — the playing fields having made way for yet more Mini-suite developments, no doubt!

Before we know it, today’s new spacesaving designs have become tomorrow’s over-crowded slums.

We’ve been there before, its called the law of unintended consequences.

The fact that designers are willing to collude with our elected representatives to consider such tiny spaces as being adequate to live in reveals how little they value ordinary people. Why should essential workers, or anyone for that matter, be forced to put up with less space than our MPs provide for their precious cars? Leaving housing (or any other essential commodity) to the so-called ‘free market’ is a crazy strategy which is ultimately unsustainable.

New housing starts are only just beginning to creep up from the lowest figures since World War II. Prices are out of reach for large sections of the population and many are borrowing way beyond their means thanks to the opportunism of the finance sector. Politicians are now peddling the lie that we are all middle-class and economic cycles are a thing of the past.

Nonsense — low interest rates and full-employment won’t last forever, and it will inevitably end in tears.

Housing lies at the core of all regeneration plans, yet successive governments have failed to take the initiative. Property speculators and developers will always find ways to make money, but only governments can insist on increased numbers of building starts, higher housing standards, and improved affordability.

Regeneration plans for Hastings are no better, the local council has totally failed to capitalise on the town’s proximity to London, relatively cheap property prices, and large numbers of empty homes. It should have put all its efforts into improving road and rail transport links to the metropolis instead of half-baked schemes to revamp the seafront with fancy hotels and restaurants. TN Creative accounting

HASTINGS BOROUGH COUNCIL AND THE ENRON FACTOR

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ne of the books I read during the recent news blackout that passed for the Christmas and New Year’s holiday was Pipe dreams. Greed, ego and the death of Enron by Robert Price, and it struck me that perhaps the worlds of big business and local government aren’t so very different.

Don’t get me wrong — a huge

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multinational which bought and sold nearly $3 billion worth of gas, electricity and other commodities every day is certainly bigger than any of the UK’s local councils. And although I can’t speak about greed, ego, and death, they certainly share other things in common — namely

the ‘creative arts’ of spin and opaque accounting/PR announcements.

In particular, I’m talking about ‘mark-to-market’ accounting. Now you are going to have to bear with me here for a couple of paragraphs. For as boring and complicated as it may be, it’s a phenomenon we must live with

and it behoves us all to at least understand the basics.

For the past 500 years or so, beancounters have followed a system known as cost, or accrual accounting which was invented by a Franciscan friar. Under this dual entry system every business transaction is written

OUR LOCAL M.P.s — REGISTER OF MEMBERS’ INTERESTS Last month we looked at which way our local M.P.s had voted in recent debates. This issue we are reviewing their outside interests and holdings, as recorded in the House of Commons Register of Members Interests (from January 2006 back to year 2001-02). For more detailed information about any MP’s interests check out www.theyworkforyou.com.

Nigel Waterson (Conservative), Eastbourne Remunerated employment— office, profession, etc.: consultant to firm of Solicitors, Messrs. Watson, Farley and Williams, London; member of Harris Parliamentary Panel (£1-£1,000). Fee paid direct to the Multiple Sclerosis Society (Eastbourne Branch).

Gifts, benefits and hospitality (UK): honorary membership of the Baltic Exchange, (registered 20 December 2000) Overseas visits: 19-21 July 2005, to Washington, USA. Flights and accommodation paid for by the American Association of Retired People (AARP), (registered 25 July 2005).

20-24 September 2003, to Singapore with the All-Party Singapore Group for discussions with ministers and officials. Flights paid for by Singapore Airlines and accommodation provided Michael Foster (Labour), Hastings & Rye Remunerated employment — office, profession etc.: consultant to a firm of solicitors, Messrs.

Fynmores of Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex.

Sponsorship or financial or material support: donations and value in kind was received by the Hastings and Rye Constituency Labour Party towards election expenses (generally) including

from residential property in London.

Registrable shareholdings: (a) Flare View Ltd; Simplygames Limited; (b) Great Portland Estates PLC; Electra Kingsway VCT PLC; Quester VCT 5 PLC; Close Technology and General VCT PLC; New Star European Growth Fund PLC; New Star UK Growth Fund PLC; Henderson High Income Trust PLC; New European Property Holdings Ltd. (NEPH); Igroland Ltd (owns and operates children’s entertainment centres in Kiev, in partnership with IKEA); Maybush Telecom Limited; Scottish & Newcastle PLC. Gifts, benefits and hospitality: Greg Barker (Conservative), (UK) 25 June 2001, day at Bexhill & Battle Remunerated Directorships: Flare Wimbledon Tennis Championship, View Ltd (property investment as guest of Hawkpoint Partners company holding freehold property (Investment Bank), (registered 27 let to commercial tenants) and July 2001) Maybush Telecom Limited Miscellaneous and (distribution of mobile and related unremunerated interests: wife equipment). Chairman, Haus (Celeste Barker) is a shareholder in a Publishing Limited (publisher of family-owned business, Charles historical biographies).

Wells Ltd (Brewery).

Remunerated employment — Overseas visits: 8-13 March office, profession etc.: director2004, to Moscow and Ekaterinburg designate of Spinel Holdings, whose with the All-Party British-Russian activities include commercial and Parliamentary Group. Hotels, property interests in the Russian hospitality and internal transport Federation; consultant to Octopus paid for by Novosti Russia News Asset Management.

Agency (flights London to Moscow Land and Property: freehold return paid for by Foreign and commercial business park property Commonwealth Office), (registered in East Anglia, from which he receives rental income; rental income 14 May 2004). assistance in the run-up to the May 2005 General Election from GMB and USDAW, (registered 25 October 2005). Hastings Direct (a tele-sales insurance company based in Bexhillon-Sea) provided and set up a new telephone system for the constituency office. (registered 29 May 2003). A contribution of more than 25 per cent of expenses at the 2001 General Election was made by the GMB to the Hastings & Rye CLP, (registered 5 September 2001.)

Land and Property: house owned jointly with wife in St. Leonards-onSea, from which rental income is received.

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down as both a credit and a debit item in a journal. Using a simple example from Robert Price’s book: ‘if a trader sold a boat for $100 in cash, he entered a debit of $100 in his asset column and a credit of $100 in his liabilities column’. At all times, debits and credits have to be equal and if the two sides don’t balance then it indicates a mistake on the ledger.

If the trader then ‘signed a contract to sell to another company one boat each year for ten years, with each boat costing $100’, the accountant ‘would only be able to record the $100 debit (and credit) for the sale once each year’.

However, under the more ‘creative’ mark-to-market system, the accountant can estimate the total value of the ten-year deal at any price he chooses. Although the projected income is $1000, the accountant can put a net present value on the deal of say $800 in the ledger right away, matched by an $800 liability on the balance sheet.

Still with me? Because here comes the magic trick. You’ve probably spotted that the boat seller doesn’t actually receive $800 in cash up front, he only has $100 from the sale of the first boat and a promise from the buyer to purchase another boat each year over the next nine years. Also, being a smart

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businessman, the seller knows that the price of the boats is likely to go up, and in three years time a boat now selling for $100 might be going for $150.

This means that under the mark-tomarket accounting method, the accountant can now increase the value of the ten-year contract and book all the revenue immediately. Much more impressive than the old fashioned accrual system, which would only record a single $100 sale.

Just think of the Christmas bonuses that the managing director and accountant can negotiate for themselves when they show off these new figures to the company board.

Even the shareholders will get a warm glow and think that everything is going well.

What’s this got to do with local government? Well, some councils are guilty of a similar legerdemain in some of their announcements about local regeneration plans.

Take Hastings, for example, which initially announced over £400 million of regeneration funds for the town.

Looked at more closely, the government only originally committed itself to £38 million in regeneration funds over a three-year period. This may (or may not) lever the remaining £362 million from the private and public sectors over the following ten years.

Certainly, some more money has been committed, but nowhere near the £400 million originally announced. The original figure was, in fact, totally hypothetical and could be badly thrown off course by outside events — wars, spiralling energy prices, interest-rate hikes, economic slow-downs, and competition for funds to complete infrastructure projects for the London Olympics by 2012. Shades of markto-market accounting techniques utilised by Council spin doctors, or what?

As one letter-writer to the Hastings and St.Leonards Observer pointed out, it’s a bit like going into the corner

newsagent, buying a Lotto ticket, stepping outside and declaring at the top of your voice ‘I’ve won! I’m a millionaire!’ You may indeed become a millionaire but don’t give up the day job just yet. TN Power Struggle

GAS AND HOT AIR

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eaders of the previous issue of The Hastings Trawler may recall the scam operated by gas and electricity supplier Utilitas whereby they were sending out vastly overinflated estimates to consumers and receiving an interest free loan from their customers.

Since then things have only gone from bad to worse, as the financially troubled power supply company has tried to claw back yet more money from its unsuspecting clients.

At the end of September 2005 Utilitas wrote to all its domestic customers with an enclosed and belated copy of its Terms and Conditions and Codes of Practice. The letter pointed out that the company would have to increase its prices and would be applying a surcharge ‘as a result of a disruption to energy markets (like Hurricane Katrina) that may occur in the future and temporarily raise prices to high levels’.

I had no idea that my gas and electricity came from New Orleans!

In reality, the price rises had nothing to do with the hurricane but were due to the inability of Utilitas to maintain its position within the highly competitive power-supply market, having signed up hundreds of thousands of customers at unsustainably low rates. Here was a company with experience in supplying one commodity (phone lines) jumping onto a power-supply bandwagon which it didn’t understand, nor have the expertise to manage profitably.

At the end of November 2005 Utilitas then wrote to its customers informing them that the surcharge

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would amount to approximately 10 per cent on top of most people’s bills and this would be automatically added to their December statement.

The company was now making the excuse that the price rises were caused by ‘cold weather and a number of industry factors’. What cold weather?

In reality the UK had one of the mildest autumns ever on record, and the real reason for the problem was the shortage of supply and the unethical manipulation of the market by certain big players in the industry.

While Utilitas was so busy raising prises and adding surcharges it failed to inform its customers that it was actually in danger of going out of business. In reality the firm was simultaneously getting ready to bail out of the power-supply sector altogether and was finalising negotiations to hand over its entire client list to a completely different power-supply company, EDF Energy.

So now all existing Utilitas customers will find themselves automatically getting bills from EDF, and guess what? Yup, you got it, the prices have shot up yet again!

Depending on the amount of power you previously used with Utilitas, gas prices may now be up to 33 per cent higher, and electricity prices almost 23 per cent higher.

This makes EDF Energy one of the highest-priced power suppliers in the market and I would encourage all users to go on-line to one of the consumer choice websites (such as www.theenergyshop.com or www.uswitch.com) and find out who is the cheapest gas and electricity supplier in their area.

