I feel it's time to get going again with what is after all the main purpose of this society - to investigate what has happened to the town of Eastbourne over the years, and what has made it the place it is today.
To that end, I've dug out some old journal articles - all of which make use of the town as source material, although their authors represent a variety of academic disciplines. I'm going to write about more of these in weeks ahead. For now, I've been looking at a geographical study from the 1970s which sought to measure the impact of new building on people's appreciation of the town's natural landscape - specifically the houses built in the decades after the Second World War.
The article - titled "The Impact of Suburban Expansion on Landscape Quality" - was published in 1977 by the Royal Geographical Study. It was written by academics Geoffrey Smith from the University of Manitoba and Catherine Sykes from the University of Birmingham.
The study's context was a widely held view at the time that the natural environment of coastal towns had been spoilt in some way by housing developments on their margins. The planners of the time knew that the local population needed more houses, and accepted that they would have to permit building on open spaces to get the necessary numbers. But how would they take a decision on which places to use and which not to? It was not always easy to get a reliable view of local opinion. Campaign groups and special interests tended to drown out other voices.
So the authors of the study went to Eastbourne to test two hypotheses: first, that people's appreciation of the natural landscape in which they live lessened when it was built on; second, that people valued a landscape more the longer they had lived within it.
The study's method was to choose 18 locations across the town where recent house-building had taken place. Two photographs of each site were produced - one taken in 1945 before development; then one in 1975, after. A random sample of local people were then asked to rate their appreciation of the landscape before and after.
The study covered three broad areas - first, sites along the base of the the Downs on the western edge of the town - where houses had been built towards the scarp's edge from Meads up to Ratton; second, across Willingdon Levels, so the Hampden Park area; third, Langney and then down to what was then the Crumbles.
I should declare an interest at this point. As far as I can tell from the quite rudimentary map reproduced in the article, one photograph in the first group is of the site where I grew up in the 1970s, near the Golf Course in Old Town - on what used to be called Motcombe Laine.
In the case of this first group, the strong view was that the quality of the landscape had deteriorated as a result of the housing. This was even more the case in sites where the housing was at the upper end of the market - so the Ratton estate, and the Motcombe Laine site where I grew up.
The same assessment was made of the sites in Hampden Park and Langney, albeit to a lesser degree. And in the case of the Crumbles, the reaction was the reverse, in that development was seen to have enhanced the landscape.
Just to complete the picture, the researchers found only a mildest of associations between appreciation of landscape and length of residence, although the association was undoubtedly there.
It's not possible to say what use was made of the study, or whether the local opinion it captured influenced development decisions from the 1970s onward.
I suspect it did. To my knowledge, there was no further building (of scale) along or up the scarp - the downs itself are protected. Instead, outside the confines of Eastbourne Park, estates spread across the levels, and also out from Langney. And then of course there is the new harbour and all the new build on top of what was The Crumbles.