Quite what the sick, elderly, or poor consumers are supposed to do if they don’t have access to the internet, I don’t know. But that’s all part of the government’s drive for a ‘Darwinist’ free and unregulated energy market, where the well-off and technologically literate take advantage of being ‘ratetarts’ by shopping around for the best deal. Meanwhile, the rest of you will

just have to continue to pay through the nose as usual! TN Water mess

THE AMUSING MR DAWSON

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ave you ever wondered what happens to stand-up comedians when they die? Do they go to some ethereal chuckle-factory in the sky, or are they re-incarnated as a Chief Executive for one of our privatised utility companies? Les Dawson appears to have turned up as the head of our local outfit, Southern Water, which supplies about a million households with water and treats/recycles dirty water for two million homes in the region.

The only difference is that it’s no joking matter that last year the company received over 8,000 complaints from customers who did not get adequate responses to their grievances concerning bills, enquiries and other services.

To give it its due, Southern Water took the problem seriously and reported the failure to the Water Industry watchdog, OFWAT. Back in October 2005 it also launched an investigation involving a specialist team of independent investigators who are currently reviewing thousands of paper records and examining millions of microfilmed details of customer correspondence.

The problem relates to the operation of Southern Water’s Guaranteed Standard Scheme, which promises to make payments to customers if it does not reply to letters within certain time-scales. It pledges to make payments of between £25 and £35 where there has been an exceptional delay. The investigative team is identifying those consumers who should have been paid, but were not. So far, over £50,000 has been posted off — and more is anticipated.

Originally, it was anticipated that inquiries would be completed by the end of 2005, but the company is now unable to say when the exhaustive study will end. Six members of its

Customer Service staff who were originally sent home on fully-paid ‘gardening leave’ have since been joined by a further four employees.

The Serious Fraud Office was also informed about the inconsistencies, but so far they do not appear to have launched any official investigation — watch this space!

Before you start feeling sorry for the travails of Mr. Dawson and Southern Water, it’s worth considering a few facts. The latest financial figures reveal the company had an annual turnover of £475 million and showed a profit, after tax, of £67.2 million. It managed to pay out a total dividend of £803.57 per ordinary share (down from a whopping £1,017.11 per share in 2004!). On top of this it paid out a further £13.7 million in preference share dividends. That’s a grand total of £58.7 million in dividends to shareholders.

The twelve Board Members, including the amusing Mr. Dawson, did rather well too, and managed to trouser a total of £1,765,000 between them. The highest-paid member of the Board getting £254,000 — down from a mere £331,000 the previous year! But they did approve charitable donations by the company to the value of £53,000 — so it’s not all one way.

This is the same firm that has a black-hole of £98 million in its pension fund and closed its fullyfunded defined benefit scheme to new members back in April 2005.

OFWAT has just given the go-ahead for Southern Water to raise its charges over the next five years. The average bill (excluding inflation) for customers getting both water and wastewater services was £259; it will rise to £324 by year 2009/10 — that’s an increase of over 25 per cent.

We’re talking about water here, one of the basic necessities of life — are you still laughing along with Les Dawson and comedians from Southern Water?

TN

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Rip-off petrol prices

CONSUMERS FIGHT BACK

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f like me you are fed up with paying rip-off prices for your petrol or diesel, then take a couple of minutes to read the following and you may be able to save a couple of quid every time you fill your tank.

A new website at www.petrolprices.com will tell you where the cheapest fuel (leaded, unleaded, diesel, lpg etc) is in our area — depending on whether you want to travel 5, 10, 15, or 20 miles to fill up.

To access the information, all you have to do is go on-line and register — which is free.

Hastings appears to be a particularly expensive place to buy fuel. ASDA at Eastbourne is regularly one of the cheapest suppliers in the area, although Morrisons on Queens Road is often only a penny or two more and has a loyalty card scheme where points are collected for fuel purchase which can then be used to save money in the supermarket. Other suppliers can sometimes compete — its worth checking the website regularly as prices do change. TN City and Guilds

THE UNTOUCHABLES

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e British are a funny race when you think about how the media builds up so-called ‘celebrities’ and then the vociferous tabloids come along and tear them down again. Yet some personalities and institutions, usually attached to our heritage, do break the rule and appear to be completely off-limits for any criticism, indeed any negative comments whatsoever. I’m thinking about people like the late Queen Mother and authorities such as the National Trust.

Another of these ‘Untouchables’ appears to be that pillar of the British 8

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educational establishment, the City and Guilds of London Institute.

Founded back in 1876, a registered charity, incorporated by Royal Charter and having Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, as its current President.

Most readers probably don’t know much about this august body apart from the fact that they have become a household name and are responsible for ‘encouraging education and training in, and for, the workplace’.

In fact, according to recent consumer surveys, one in five households has a City and Guilds qualification. Their website also reveals they are the leading vocational awarding body in the UK, awarding almost 50 per cent of all National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). That makes them very important in the field of education and training and, by default, at the core of the regeneration industry which seeks to rebuild deprived communities, lift people out of ignorance, and give them the skills to improve their lives and change the towns where they live.

In reality, City and Guilds is no longer that cosy-sounding benevolent educational ‘uncle’ who used to help us all get through our apprenticeships. Nowadays, under its Director General, Chris Humphries CBE, it’s an organisation that’s gone global with an annual turnover of £60-million and directly employing over 700 people. There are more than 8,500 approved City and Guilds centres worldwide, offering over 500 qualifications in twenty-two sectors of industry and commerce. From agriculture to hairdressing, from IT to vehicle maintenance, health-andcare to community services. It’s even beginning to sound like a huge multinational in its publicity: ‘altogether the City and Guilds Group awards over one million certificates every year’.

And. like a huge multinational. it suffers from hubris, secretiveness, and

a lack of public accountability, as it colludes with the government and educational establishment over the stealthy privatisation of skills training within this country.

Harsh words for a story that the educational press has either conveniently overlooked or is so far out of touch that it isn’t even aware is happening. Never mind £3000 a year to get a degree, what they aren’t telling you is that it can now cost £15,000 just to get an NVQ! Don’t believe me? Then go on-line and Google ‘NVQ Plumbing’ to see for yourself what options are available.

The plumbing skills’ shortage is the one leading the charge in the secret privatisation of further education within Britain. The Deputy Prime Minister himself has made all sorts of promises concerning the construction of hundreds of thousands of desperately-needed new homes and the upgrading of the energy-efficiency of millions of existing ones. In reality, there just aren’t the number of qualified plumbers to actually meet any of his targets — mainly due to the pending retirement of the last generation of tradesmen who passed through the old apprenticeship system before it was eviscerated by Margaret Thatcher’s educational reforms.

The sad truth is that skills-training, especially within the construction trades such as plumbing and electrics, is in crisis. In the academic years 2001-04, the Learning and Skills Council paid out almost £63-million to FE colleges across the nation to run plumbing courses. Hastings College alone received over £622,000 of this money. This simply hasn’t produced anyway near the number of fully qualified plumbers required and threatens the very future of the entire building and property maintenance sectors. And never mind completing the projects for the London Olympics — but don’t worry, wellpaid British plumbers and blow-ins from Eastern Europe will make sure

FORUM

that these schemes are finished on time. Just don’t expect to buy a new home or get your old boiler replaced in the two years prior to 2012.

Two areas in particular have exacerbated the skills’ shortage. One is the reluctance of colleges to pay decent salaries to attract older qualified and experienced tradesmen to give up working on the tools to become lecturers and outside assessors for students in the workplace. Last year, Hastings College was offering less than £15,000 pa — an insult, when you consider they are perfectly happy to pay less ‘useful’ administrators £55,000 each and a Principal over £96,000! Secondly, there is a chronic shortage of plumbing firms willing to take on new apprentices. Why? Ask them and you will get some very interesting answers, but this government doesn’t even want to ask the question.

Instead, they have gone for the quick-fix, secretive, privatisation option. FE colleges currently offer NVQ Plumbing courses over a two/three-year period at a wide variety of fees, ranging from a few hundred pounds to £4,000 each for NVQs 2 and 3. Recently, a plethora of so-called private ‘training’ organisations have jumped on the band-wagon and are offering the same courses for up to £15,000. These new courses last just months, not years, and are frequently offered under the auspices of our gogetting City and Guilds Institute — not slow to see a market opportunity when it comes along.

Where does this leave those students currently enrolled in the FE system or those who can’t afford the excessive fees of the new private trainers? They are up the swanny, or should I say, more appropriately, down the plughole!

In particular, the chronic shortage of qualified FE plumbing lecturers and outside assessors (now exacerbated by the growth of new private sector trainers) has seen a number of colleges, including Hastings College of Arts

and Technology have their NVQ Plumbing accreditation suspended by City and Guilds.

City and Guilds have been asked which colleges in the UK have had their NVQ accreditation status removed or suspended in the past 12 months and what is the NVQ subject area.

Their reponse?: ‘City and Guilds is not a public body for the purposes of the Freedom of Information Act and therefore we cannot and will not, entertain any application to us for the disclosure of information under that Act’ You wouldn’t expect to get a such a reply from their legal department — just what are they really hiding? TN Sea-Space Saga

UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BURTONST.LEONARDS SOCIETY

I

have to admit I’m not into cruel sports and was a bit surprised by a recent ‘blooding’ given by members of the Burton St.Leonards Society and others. This excitement occurred at a talk given on Saturday 14 January by Abigail Gilbert, the Communications officer for Sea Space Ltd — the development company currently responsible for the £1.7m revamp of the Marina Pavilion in St.Leonards.

The poor woman had come along with the project architect to provide an update on progress and answer a few simple questions. It was a classic case of ‘shooting the messenger’ as the meeting was somewhat taken over by local residents and business operators (some of whom may or may not have been members of the Society). Many attendees, out of seventy or so at the meeting, were clearly very upset and angry that the scheme had been granted planning permission and was going ahead despite their objections.

Most vocal among the anti-lobby was Hazel Lambe, manager of the nearby Kollege Kantina, who stated that the project ‘was a misuse of public funds, which would put existing local operators out of business.’ Other people objected to the proposed building’s architectural style and choice of materials.

Questions were also raised about who were the directors of Sea Space Ltd, and what arrangements were planned for property leases and the distribution of any profits.

Talk about shooting the fox after it has bolted — the animal is practically in the next county! Look behind you!, the bloody structure is up and only the lack of a contractor is stopping the project’s completion!

However, I was surprised nobody asked more obvious questions like, ‘who is going to use this new restaurant given the high crime levels in that part of St. Leonards? Which particular gourmet chef will be willing to gamble his future on a long-term lease in such a dodgy location given that the Stade’s upmarket (and better located restaurant proposal) has already been canned for being unviable?’

I also felt rather sorry for the fox, sorry I mean Ms. Gilbert, and wondered if it would have been kinder to just shoot her as she walked into the room carrying her overhead projector.

What is Sea Space going to do to ensure that the worst fears of people like Ms.Lambe are never realised?

Very conspicuous by his absence was Sea Space Chief Executive, John Shaw, or indeed any Board member from Hastings and Bexhill Renaissance Ltd. They clearly prefer to sacrifice underpaid junior members of staff to the bloodhounds, rather than upset their precious weekends and expose themselves to any kind of public scrutiny — they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

TN

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

9

TRANSPORT

On the buses!

by Peter Roe

astings bus service has a poor image. Glance through the local press most weeks and you’ll find somebody, somewhere, complaining about late night safety, service cuts, reliability, frequency, route coverage.

A recent independent survey of public transport acknowledged a climate of ‘poor publicity’ for Hastings buses.

And one senior bus company spokesman admitted ruefully to The Trawler “We do get a lot of stick.”

So exactly how bad is the Hastings bus service?

And is there a better solution to getting around our narrow streets and steep hills than a lumbering great bus?

The Trawler looked at the facts....

East Sussex County Council subsidises Hastings buses to the tune of around £1 million a year, though some of that bankrolls out-of-town services to places like Tunbridge Wells, Maidstone and Cranbrook.

The cash helps pay for 58 buses, which last year carried a staggering 4.9 million passengers on journeys totalling 2.2 million miles. And the numbers are growing. 2005 saw a 7 per cent increase in passengers on the town’s buses — the biggest rise anywhere in East Sussex.

The biggest test of a transport system is not how it is perceived by non-user experts, but what those who depend on it for everyday travel say.

H

10

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|February ‘06

Hastings’ bus service scores well there.

East Sussex County Council, Hastings Borough Council and Stagecoach — the bus operator — recently funded a survey of the town’s bus service by independent analysts Peter Brett Associates. It found that 59 per cent of all Hastings bus users were ‘satisfied or very satisfied’ with the service — well above the national average.

The survey compared Hastings to ten other towns of similar size and population — Eastbourne, Lincoln, Worthing and Harlow among others — and placed it ‘average or better’ in key areas like ticket prices, town centre departures and evening and Sunday services.

Other studies show average waiting time for a bus is 30 minutes across the whole town and only ten minutes in much of it — again comparing well with similar towns.

One local transport expert told the Trawler: ‘Hastings presents big problems to public transport planners because it doesn’t have large volumes of people who want to go from A to B — nothing as simple as a mass of people from a residential area all wanting to go to the same industrial estate to work.

‘The passengers are very scattered, and so are the places they want to go to, which makes it hard to please all

the people all the time.’

Given geographic, employment and population problems, then, it seems the Hastings bus service really isn’t as bad as the press it gets.

Which begs the question — is there a better way to move a scattered population around the area?

Certainly the Pub Pundits think so.

Three popular solutions are mooted wherever amateur experts meet — the obvious one of more buses; radiocontrolled dial-a-bus; and the banning of buses altogether in favour of a subsidised taxi service.

The Trawler looked at all three.

The town’s traffic planners cite the universally-cursed A259 to Bexhill as an example of why more buses wouldn’t necessarily help. Traffic on the route can be so bad it actually causes an air-quality problem at busy times. So it seems an obvious step to use more buses and avoid the oneperson-to-a-car jams.

Our expert said: ‘Lengthy study showed the majority of the traffic was local people going to many different places off the actual A259. So more buses wouldn’t help. People simply wouldn’t use them.’

What about those nice, neat taxibuses then? The ones that come and get you?

East Sussex County Council launched the Hollington Arrow service just over a year ago. The idea is that you ring a central number and arrange to be picked up by a 12-seater, radio-controlled bus.

ESCC says figures so far show an average of 70 bookings a day for the service, half of which are regular work or school journeys not served by other routes.

The Council paid out £65,000 for the service over the year — which works out at a startling £6 per passenger journey. An ESCC spokesman said: ‘The Arrow service is vital to a small number of people. It works well in an urban area, but is unlikely to work in rural areas where communities are more disparate and bookings less regular.’

‘Cherry-picking’ is a major problem

TRANSPORT

for a bus company. Buses work best when they’re full of people who want to go from A to B. They’re at their worst when one or two people want to go to and from every letter of the alphabet.

Dial-a-bus has been tried — and has failed — in other parts of the country.

A spokesman for Stagecoach — the operator that runs both the Arrows and the Hastings bus service — said: ‘We ran it for about 18 months in Corby, Northamptonshire, before closing the service down as being economically unviable.

‘We gave it a good launch, with door to door leaflets, posters, adverts in the local press — but it just didn’t develop.

‘People just didn’t use it. Despite our best efforts they seemed confused by it, and used local taxis instead. We had a real problem in getting information on the service out to the public. That’s not to say it won’t work elsewhere — that's just what we found in Corby.’

One problem dial-a-bus shares with conventional buses is that it will usually pick-up and drop-you-off at a spot convenient to the majority. You’ll still have to walk up that steep hill with your groceries.

So, we ban buses and use that £1 million subsidy money to promote taxis?

Hastings has 48 taxis — technically, cabs that can be flagged down or hired from a taxi rank — and 146 privatehire vehicles — cars you can just ring up and book.

Local traffic experts see taxis as a valuable addition to a transport system, but not as the answer.

One told the Trawler: ‘No urban local authority wants to see more cars on the roads, for obvious environmental reasons. Motorists don’t want more congestion either.

The roads are crowded enough already.

Yet more cars would be against all perceived wisdom.

‘We’ll continue to try and move as many people as possible in as few vehicles as possible.’

The Trawler’s conclusions?

We have a bus service that is actually average or slightly better than

1925-2006 - TRAIN TIMES FROM HASTINGS It’s interesting to compare the times of trains from Hastings today with those of over eighty years ago, when engines were all steam-driven and before men had landed on the moon. The good news is that Hastings to Charing Cross is now considerably faster (by about three-quarters of an hour), and Hastings to Ashford is also quicker (by about a quarter of an hour). The bad news is that Hastings to Cannon Street hasn’t changed, and Hastings to Brighton is even slower today (by between 11-17 minutes).

Hastings – Charing Cross Dep Hastings Arrive Charing Cross Time 1925 Timetable 6-55am 9-27am 2-32 minutes 10-10am 11-55am 2-45 minutes 2006 Timetable 7-02am 8-48am 1-46 minutes 10-33am 12-03pm 1-30 minutes Dep Hastings 6-26am 9-10am 6-29am 9-34am Dep Hastings 6-55am 7.35am 7-02am 7-24am Dep. Hastings 6-35am 9-30am 6-21am 9-26am

Hastings – Ashford Arrive Ashford 1925 Timetable 7-30am 10-07am 2006 Timetable 7-11am 10-15am Hastings – Cannon St Arrive Cannon St 1925 Timetable 8-52am 9-16am 2006 Timetable 8-59am 9-06am Hastings – Brighton Arrive Brighton 1925 Timetable 7-44am 10-31am 2006 Timetable 7-39am 10-44am

average when compared like-for-like with others across the country.

Even the most advanced bus service is useless unless people know how to use it. The catchily-named Quality Bus Partnership that runs the Hastings buses might gain as much from improving access to bus timetables as it has from improving access to the buses themselves.

Time 1-04 minutes 0-57 minutes 0-42 minutes 0-41 minutes Time 1-57 minutes 1-41 minutes 1-57 minutes 1-42 minutes Time 1-09 minutes 1-01 minutes 1-18 minutes 1-18 minutes

And until somebody invents the matter transmitter, any public transport system will struggle to cope with a disparate mass of individuals who all want to go in different directions to different places at different times.

Do you have a view on public transport in Hastings? Or a suggestion for improving it? Drop The Trawler a line.....

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

11

PROFILE — LIANE CARROL

Liane Carrol: Jazz Queen of the South

by Joy Melville

R

onnie Scott’s, the everpopular jazz club in London’s Soho, was crammed and buzzing. As I levered myself into the only empty space, the woman next to me whispered, ‘Are you here for Liane Carroll? Isn’t she marvellous. She’s got the technique of Ella Fitzgerald and the heart and spirit of Billie Holiday’.

When Liane came on, in black trousers and top, her breezy personality practically blew you apart. Head down, ear-rings swinging and swaying to the music, she launched her deep, resonant, smoky-jazz voice into Hit Me Daddy with the Big Iron Bar, accompanying herself on the piano. ‘Make the most of it while I’m sober’, she said, in between songs. ‘No, I’m just joking’.

The audience cheered and thumped the tables in delight at her performance — hardly surprising, given Liane’s recent success in winning the twin awards of best vocalist/best of jazz in the 2005 BBC Jazz Awards.

The dim amber lights and clink of glasses seemed light years away from seaside Hastings. Yet though her early childhood was in London, Liane and her family moved to Hastings when she was 12 and, with a few gaps, she has lived in Hastings ever since. She went to the High School there, and loves the town.

‘After being in London I can’t wait to hear the seagulls in the morning’ she says. ‘I love the Old Town of Hastings, it’s a melting pot: the fishermen, the many musicians, artists, and sculptors. I often compose my own songs, but, emotionally, writing songs is a lonesome thing. It’s fun, but 12

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|February ‘06

exposing. Sometimes I need to turn off and watch telly. But the community and all the friends Roger and I have are like a blanket, you feel creative. Music is always going on in my head. I can still hear it when going for a walk over the fields’.

Liane’s Irish father was a singer.

‘And my mum, who still lives in Hastings, was a wonderful singer,’ says Liane. ‘She used to sing with the Ken Macintosh band in the fifties at the Hammersmith Palais. And when I was growing up, we used to sing together in the car’.

Liane can remember playing the piano at three. ‘We were passing Chapples, the music shop in London, and there were all these pianos. They sat me down and I was off. But we couldn’t afford a piano till I was six. Then on Christmas Day this lovely piano arrived with candelabras. After mum and dad split up, mum put the piano in the conservatory, which was really a lean-to of corrugated iron.

As a child in London she studied with the concert pianist Phyllis Catling then, on moving to Hastings, transferred to Margaret Skelhorn. ‘She was a marvellous piano teacher’, says Liane, ‘a real gentle soul, very encouraging and creative. She used to have the two pianos back to back’.

Liane decided to leave school at 18 and work in a music shop, selling and demonstrating musical instruments. ‘In the evening I joined a band called Gemini, a jazz funk band. I had been composing a lot of stuff and I became bored with what I had to practise, like Bach. I wanted to do something a bit swingy, so I made something up. It was such a

learning experience, improvising, and the whole band was beautifully patient with me. I was stiff, playing on the first beat of the bar, and they said, “Why don’t you anticipate it?”

It was my first lesson in learning about jazz. It sounded far more groovy and by working, doing solo gigs, and being around jazz people, you pick up snippets all the time. I realised that this was what I really wanted to do’.

However, Liane married at 19 and moved up north to Yorkshire to live on a boat for two years. The marriage failed and she returned to Hastings with her new baby girl, Abbey. ‘Then I got together with Roger and I started work at the Grand Hotel at Eastbourne, singing with the dance band at night. It enabled me to look after Abbey and still practise music.

Liane first met her husband Roger when she was 15 and he was 24. He was born and bred in Hastings and Liane says ‘I fell in love with him because I thought he looked like Jesus, with his long hair and beard. I met him again when I was 21 and we’ve been together ever since. He is a professional bass player and has been so supportive. I am very difficult to live with — “it’s your artistic temperament” my mum says — and we used to play together all the time but that wasn’t such a good idea. Now we both have different projects, play together about 50 to 60 per cent of the time and it’s really nice’.

After Liane returned to Hastings, she joined Trevor Watts’ band, Moire Music. ‘One day he said to me he had a couple of gigs booked in America for 1988. I said, how much

Liane Carroll by Scott Ramsey pictures@scottramsey.co.uk

PROFILE — LIANE CARROLL

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

13

PROFILE — LIANE CARROLL

Liane Carroll by Scott Ramsey pictures@scottramsey.co.uk

will it cost me? And he said, ‘YOU will get paid’. And I left England and through travelling got the confidence to start working with my own band’.

Liane’s first gig was in Hastings, the Liane Carroll trio. ‘That was very scary,’ she says, ‘as there were two other people to think about. It was hit and miss and I was quite wild in those days, experimenting. I remember the Times reviewer saying, “I am waiting for this woman to find her own voice”. And I agreed with him, I was waiting too — and I still am. But I am finding myself now and feeling more comfortable within myself ’.

In the last five or six years Liane has done some teaching, which, she says, ‘is really nice, I love it. I go once a year down to Mexico to this ranch in the grounds of a sacred mountain and teach people singing, and I do this as well in Glamorgan and the south of France. I am not an academic. I get them to sing: a lot are nervous, but I get quite exuberant and you throw them together en masse and in half an hour you can’t shut them up. I get people to learn how to find their own voice and that’s important’.

Liane’s latest album is Standard Issue (Splash Point), recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. Steve Rubie, a London club owner, considers her one of his all-time

14

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|February ‘06

favourites: ‘She has a remarkable delivery, powerful and soulful, but at the same time she can sing a ballad to make you cry’.

You are very conscious when you meet Liane that as well as being fun, she’s incredibly straightforward and direct. It comes out in her songs and in her patter between songs. ‘I was never shy,’ she says. ‘I was encouraged to be honest and wear my heart on my sleeve. I used to run down the street singing’.

It wouldn’t at all surprise me to see Liane do that today. At 41, she’s still effervescent, loving life. ‘I am never going to leave Hastings’, she says. ‘I play at Porters, the wine bar in the High Street on Wednesday nights if I’m not away, on a lovely old piano.

I’ve been playing there for 17 years and they are very kind and let me do my own thing. It’s my local and everyone is very friendly there’.

However, she is excited about the future: ‘The jazz awards, which were a big shock, have opened up a lot for me’. She is working in various trios, including one called Holy Guatamole, with electric piano, double bass and drum. And her daughter is expecting a baby. ‘What I’m really looking forward to’, she says, ‘is being a groovy grandmother’.

Joy Melville is a well-known journalist and author. She has written for The Guardian, Financial Times and Sunday Times, and has had a range of health books published. Her biographies include 'The Mother of Oscar', 'Julia Margaret Cameron' and, out this Spring, 'Ellen Terry'.

LIANE CARROLL DISCOGRAPHY

CLEARLY (1995): Bridge Recordings (BRDG CD 19) DOLLYBIRD Live at Ronnie Scott’s (1997) Ronnie Scott Jazz House (JHCD 051) SON OF DOLLYBIRD Live at Ronnie Scott’s (2001) Ronnie Scott Jazz House (JHCD 068) BILLY NO-MATES (Solo Album 2003): Splashpoint Records (SPR 001 CD) STANDARD ISSUE (Latest album recorded at Abbey Road Studios, 2005): Splashpoint Records (SPR 003 CD) HASTINGS JAZZ & BLUES VENUES

1066 Jazz Club: Phoenix Arts Centre. Parkstone Road, Hastings Tel: 01424 448200 Bar Blue: St Leonards sea front.

Tel: 01424 435100 Black Horse Inn: Telham (on the A2100 between Hastings and Battle) Tel: 01424 777767 Blue Jazz Company: South Terrace, Hastings.Tel: 01424 729417 Blue Monday: The Hastings Arms, 2 George Street. Hastings Old Town British Legion: Bexhill Tel: 01424 212215 Hastings Angling Club: (on the sea front, Hastings Old Town) Tel: 01424 729174 Pissarros: 10 South Terrace, Hastings. Tel: 01424 421363 Porters: 56 High Street, Hastings Old Town. Tel: 01424 427000 The Stag: All Saints Street, Hastings Old Town. www.thestag.org

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15

FOOD

Organic (mine)fields Rachael Glazier

ORGANIC FOOD IS OFTEN LUXURY MIDDLE-CLASS

SEEN AS A WITH

ITS

OPPONENTS POINTING TO A LACK OF RESEARCH PROVING ITS HEALTH BENEFITS AND FREQUENTLY EXORBITANT PRICES FOR SEEMINGLY LOW-QUALITY PRODUCTS.

THERE’S

A

LOT

OF

INFORMATION

FLOATING AROUND, AND TRYING TO MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF IT CAN BE A COMPLICATED PROCESS.

THE

TOPIC HAS

TOO MANY FACETS TO EXPLORE IN DEPTH HERE,

BUT

SOME

OF

THE

MORE

IMPORTANT ISSUES WILL BE ADDRESSED, STARTING WITH PRICE AND QUALITY.

E

veryone is aware that the identical, glossy fruits and veg grown by conventional means are not the result of a special farming technique but instead involves the dumping of less than perfect specimens — produce that while not looking the belle of the aisles, is still, in nutrition and taste terms, identical to the selected ones. While supermarkets have claimed that they are simply responding to British shoppers’ shallow tendencies to buy on the basis of looks, the phenomenal growth of the organic sector with its misshapen potatoes, matt apples and insectcovered lettuces has disproved that.

This does not, however, excuse the selling of bruised and battered fruit at premium prices. This practice, following a highly unscientific recent survey of the shops, does at least appear to be dying out in Brighton, as owners realise that selling damaged produce in order to rake back some of 16

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|February ‘06

their expenditure is a short-sighted strategy. People dislike being made fools of, and being asked to pay top prices for fruit that is ready for the compost heap creates a bad image for the organic industry as a whole. One shop in Hampstead, London, makes a point of buying fresh organic fruit and veg every morning at New Covent

...Of particular interest is the finding that there has been a decline in the mineral levels in fruit and vegetables in the past 50 years...

Garden Market, saying that customers expect a certain standard, and anything less is an embarrassment that ultimately will eat away at their customer base. None of the shops in Brighton were selling anything less than top-quality food, a marked improvement on a year ago, and a sign that selling organic food does not

mean that less commercial sense is required.

The price of organic food is a common bugbear, hence its label as a middle-class luxury. The price is a reflection of the work that goes into producing the food — Friends of the Earth estimates that an extra 3045,000 jobs would be created if just a quarter of the UK farming industry converted to organic production.

With high levels of unemployment in parts of the countryside, this seems an option that would benefit more than just the consumers. The percentage of people’s income that goes on food is much lower today compared with 50 years ago, and while not advocating that we go back to the 1950s, paying a reasonable sum for food that allows workers to be paid properly and animals to be treated to a high level of welfare is hardly asking too much.

The most expensive part of shopping organically tends to be meat, but eating meat every day is not necessary, or particularly recommended from a nutritional point of view, despite the dropping of prices to unrealistic levels. Who really believes that £2.99 for a chicken is an adequate reflection of the amount of time, food and care that has (or should have) gone into raising it? And what about the hidden costs of cleaning up the chemicals leached into lakes, rivers and water meadows — this is incorporated into taxes and water rates, so perhaps consumers should factor this in when comparing the cost

FOOD

of organic versus non-organic food?

Processed food, while cheap and quick, is a false economy as it tends to be low in nutritional value, high in added salt, sugar, flavourings, colourings — the list goes on — whereas spending a few minutes creating a stir fry from fresh veg is hardly time-consuming and is a lowprice, healthy alternative that even a kid could throw together.

Of course, fresh fruit and veg is preferable to processed food, however pesticide residues on conventionally farmed food is a deterrent to many. A reported 50 per cent of mothers are choosing to feed their babies organic produce, irrespective of whether they themselves eat organic or not.

Research is still limited in this area, but an analysis by the Soil Association of 400 published papers found that on average, organic crops were higher in vitamin C, essential minerals and phytonutrients than non-organic crops. Of particular interest is the finding that there has been a decline in the mineral levels in fruit and vegetables in the past 50 years. Vegetables and fruit get their minerals from the soil, and conventional methods using chemical fertlisers with no set-aside (a period when the field is not farmed in order for it to rest) leaves the soil empty of nutrients and lacking in

insects that are needed to maintain biodiversity. A farm in Shropshire that has used organic methods for several decades has such a diversity of grass types and micronutrients in the soil that the meat from the cattle grazing there has been found to have higher than normal levels of omega3 oils, usually associated with oily fish.

Opponents of organic food maintain that the levels of pesticide residue on fruit and veg is minimal and well below the limits. Sir Jonathan Krebs, then Chair of the Food Standards Agency, said in a speech given to the Cheltenham Science Festival, June 2003: ‘Organic food contains fewer residues of pesticides used in conventional agriculture, so buying organic is one way to reduce chances that your food contains these pesticides. But it is also possible to produce conventionally grown fruit and vegetables with minimal residues. In fact, residues are not detected in about 70 per cent of produce sampled by the Pesticides Residue Committee. And remember that the committee tends to focus on problem crops. So, our view is that minimising residues is not just about organic versus conventional food: it’s about good practice by producers, whatever method they use.’

Until good practice regarding

pesticides can be judged from food labels in the same way that the Soil Association label provides a guarantee of certain standards, then organic seems to be the way to go for those concerned about residues. For those willing to venture beyond the supermarket, shopping locally allows consumers to question the methods used, so while not necessarily organic, the concerns regarding pesticides can be laid to rest with a quick chat to the farmer. Shopping locally also reduces food miles — buying organic food flown from halfway across the world seems absurd when there is good quality fresh produce grown nearby, and as small producers may not yet be able to afford certification from the Soil Association (the cost is on a sliding scale that takes profit into account so is not out of anyone’s reach longterm), this is where getting to know your food suppliers can be worthwhile.

Of course, there are many more topics that could be discussed, such as biodiversity, GM foods, feeding a growing world population, maintaining global wildlife habitats, declining fertility rates, rising rates of allergies and the cocktail effect of using various pesticides, but the constraints of space will have to leave this for another day.

ART EXHIBITION

ART EXHIBITION

An exhibition of recent paintings by Hastings artist Robert Sample at the Revolver Lounge in George Street, Hastings Old Town.

An exhibition of ‘black geometry’ Indian ink drawings

by Spanish artist Helios Gómez at the Dragon Bar in George St, Hastings Old Town.

Isn’t life full of little ironies?

The exhibition will run from February 1 until March 15.

The exhibition will run from March 1 until March 30.

Gomez’s black and white pen and ink drawings (1917-1939) and full-colour Spanish Civil War posters can be seen on the art and posters menu on

The exhibition includes The Hastings Trawler portrait of Aleister Crowley (January 2006)

www.tvhastings.org Exile, 1939: Helios Gómez February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

17

PLANNING

difficult to build on. The Mount Pleasant Hospital site looks more like a ski slope than a place to build new homes — and who would want to buy a house next to the near-slum of Farley Bank?.

Poor Valley

by Steve Peak

HASTINGS IS ONE OF THE TOP TEN PLACES 2006, ACCORDING TO JANUARY’S COUNTRY LIFE MAGAZINE. BUT THE REVIEW DOES NOT MENTION ORE VALLEY. THE ENVIRONMENTAL SQUALOR, SOCIAL DEPRIVATION AND TO BUY PROPERTY IN

DEPRESSING HOUSING CONDITIONS IN WHAT WAS ONCE A RURAL IDYLL WILL NOT ATTRACT

COUNTRY LIFERS. AND

CRAMMING 700 NEW HOUSES AND FLATS INTO THIS ALREADY OVERCROWDED ZONE FOR

THE

UNEMPLOYED

AND

UNEMPLOYABLE COULD DEGENERATE THE VALLEY RATHER THAN ‘REGENERATE’ IT.

T

he government-backed programme to transform Ore Valley at last shows some signs of life on the ground. Behind the project is the town-hall-backed quango SeaSpace. With £15 million from the taxpayer, their basic ideas are sound ones. The key will be the adjoining former goods yard. Here there should be a big neighbourhood centre and transport interchange, with shops and cafes and 219 new houses and flats, plus possibly a nearby technology college and health centre. On the nearby old industrial sites, including the power station and the Stills factory, will be 356 new homes. At the north end of the valley, the area around Pennine Rise will be cleared, 110 homes will be built and a new public space will be created, with shops and community facilities fronting onto it.

18

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Two new roads, utilising pieces of old ones, will run along either side of the valley to remove the many dark spots in the valley and improve communications. Work has already begun on the eastern road. Near the Mount Road end of Frederick Road, the old Mount Pleasant Hospital site has been cleared and opened up for the building of 80 homes. A hundred yards of road has been laid in the direction of Hurrell Road, with the aim of connecting the two, eventually.

But even if the 700 homes were built and sold, where would their owners work? The Ore valley project hopes there will be some new jobs in the valley — but it could never be 700. A key part of the project initially was to turn the railway into a greatly improved ‘Metro’ service linking Ore with other places with jobs, but that idea has been quietly ditched. So what will all these additional unemployed people do in this valley already notorious for its bad feelings?

And the scheme may not get that far. The problem is that present SeaSpace only has the money to buy the land and make it ready for development, but not to carry it out. It needs to join forces with privately-funded businesses who can be persuaded to gamble significant sums on steeplysloping sites notorious for being

Until the beginning of the 19th century Ore valley was farmland, a mixture of fields and woods, with a stream running down the middle. At the heart of the valley was the large Bunger Hill Farm (later partly renamed Broomgrove), at the bottom end of the track that is today Upper Broomgrove Road. The only road in the valley then was Cackle Street, renamed Frederick Road on 1904, connecting Mount Road with the Ridge Going round the edge of the valley was the main highway — the turnpike road — from Hastings to London, now called Old London Road and the Ridge. Two hundred years ago there were just a few small houses and a pub where today’s Ore village stands. The pub was popular because it stood a few yards outside the borough boundary of Hastings, and could therefore supply services that were not so easy to obtain in the town! At that time Ore (or Oare) was still seen as being the small settlement a mile to the northwest around the Saxon church at St Helens.

The modern Ore village started

Ore Valley, — SeaSpace’s vision of the future?

Ore Valley, 1829

TIMES PAST

PLANNING

appearing from 1815 onwards, as the town of Hastings mushroomed and a land speculator moved in. Hastings suddenly became a very fashionable seaside resort for a few years from 1815, and the greatly increased traffic along the Ridge brought many customers for the pub and some shops that set up. At the same time, Hastings needed many new building labourers, and these found places to live on the farmland that had been purchased by the biggest property owner in the Hastings area, Edward Milward. In 1811 he bought much of what was known as Fairlight Down, the slopes from Ore village to North’s Seat. He sold off many small parcels and cheap housing soon appeared.

The new residents, the increased road traffic and the surrounding farmland all helped form the village of Ore by early Victorian times. But in the late 1830s the village lost much of its trade when the new town of St Leonards built new London turnpike roads — including today’s Battle Road and Sedlescombe Road/A21 — that took much of the Ridge traffic away.

At the same time, the first big development was taking place in Ore valley: the building of the Hastings Union Workhouse in 1836-37 which helped create the feeling of deprivation and isolation that is the hallmark of the valley today [see separate box on page 21].

Ore — like Hollington — has always been a poor village, a home for the labourers rather than the bosses.

Most Ore people were in the building trade, and they shared some of the benefits of boom years, including the construction of the local railway network in the late 1840s and early ‘50s, and the general expansion of the whole borough through the 1860s to the early ‘80s (especially the building of the neighbouring Clive Vale estate in the later years).

But from the mid-1880s onwards the whole town started a long-term decline, growth came to a halt and extreme poverty hit the people of Ore.

In 1884 the Ore Penny Dinner Fund was started, to feed hundreds of nearstarving children with at least something of a midday meal when they were at school.

Until 1897 Ore valley was officially outside of Hastings. But then the corporation extended the town’s boundaries to take in the outlying districts of Ore and Hollington to help solve its serious financial problems. By absorbing these wellpopulated areas, the wheelers and dealers in the town hall could raise the rateable value of the borough, and thereby borrow more money to pay for their ill-fated schemes. They needed to incorporate their poor neighbours to reach the rich pickings beyond.

But the Edwardian years that followed were perhaps the worst in Ore’s history, with widespread unemployment and misery. In early 1905 a new local GP in Ore, Dr AH Huckle, said that what struck him when he started his work in the district was the utter destitution and poverty of the poor. Poverty was relative, he said; it depended not only upon the amount of money, but the purchasing power of that money, and in Hastings, unfortunately, the amount of money received by the working classes was very small. The poor of the town, he believed, were poorer and more destitute than in the worst parts of London in which he had practised. Women had become breadwinners because men’s wages were so low, if any.

The summer of 1905 was a milestone in the history of Hastings.

The building of the tramway system around the town opened up much of the new borough for development and provided a means of transporting the impoverished labourers of Ore to the building sites. A tramline ran from the Old Town through Ore, and along the Ridge.

The building of the tram system helped create a major industrial area in the lower Ore valley. Until 1888 it had

remained as farmland, with just a brickworks, but then the opening of the new Ore railway station, followed by the laying out of sidings, opened up possibilities for development. Since then the many acres around the Ore goods yard have been the setting for innumerable large and small businesses, several of a highly dubious character, and often stretching planning regulations to build the lowest quality, badly designed premises in anti-social settings almost touching neighbouring houses.

It was the building of the tramway power station in 1905 that gave the lower Ore valley the industrial image it still has. It was built at the bottom of the newly laid-out Parker Road, and from here it supplied all the borough’s trams with electricity. Its 176-feet high steel chimney was fuelled by coal delivered via the rail sidings.

More sidings were added when the Hastings electricity station was built nearby in 1926 adjoining the brick works. Hastings Council’s electricity station in Earl Street — built in 1882 — had come to the end of its life, so it was replaced with a much bigger station at Broomgrove, which was also coal-fired, via its own siding. This power station lasted four decades, being replaced in 1966 by an even bigger one, with two Rolls Royce 55megawatt gas turbine generators that could be started quickly when national demand was high or supply limited. It was used during the 1984/5 miners’ strike, after which the privatisation programme made it redundant.

Then, during the night of 15 May 2000 the power station caught fire.

About 30,000 old tyres had been dumped there, and these ignited, causing irreparable damage to the station. Demolition did not take place for over a year because of the dangers in the building, including much asbestos. It cost £1.96m to create the vacant building site it is today.

Not only have all the power stations gone, but so have the busy sidings and

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

19

PLANNING

Ore Valley, 1930s

carriage sheds that used to give a real feeling of life to Ore Station and its surroundings. In the early 1930s the station’s goods yard had big carriage sheds built for the newly-electrified Ore-Brighton line. Until the early 1980s the station played a valuable role in the local rail service, but now it is almost disused — just a couple of fenced-off platforms down the end of a long, inhospitable pathway.

It was the railway sidings, the many businesses around them and the workhouse further up the valley that helped open up the undeveloped west side of the valley for council housing between the wars. There were already privately-owned houses north of the workhouse, in and around Ore village and in all of Parker Road (built 193536).

In the late 1920s, with many local

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jobs available — unlike today — the forerunner of the Broomgrove council estates was built. But these were extraordinary houses: they were made of steel. ‘Tin Town’ as it was widely known was the new Fellows Road and Clement Hill Road, plus the west side of the existing Upper Broomgrove Road. The old house of Broomgrove, from which the area drew its name, was demolished to make way for them. The steel houses were very cold in the winter, with frost and damp on the inside as well as outside, and were exceptionally hot — like an oven, it was said— in the summer months.

They were replaced in the early 1960s by the more conventional houses that stand there today.

Work on the main Broomgrove estate began in the mid-1960s, but the construction companies found it very

difficult because of the hillside terrain.

This is why many of the buildings are positioned on top of artificial slopes.

By 1967 many residents had moved into homes on an unfinished estate which still resembled a building site, without proper roads.

The Broomgrove estate looked much as it does today by the end of the 1960s.

On the east side of the valley, the lower-quality Farley Bank estate was built several years later.

The biggest building in Ore valley has been the catering equipment manufacturer WM Still and Sons. It was built on the allotments on the west side of Fellows Road, dominating all the adjoining houses and gardens (although almost invisible from Parker Road). The first part of this factory went up in the mid-1960s. The name ‘Stills’ became internationally known Continued on page 24

PLANNING

HASTINGS WORKHOUSE

first site, where a new workhouse was built from 1900-03, at cost of £46,000, half that feared for Elphinstone Road.

The Edwardian years brought huge numbers to the workhouse. In January 1908 there were 433 inmates living there and 150 overnight ‘casuals’ (tramps and job-seekers). All lived in harsh conditions, although not quite as bad as in the early Victorian years.

Casuals had to break up large stones in order to earn their food and bed. If they refused they could be sent to Lewes prison.

In 1930 the government scrapped the workhouse system, with such establishments being recognised as hospitals as well as places for the unemployed and disadvantaged. The Hastings Workhouse was renamed the Municipal Hospital, although it remained known as just ‘the workhouse’ for many years. The 1946 National Health Service Act brought major reforms, including separating hospital functions from traditional workhouse aid for casuals.

In 1948 the former workhouse was renamed St Helen’s Hospital, and over the following decades it became a friendly and well-remembered institution. Its staff were popular — and that included the management!

Unfortunately in the mid-1990s St Helen’s and most other Hastings hospitals were replaced by the bureaucrats dreamland, the Conquest Hospital. By 1998 all the 1903 workhouse on the west side of Frederick Road had been demolished and is now a housing estate.

Christmas Day in Ore workhouse (1910)

For the better-off people of Hastings, Ore valley has often been out of sight and out of mind. In the 1830s it was also outside the town’s boundaries, and so, when the local establishment were told they had to build a big new workhouse, the site they chose was a chicken farm near the bottom of the valley, where the good folk would not see the building and the impoverished people who used it.

The government ordered the building of the new type of workhouse following the Captain Swing riots of 1830/1 in which rural workers took violent direct action against farm owners and their new machines. The 15,000 parishes had to form groups (‘unions’) and replace their small individual workhouses with a much bigger single one. The new unions were also ordered to be much harder on the unemployed and homeless who wanted to use the new workhouses, making them prefer to work harder for less wages rather than enter these inhospitable prison-like structures The nationwide Captain Swing riots had started in the countryside immediately to the north and east of Hastings, and in neighbouring Kent.

The disturbances so threatened the British establishment that The Hastings Union comprised 14 parishes in and around the town. Their first meeting was in July 1835, but within just 24 months they bought the land, built the workhouse and opened its doors. On its first day, the old parish

workhouses transferred 160 paupers, half of them from Hastings old town.

The tramps, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, the orphans — all were now over the hill and far away.

A large part of the original 1837 building still stands, on the east side of Frederick Road, near Clifton Road, having recently been converted into private housing.

After just 30 years the Hastings Workhouse was severely criticised by Whitehall’s Poor Law Board for its many ‘serious defects’. It had been run in the cheapest possible way, with little regard to the needs of the sick inmates.

A guilty conscience forced the Board of Guardians that ran the workhouse to build a new 60-bed infirmary, which also can still be seen, alongside Frederick Road.

By the mid-1880s, however, unemployment had increased dramatically in Hastings and it was clear a much bigger workhouse was needed.

In 1885 the guardians started trying to buy nine acres of fields on the other side of Frederick Road. But then, in 1886, they suddenly abandoned the scheme and bought a site double that size in Elphinstone Road. This provoked widespread public opposition, not least because the whole project could cost up to £100,000.

In 1891 new guardians abandoned the Elphinstone Road project, but were left with a bill for £15,000 for what the Hastings News called a ‘great financial blunder’. Eventually the site was sold in 1920 to Hastings Council and it became the Pilot Field football pitch.

The guardians then went back to the

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

21

PLANNING — ANOTHER STADE CONSULTATION

Deja vu — again!

Anna Mason

H

ow disappointing to attend yet another consultation to discuss the development of the Stade Coach Park and to be asked to consider the very same ideas already so decisively kicked in to touch at all previous consultations.

Is the debacle over the SLUG and the TADPOLE about to be repeated?

Time moves on, and unfortunately the Consultants’ brief is stuck firmly in the past. To recap: a new build visitor/interpretative/information centre with attached shop, up-market fish restaurant and public toilets, topped off this time with an 80-bed budget hotel instead of an art gallery.

The same concerns came back to haunt everyone present at the meeting on 9 January, and there was little difficulty in highlighting them all at question time, they were also written on ‘pink’ cards for the Consultants to refer to later — and are listed below: The height, mass, visual impact, architectural design and siting of any new build.

The loss of views and loss of public open space.

The impact on existing businesses / the loss of coach- and disabledparking and the visitors they bring.

The dubious financial viability of the scheme — which the Consultants

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must prove or disprove.

The constraints of development in a Conservation Area which requires the proposal to ‘enhance the buildings, related spaces, streetscape and other features (i.e. listed buildings, Netshops etc.) that contribute to the character or appearance of the area.’ Local Plan 2004 Policy C1 The consideration of the site in isolation of its surroundings, a situation that the Seafront Strategy was drawn up to avoid.

No space for sporting activities for young people.

The side-stepping of the recent undertaking to the Stade Partnership that any new build would be confined to the footprint of the present Tourist Information Centre/toilets building.

Crime figures indicating those serious problems are still not being addressed.

The improvement or otherwise of the road layout round Winkle Island/Rock-a-Nore/A259 — with or without more or safer crossings — all requiring approval and financial support from ESCC Highways Department.

Other issues including traffic calming and improved street lighting have been recently surveyed by ESCC.

Fees so far: £ 422,000+ spent on many previous consultations + £50,000 allocated to this ‘feasibility study’.

Timetable: The first report will be ready by the end of January, the second consultation and public presentation in the Town Centre will happen at the end of February. The final report must be presented to the Council by mid-March.

This is a ‘gem’ of a location, it’s future should be given full and long consideration — not the superficial glance it is being afforded now.

Unfortunately, with local elections planned for May 4th, ‘we must be seen to be doing something’ is now in overdrive.

Two questions: -1) Why are there no new ideas on offer? 2) Why did most of the ‘stakeholders’ have to invite themselves to the consultation meeting?

CONTENTIOUS MATTERS! Two sobering thoughts: 1) Nothing can go ahead on the Stade until the contentious matter of the Foreshore Trust has been resolved. 2) Nothing can go ahead until the hotel at Pelham — opposite St. Mary-inthe-Castle — is completed. While Pelham Car Park is a 3-year building site all the adjacent seafront parking will have to be relocated to the Stade.

PEOPLE

Nuts & Sledgehammers

Graham Frost

by Ted Newcomen

H

astings resident Maya Evans, aged 26, appears to be an intelligent, articulate, petite woman with a steely resolve, who has a passion for life and justice. She’s the sort of person any reader would be proud to have as a daughter or daughter-in-law.

Yet this government believes her to be either a threat to national security or some kind of nut who flouts the law just for the fun of it.

Even the Hastings & St.Leonards Observer has managed to write a few lines about her arrest, charge, and conviction under the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) 2005.

This young woman now has a criminal record for simply standing vigil in Whitehall and reading out the names of the 97 British soldiers whose lives have so far been wasted in Iraq.

For the rest of her life she will have to endure the restrictions such a conviction entails, i.e. exclusion from

earning a living from certain jobs, financial handicaps, and possible restrictions on travel to some overseas countries.

She was prosecuted because she challenged the new Act’s requirement to apply to the police for permission to take part in a demonstration in a designated area, i.e. within 1km of parliament. By not filling in the requisite form she failed to co-operate with a law that also forbids the use of loudspeakers (which actually undermines the ability of stewards to keep large crowds in order), and gives the police the power to impose conditions on any protest that can make them completely meaningless.

Restrictions imposed on demonstrators can include locations, times, duration, numbers of persons taking part, number and size of banners, and even the noise levels generated.

It’s a law that forbids any

spontaneous protest in a wide area beyond Parliament, even across the Thames on the South Bank. This makes it impossible for there ever to be any impulsive demonstrations such as peace campaigners who may want to voice their outrage when the death toll for British soldiers serving in Iraq inevitably reaches 100 at some point in the coming weeks.* The government argues that the right to restrict demonstrations is valid as such events could hinder access or egress to/from Parliament, create serious public disorder, damage to property, cause disruption or safety risk to the public, or even be a security threat — terrorists could easily use an innocent demonstration to mask an attack.

In reality, any terrorists attacking Parliament are much more likely to disguise themselves as commuters (as happened in the 7/7 bombings), or policemen, or even MP’s parking their cars in the underground carpark. The authorities appear to have no trouble with the thousands of cars, buses, and lorries which pass through Westminster everyday — any of which could carry a huge cash of explosives or even a ‘dirty’ atomic bomb.

At a time when the operations of Parliament are becoming ever more remote from the electorate, this government has enacted poorlydrafted legislation which allows the sledgehammer of the state to crush the kernel of legal protest Unlike many readers, I wasn’t born and bred in Hastings, I am, literally, a newcomer. I spent the early 1970s under the apartheid regime in South Africa and I see this country sleepwalking into the same cul-de-sac of crushing legitimate dissent — it can only end in tears. Hastings should be proud that it has residents like Maya Evans — our government may be nuts but they’re not going to crack this particular sledgehammer for justice.

TN * This figure may even be reached before this article goes to press.

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

23

PLANNING

Linking Hastings with the world

www.tvhastings.org Hastings’ own (free) global-local internet tv channel Serving the community — and local democracy Ore Valley Regeneration (continued from page 20.)

because the name was on the front of the water-boiling devices seen in many cafes. Following the closure of Stills, its old factory has been the Saturn Facilities Centre, and is now due for demolition.

Despite the many light industry units around Ore Station, the whole valley has had only a handful of shops and just one pub. Attempts to tackle the social isolation this helped create were made by setting up two community centres in the early days, both of which have just been rebuilt. The Broomgrove Community Centre is on the corner of Malvern Way and Chiltern Drive, and the Bridge in Priory Road, 24

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|February ‘06

above Farley Bank. The new Bridge, with a multi-purpose hall and large café, opened in January 2006, and is the base of the Ore Valley Forum.

TIMES FUTURE? Ironically, if the Ore valley regeneration project failed, it could have a good result. If all the £15 million was just spent on making new roads and creating open spaces, but with no houses for even more unemployed people, then the existing valley dwellers might have a somewhat better life. The worst prospect is that the 700 new homes are created, but 700 new jobs are not. If so, watch out for more deprivation, vandalism and misery in the poor valley of Ore

Why the long face?

SOCIETY

The New Brighton?

Jan Gooday

O

k, so it may not rank alongside the exodus of the Thatcher years when Chingford skinhead Norman Tebbit urged us to get on our bikes and find work, but the numbers of Brightonians moving to Hastings is on the rise. Not the same dynamic driving the surge of course, this is more lifestyle than making a living. In other words we’re not talking about redundant miners coming down south to make a bob or two. Not that Brighton residents — and yes I’ll lay my cards on the table, I’m one — would sniff at the chance to pay a pound less for their soyaccino, skinny latte with petit-fours on the side please, dahh-ling.

Diana Adams is a sales consultant at leading Hastings estate agents, Abbeygate Property Management. She has definitely picked up on a trend, ‘Yes, we’ve noticed a marked increase in the number of people moving from Brighton to here, maybe as much as 10 per cent. And it makes sense when you think that a sea-front property, like one we have here, a property where Queen Adelaide once stayed, which is on for around £200,000 — in Brighton that would cost between £300,000-£350,000.”

Lower house prices coupled with the gradual shedding skin of druggyshabby-Hastings-poor-man-of-Sussex has played into the hands of disillusioned Brightonians. That and the regeneration plans which Gemma Salter spokesperson at Hastings Borough Council was keen to point me in the direction of — press release upon press release extolling the virtues of ‘a number a major regeneration projects completed and underway: the University Centre; the new station building; the two-part Creative Media Centre and the Marina Pavilion’. And we all know about the improvements to the exterior of over 230 buildings in

town, including the large period buildings down on the seafront.

But what I really want to know is, who are the new ‘types’ Hastings is now attracting? Recent research commissioned by Tourism South East shows that it’s a younger, more affluent visitor — people in their twenties and early thirties drawn more to Hastings than even Oxford, Canterbury, or according to the survey — and can it really be true! — Eastbourne. Not that you’re allowed within 50 yards of that seaside haven without first having donned a pair of bi-focals and a Fair Isle sweater.

My own research has led me to one Justin Rhyme, 33, formerly of Brighton, who moved to Hastings three months ago and could well be that rare breed I’m after: the archetypal Brighton interloper. So what’s his story?

‘I'd lived here eight years ago and kept returning to compere open-mikes and put on gigs [Justin runs spoken word outfit Don't Feed the Poets Productions with John Knowles].

‘I moved back because there is so much we want to do in Hastings, to develop the performance scene and to work with the local community. It’s smaller and there is more of a discernable community of creative people, which is friendly and supportive, oh and I can’t afford the price of a beer in Brighton!’

Are there other drawbacks, which made Hastings a more enticing prospect?

‘The people that come along to our events are usually much more appreciative than a similar crowd in Brighton, who take things much more for granted. The feedback after the last Word about Town [Hastings literature and

spoken-word festival] was phenomenal, and the stuff we put on seems to create an appetite. Not that it’s been easy financially, we've never made big profits from our gigs, generally we are happy not to make a loss without even paying ourselves.

Although Hastings has real pubs and you can get a pint of Guinness for less than £3!’ A topic you seem to warm to Justin?

He continues in a different vein, ‘For a creative person who is trying to develop their art, Brighton is positive up to a point. There are lots of artists, some good pub theatres, etc, but there isn’t as healthy a creative vibe as there was say, eight years ago. The Fringe festival and the associated venues have become more professionalised and many talented and developing artists have been marginalised.’

And he agrees that housing is the other issue. ‘Yes, most of all the cost of living, and in particular housing in Brighton is ridiculous. After years of sleeping on sofas and sharing places with students, friends, other people’s children and other people’s cats, I really felt I needed a space of my own and that wasn’t affordable in the slightest in Brighton.”

Words that s p e a k

And did those feet...?: Disillusioned Brightonian Justin Rhyme

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

25

SOCIETY

Les Prince

New Brighton

(continued from page 25.)

volumes and a trawl through various Hastings and Brighton chat-rooms happen upon similar views.

Here’s a typical entry: ‘Brighton is out of our league. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we looked at the [Hastings] property prices in the estate agents. I have not looked back since and will be exchanging contracts next week for my two bed Victorian ‘penthouse’! What a perfect place to get on the property ladder!’

So there you have it — Hastings is the new Brighton or should that be the old Brighton; it has the best bits minus the drawbacks. The inherent danger here, however, is that Hastings could well turn into what Brighton has to some extent become — a haven for well-heeled London meeja-wannabes who end up racking up house prices by expecting their Starbucks on every corner.

What Hastings has to offer now is, 26

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among other things, diverse artistic pedigree — The Pier hosted Nick Cave last year in case you didn’t notice and the late, great Joe Strummer played there before that.

Monthly nights like Queer on the Pier and the Crowley-influenced Les Chambres Musique add edge, while groups representing minorities like the Centre of Creativity offer more mainstream workshops, family days, and bring- a-dish parties.

There’s a folk scene in Hastings which easily rivals Brighton’s, based at the Hanbury Ballrooms. In Hastings it’s the Black Horse and The Stag taking the lead, with musicians like Tymon Dogg and Claire Hamill who’ve ‘been there, done that’ and yet are still doing it, while at the same time supporting the local scene and helping out younger bands. On the art side there’s the Open Houses and Coastal Currents festival, while venues-wise there’s DeNiros and The

Crypt and St Mary in the Castle which has some of the best acoustics in the country, over and above those of the Brighton Dome even.

And finally, yes, it has to be said; the beer is most definitely cheaper. I can vouch for that, cheers!

PHOTO GALLERY

A bigger splash: Steve Peak

February ‘06 | THE HASTINGS TRAWLER

27

FICTION

The Note

by Pauline Melville

O

n the morning that he was to make his fateful decision Noel Dunham peered through the telescope in the window of his study. His house perched on the East Hill overlooking Hastings. The mists rolled towards him from the horizon. The black outline of the pier jutted out over the milky surface of the English channel which heaved and swelled gently around the struts. He adjusted the lens and swung it around to look down at the town scanning the tarry black fishing-net sheds, the arcade and the Crazy Golf course. A few people were walking along the front, a normal day for them, perhaps. But today Noel Dunham decided was the day he was going to kill himself.

The writer went over to the maritime barometer hanging on the wall and tapped it to check the weather. It was a habit. He had started life as a marine engineer and his study was full of artefacts connected with sea-faring; a mariner’s compass, nautical charts, hydrographic maps showing seasonal variations of the tide. He had often drawn on the sea for inspiration. But these days inspiration failed him.

Three years earlier Noel Dunham had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. It had been a curse.

Ever since then he had been unable to write a word. His fear was that nothing he wrote would ever be as good as what he had already written. A sort of superstition kept him using his ancient typewriter rather than a computer. He was in his sixties and felt too old to adapt to new technology. Whereas most 28

THE HASTINGS TRAWLER|February ‘06

things about Noel Dunham were well worn and comfortable – his sagging florid face, silvery pointed beard, his corduroy trousers and the soft pouches under his eyes — the typewriter looked spikey and malevolent as it faced him on his desk. Recently it had appeared to

him like a life-threatening black insect squatting there in front of him, or, when the keys all rose up at once, a furious Dickensian housekeeper with swirling and clattering iron skirts.

His real housekeeper, Mrs. Edwards, was the benign opposite.

FICTION

She was enormously overweight. Her husband owned the best dairy in Hastings and the fatness of her cheeks pushed her blue eyes into a permanent slant. On the morning that he had been watching the encroaching mists, she entered the room sideways with his elevenses on a tray.

“Mrs. Edwards.” He hesitated, having never before taken anyone into his confidence on such a matter.

“I seem to be having a problem with my work.”

Mrs. Edwards gazed at him with an expression of appalled horror. She had noticed for many months now that there had been no lively tapdance of the typewriter over her head as she cleaned and dusted downstairs. But she kept her counsel and said nothing. They had clearly separate domains of work. Hers was to do with hoovers and dusters and Pledge. His was to do with things that happened in the head.

Somewhere in her mind she had always dreaded the day when something would be expected of her from this distinguished figure which she would be unable to deliver. That day, it seemed, had arrived.

“Oh dear.” She said. He knew immediately that he had breached some unspoken rule of etiquette between them. Her troubled breast heaved. Her weight made her pant a little whenever she spoke. “Oh dear.”

She repeated as she turned and left the room.

The decision to kill himself had come as lightly as the mists he had watched enveloping the horizon. It was prompted by that welcome sight of everything being blotted out. He went to the bathroom and checked.

To his satisfaction there were enough anti-depressants there to disable a horse. From the upstairs hallway he could hear Mrs. Edwards on her mobile: “Why couldn’t he ask me about milk-churns, ice-cream churns?” She was saying indignantly. “Or butter

pats. Home-made cheese in muslin.

Clotted cream or something I could help him with.”

Back in his book-lined study he took some headed paper from the drawer in his desk, unfixed his fountain pen from his top pocket and settled down to write his final note.

‘To whom it may concern’…that sounded a bit formal and impersonal. He screwed up the paper, tossed it into the bin and started on a fresh sheet. ‘Life has become an intolerable burden.’

Jesus Christ. How banal. I’m supposed to be a Nobel prize winner. I should be able to knock up a decent suicide note. He sprang up and went over to his bookcase.

What kind of note did Ernest Hemingway write? He thumbed through one or two biographies. No mention of it. What about Virginia Woolf? Why don’t these ineffecient biographers include their subject’s suicide notes? Sylvia Plath. What did Sylvia Plath have to say?

Nothing? How inconsiderate of her.

What was wrong with these people?

The old typewrite faced him like an implacable enemy, a metal gin-trap waiting for him. He gingerly inserted a piece of paper into it and tapped out a few words.

‘Barometer falling.

Stormy weather.’ Too much like Ella Fitzgerald. He tore the paper out and flung it across the room. He considered doing something witty like leaving a full stop on a blank page. But people might not notice it. In a panic he decided to write every possible sort of suicide note in every possible style and then go through them until only one striking and inevitable farewell remained. For the rest of the morning he wrote an avalanche of suicide notes: magical realist suicide notes; an epic suicide poem in verse, a brutal realist goodbye; an epigrammatic farewell; a series of post-modern adieus; a suicidal

limerick, a Haiku cheerio. They fell off his desk one after the other and began to pile up on the floor. The sun came out and dispelled the morning mists outside. He bent down and read everything he had written. After a while he groaned out loud and threw everything in the waste-paper bin. Nothing worked.

He put his head in his hands. He would be forced to continue living because he could not write a good enough suicide note. He would be like Prometheus, bound to a rock with his liver being eaten daily only for it to be regenerated overnight. He would be condemned to live.

At that moment Mrs. Edwards appeared. She was flushed as she popped her head round the door. It was one of their rules that she did not interrupt him at work after his elevenses. But she felt that something untoward had happened. The rules had been broken. Some sort of chaos had entered the household. And she wanted to make amends for not being able to help him out of his impasse. For once she thought she would defy their code of conduct and say goodbye.

“I’m going to fly off.” She said.

Noel Dunham turned and looked at her in surprise.

“I’m away now.”

Slowly an expression of delight spread over the writer’s face: “Goodbye, Mrs. Edwards. Thank you.”

She nodded and shut the door quietly behind her.

The writer put a fresh piece of paper in the typewriter. He typed out the words: ‘I’m going to fly off. I’m away now.’

That would do. Simple. Dignified.

Slightly poetic. Excellent, he thought. ©2006 Pauline Melville

Pauline Melville is the author of ‘Shape-Shifter’ (1990), a collection of short stories which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book) and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her first novel, ‘The Ventriloquist’s Tale’ (1997), won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recent collection of stories is ‘The Migration of Ghosts’ (1998).

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LETTERS

Letters to the Editor Crowley in Hastings From Adrian Barnett, Hastings

Dear Sir: My dad [film director Ivan Barnett] has managed to find some of the old photos of his film, The Fall of the House of Usher. They were tucked away in his garage in Cornwall where he found an old box of them.

One has the classic shot of the hand coming out of the coffin, which was the main shot used in all the film books at the time. The hand actually belongs to Gwen Watford who was just an unknown but aspiring actress at the time! The picture of the three people standing round the coffin shows Irving Steen as Jonathon (left), Vernon Charles as the doctor (centre), and Kay Tendeter as Lord Usher on the right.

Vernon Charles was the stage-name of Vernon Symonds who owned Netherwood along with his wife Kathleen (Johnny) Symonds. It was Vernon Symonds / Charles who had Crowley staying with him and introduced him to my father.

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The third picture is of Kay Tendeter taken in one of the rooms at Netherwood. It was here that they had a painting by Crowley (‘The Cuboid Painting’) hanging on the walls — unfortunately it is out of shot in this picture. It may be visible in the background of one of the other stills, but my dad still has a lot of them to sort through. If there is one of Crowley’s painting it will only be as a background shot. I know it can be seen in the film itself.

Usher, slowly going mad, has been painting and so Crowley’s picture on the wall was supposed to be one of Usher’s works of art. I’ve no idea what happened to the picture itself. It’s quite likely that it may have been a gift to Vernon and Johnny for letting him stay there, so I don’t know what happened to it after Crowley’s death.

Adrian Barnett The Jewel in the Old Town From Michael Foster, MP for Rye and Hastings HoC 5 January 2006

Dear Sir: In the past three or four years hundreds of new residents have moved to Hastings. I meet newspaper columnists, architects, just folk who feel living in Hastings will provide for their family a standard of living that they can’t afford with property prices in London being so high. If necessary. they take the strain of the train for that better life. Internet connectivity has made it possible to live and work in

Hastings at a distance from one’s main work place.

We in Hastings live in a beautiful and increasingly prosperous town.

People come here in their hundreds and tell me what a jewel is the Old Town and its surrounds.

In the last few years unemployment has halved, youth unemployment virtually eliminated and a new station and university centre are in place. Our sea front is looking glorious, £100m invested by the government and much more by private finance is making Hastings now ‘the place to be’. Or so I thought until I read the contributions of TN* to your ‘Forum’ in the last edition of The Hastings Trawler. How awfully depressing. Against the Council, the railways a failure, taxes spiralling, the new De La Warr ‘shoddy’, our restaurants hopeless, everyone leaving town! What a sad perspective and if it was even half true 1 think I would be tempted to leave the town of my birth as well.

Of course, truth is to some extent a matter of perception. I acknowledge I see glasses as half full, whereas some see them as half empty. But by any standards Hastings is a far better town than it was some years ago. The arts are vibrant, new comers are investing.

Just look at Judges in the High Street, look at the White Rock Hotel on the sea front. People putting their money and faith in our community.

And turning to the issues, the suggestion that France with virtually 10 per cent unemployment is a better place is blatant nonsense and it is factually wrong to suggest that local trains in France are any better than here, or more especially that we are paying higher tax than the French.

In this country we are taxed and have spent on us an average of around £9,000 per person by central and local government. In France that figure is around £10,000. So it is not surprising that some public services (not all) may be better, but I challenge anyone to suggest that we are less efficient than the French. We also have a vibrant voluntary sector which makes up much of the difference.

I am not denying that Hastings still has some challenges, but it would * See box p. 32 (Ted Newcomen)

LETTERS

sometimes be nice for people to suggest the solutions as well as highlight the negatives. Sadly for a small minority the answer is ‘No! Now what’s the question?’

Michael Foster DL MP, House of Commons, SW1A 0AA Promoting cynicism? 1 From Andy Dumas PoorBoys cafe, Quen’s Road, Hastings Dear Sir: I find The Trawler, as a source of news and opinion, to be a fairly sceptical publication. My own impressions about political life in Hastings are more mixed and, personally, I spend most of my time talking up the town. Certainly, I have had no difficulty accessing elected officials. I have a good working relationship with both Councillor/ Mayor Brown, who is committed to the the redevelopment of Upper Queens Road, and Councillor/ County Councillor Daniels, who, along with the mayor, is committed to ensuring badly-needed pedestrian crossings (and a disabled-friendly busstop) are installed on Queens Road in the vicinity of Morrison’s supermarket. And, although I’ve had difficuty getting cooperation from the officious Parking Services Manager, Mr. Shahilow, in resolving public parking issues in the upper Queens Road area, most borough officials I have dealt with seem to have a positive perspective on their civic role and have been competent and helpful. On the other hand, the town does have some hugely important issues that need to be resolved before or at the next election. These have to do with how government-sponsored regeneration money is being allocated.

In fact, the most important source of redevelopment funding comes from individual people with disposable income who are willing to invest in their homes and in small businesses.

Many such people have been moving to Hastings and the extra money which gets spread around ends up in government coffers, so more services are made available in areas where gentrification has taken place.

However, it would be disingenuous to

imply that everyone benefits. When neighborhoods gentrify, lower income families are pushed into the hinterland of their ward. The Castle Ward is a good example. While as a whole it is considered a deprived area, actually, the seaward side of the Ward is a beehive of wealth generation. On the proverbial ‘backside’ of the ward, where the ‘poorfolk’ are being pushed, deprivation is intensifying.

Government seed money for capital projects, in theory, is supposed to generate local jobs, promote growth of local businesses and redevelop rundown areas where, normally, capital sources would not choose to invest.

Therefore, regeneration seed money for capital investments should be focused on the ward’s ‘backside’, rather than the seafront and town centre where capital has always been attracted and will naturally flow.

But it, manifestly, is not being spent there in Castle Ward and almost everyday in Hastings I meet more people who doubt revitalization projects in the town centre are ‘kosher’ and who suspect regeneration funding is being used to ‘sell the soul of Hastings’ to blue-chip corporate interests with no connection to Hastings at all. There is a growing awareness that misdirection of regeneration seed capital injures the whole community in the short, medium and longer term. Initially, construction and design contracts for the projects tend to be given to out-oftown-based companies, who take their profits, that is public regeneration funds, out of town. Once the projects are completed, the non-local owners of these projects and their non-local retail tenants also take their profits out of town. The local jobs created are low wage and have little promotion potential and the presence of gigantic corporate competitors with subsidised, choice locations squashes local business.

Certainly, the way regeneration project capital is being spent now is injurious to me as a entrepreneur.

Having just invested in and opened a small business on upper Queen’s Road, I am more than a little dismayed to see huge chunks of

public-sponsored project money being spent in a way that gives national and international corporate interests further competitive advantage over me. It’s as if the local government wants them to run amok all over me before I’ve had a chance to build my business.

As I said, at the beginning of this letter, my experience with local government is mixed, so it may be that what I have written will not contribute significantly to the debate about the efficacy of government or the nature of regeneration. What is important, however, is that I have bothered to write this letter and that I thought your sceptical publication was a worthy vehicle for my rather mainstream opinions. It’s important because more and more people moving to Hastings will have the same attitudes, aspirations and political awareness that I do as time goes on.

Andy Dumas Promoting cynicism? 2 From Michael Foster, MP for Rye and Hastings HoC 11 January 2006 Re: MP Accountability Dear Sir: Although a ‘representative’ and not a ‘delegate’, an MP who fails to take account of his constituents wishes will not and does not deserve to continue in that role. That’s why I am proud that over the past eight years I have had a wholly accessible office to deal with my constituent’s concerns, and last year alone wrote 15,000 letters in response to issues raised.

I noted in your last edition of The Hastings Trawler that you published a list of ‘the way our MPs Vote’. Good for you, but I am not quite clear why the outcome of that survey should suggest that ‘it makes you despair of democracy and wonder why you bothered to vote at all!’. To some extent it is not surprising that a Labour Member of Parliament will generally support the government (not always, as I did not on Iraq) or that an opposition Member such as Greg Barker should oppose the government. That’s how democracy works. But what is missing from the

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article is any form of explanation as to why the voting record somehow causes despair and a negation of democracy!

However, to help the unknown author, if he or others are concerned about any single vote they only have to ask and I will tell them (a) what soundings I would have taken before exercising the franchise and (b) the reasons I voted as I did.

That is how democracy works, not by promoting cynicism.

It is also important that in a democracy, minorities are listened to.

The problem is that minorities often believe themselves to be majorities and then claim, perversely, that is the negation of democracy.

Michael Foster DL MP House of Commons, SW1A 0AA MP Michael Foster is 100 per cent correct in that everything in Hastings, indeed modern Britain is a matter of perception. The political, economic, and cultural elite see the glass as being halffull, if not actually overflowing. Or, as Tony Blair would have us all believe, ‘we live in a beautiful and prosperous country’ .However, there is an alternative view from ordinary working people which a powerful government and compliant media would like to silence.

Mr. Foster fails to answer any of the criticisms about the poor performance of Hastings Borough Council, its waste of public funds, our inadequate public transport system, and the chronic crime problems, etc. Oh, and just for the record, I never said our local restaurants were hopeless, I just pointed out that scarce tax-payers funds were being spent on building new white elephants without the benefit of any feasibility studies.

Sure, there are some improvements in the town, but if our MP wants to read about them then he should confine himself to the press releases recycled by the Hastings & St.Leonards Observer and Meridian News.

We are entering a new age. The electorate has woken up to the fact that all the established political parties have failed us, the system is barely functioning, if not actually broken. Spin, smoke, and mirrors, and the ‘sexing up’ of information to mislead the public at international, regional, and local levels just won’t work anymore T.N .

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HASTINGS — THEN...

... AND LATER

From a Water Colour Drawing by W. H Borrow

Ted Newcomen To those of you who may be wondering who our regular contributor TN is, we can reveal (not that it was ever a secret in the first place), that it is Ted Newcomen. The following brief biography was gleaned entirely from old cuttings of the Hastings & St.Leonards Observer and the pages of other magazines.

Mr. Newcomen, aged 53, was previously employed for about three and a half years as the Stade Manager by Hastings Borough Council to oversee the revitalisation of this important area as recommended by consultants from the University of Greenwich. He was fired by the council because he ‘wrote a number of articles … in which he claimed there were discrepancies between the claims of public authorities in Hastings and the reality experienced by residents’. In another article for a nationally distributed magazine for regeneration professionals he revealed how the police and local authority were manipulating crime statistics and he ‘suggested money spent on tackling crime through locks on doors, window bars and CCTV could have paid for a local street Bobby for seven years, which is what traders wanted’.

Mr.Newcomen subsequently took the Council to an employment tribunal claiming Unfair Dismissal and other issues covered by the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998.

The case was withdrawn at the 11th hour and Mr.Newcomen is believed to have received a large out-of-court settlement and is now semi-retired. At the time he said, ‘for legal reasons I’m not allowed to discuss any details of the case’ and went on to explain he would be devoting ‘more time and energy to investigating and writing about issues of public concern which interest me’.