Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me

 I recall I was driving back from an animal hospital when I first heard the piece of music, "Jesus' blood never failed me yet".  My dog was in the back of the car, and she was very ill.

The music was - I think - some way in when I first turned the car radio on.  I remember very clearly the efforts of an old man with a shaky voice repeating the word "blood" a lot and trying to keep above the orchestration - which was growing and growing as he appeared to repeat the lines again and again.  I was amazed - some 20 minutes later - to be still hearing the old man, repeating the word "Jesus", and coming back to the word "blood" as the swell of the music would start again.

Once the track finished, the presenter didn't say much about it - simply mentioning the name of the composer, Gavin Bryars, and saying he played the piece as part of the station's meditation series.

When I got home, I found the words and tune of the old man - and the orchestration around it - repeating itself in my head.  I resolved to find out more.

I knew nothing about Gavin Bryars.  I had never heard of him.  But I knew nothing about modern music more generally.  I discovered that he was what was called a minimalist composer, and that he had written a piece about the Titanic.

I found a recording of the piece.  It started with the voice of the old man singing what appeared to be a kind of hymn, which went

Jesus' blood never failed me yet. 

Never failed me yet.

Jesus' blood never failed me yet.

There's one thing I know.

For he loves me so....

And then back to the first line again - and again, and again.  On it went.  You could hear some voices in the background.  Some 4 minutes in, the strings came in, then built up, getting bigger and bigger.  It was an extraordinary piece of music.  I don't think I'd heard anything quite like it before.

I learnt about the unusual story behind the recording of the old man.  Back in 1971, Gavin Bryars was working with a documentary filmmaker called Alan Power, and they were making a film about people living rough near Waterloo Station and Elephant and Castle.  Alan Power passed Bryars some recordings of such people talking and singing which he was not going to use for the film.  Most of them - under the influence of drink - would sing bits of opera or old songs.  But Bryars concentrated on the recording of the old man - who was not drunk, and didn't drink apparently - singing what appeared to be a religious verse - just the five lines above sung once.

Bryars went home and studied the recording.  He found if he repeated the recording of the man's voice, the last line naturally flowed into the first, making a continuous loop.  So that became the basis of the composition.

He tells a story of making a recording of the repeating loop at the studio of the art college in Leicester where he was teaching at the time.  He went out to make a coffee, and returned to find his students unusually subdued, with some actually crying.  At that point, he realised the force of the music.

After composing and recording the piece around the man's verse, Bryars went back to find him to show him what he had done.  But by then the old man had died.

The final mystery in all of this is the verse itself.  It seems that no one has ever heard it sung or played elsewhere, or come across it at all.  It is probable that the old man simply improvised it, perhaps blending the words and tunes of other hymns or songs. The words do seem characteristic of a Salvation Army hymn - and that might make some sense given his predicament - but I can't find anything like that in their hymn book.

I find it hard to believe - as I listen to the music, and I have kept coming back to it year after year - that the man sang the five lines above only once.  The music around it seems continually to change the feeling in the words, even the meaning.  It is a rich piece of music, and I never bore of it - despite the apparent repetition.

But its original source - the old man himself, where he came from, what his name was, what misfortunes had driven him onto the streets, what drove him to sing about faith - that remains unknown. There is no trace to my knowledge of the documentary film.

So, sadly, all that remains of the man are the simple 5 lines.

Eastbourne - how to look at its social history?

This post is about how you might approach a social history of a place like Eastbourne.

To guide my thinking, I've been looking at a book by John K Walton, an academic who specialises in the history of tourism in the UK.  It's called "The English Seaside Resort: a Social History 1750-1914", published in 1983.  If I'm going to use it to structure my investigation, I'll need to accept Eastbourne's categorisation as a "seaside resort".  But I think that's fair enough, given the original vision driving the town's early expansion.

So, following the book's organization, the first task is to understand the "demand" - the people who first visited Eastbourne and then in due course decided to settle here.  We would need to understand their social background and economic status.  We would want to consider how this demand broadened out to other social classes as the town grew and the transport links improved - fuelled by the increase in disposable income and leisure time following the industrial revolution.  We would want to understand how the different types of visitor chose to spend their time in the town.  The wealthy well-connected took walks along the promenade, to see and be seen, and attended concerts and exclusive parties.  Middle class families perhaps focussed on the beach, and searched the rock pools and cliffs for marine life and fossils.  And then there were working class day or weekend excursionists, wanting perhaps less adventurous, more immediate entertainment.

The next consideration is the "supply" - the place itself, its raw ingredients, topography and layout.  We would want to understand what was there before the resort took shape.  We know about the two large estates, the tenant farms, the fishing and the limited military presence.  We would want to understand how the town's geography, the layout of the beach and cliffs, might have appealed to certain groups over others, with convalescents and young families wanting a more gentle terrain, with other visitors preferring something more challenging.  Finally, we would need to be clear about the town's proximity to a population centre from which visitors might come, and the quality of transport links to and from.  

We would then move on the social and economic activity in the town as it grew.  We've already considered the wealthy visitors and residents.  But we'd want to know more about the people who provided services for such people.  This could be domestic staff or people looking after, say, their laundry and cleaning.  It might also be professionals, say medics and lawyers.  Then there would be teachers and tutors, particularly as the private schools set up in the town.  There was no large scale manufacturing as such, but there would be craftsmen/artisans and builders -  although this work was cyclical.  So we would want to understand the problem of seasonal unemployment.  Finally, the social zoning of the town, and how it was consolidated or changed over time, would need investigation. 

We would then move to the original land ownership and the entrepreneurial activity behind the town's growth.  We would want to understand the economics of the projects initiated and the degree to which those driving them worked to an overall, coherent plan.  We would want to see whether they saw returns on their investments.  Infrastructure would be a priority, including sea defences, water, sewerage, gas, electricity, road and rail.  We would also look at investment in hotels, housing and entertainment facilities, including the Winter Garden, pier and baths.

Linked to this, we'd want to understand the town's local government, as the original landowners - the Duke of Devonshire, the Davies-Gilberts - transferred power to the democratically elected representatives of the newly incorporated borough.  We would want to cover local government's bit by bit assumption of responsibility for public health, education, utilities and - in relation to Eastbourne as a resort - facilities which were not profitable in themselves but made the town an attractive and enjoyable place to visit.

We would then go back to entertainment.  We've considered the larger scale investments in theatres and formal gardens.  We would look at the orchestras, both visiting and resident.  We would look at the golf courses and tennis courts built to appeal to middle-upper class visitors and residents.  But we would also be looking at the beach entertainers, the pierrots, the minstrels, the bands - the more popular entertainments offered as visitor numbers took off.

We would then want to bring all this together and see where it had taken us.  I suspect we'd note the tensions we had found throughout the investigation - the varying social classes both visiting and living in the town;  the effort to maintain the social tone of the place as tourism rapidly expanded; hereditary land ownership and the maturing urban democratic institutions taking over; the interests of residents set against those of visitors (including those earning their living from the latter).

Of course, we'd need a further source of guidance to take us from this picture of Eastbourne - at the start of the First World War, at the height of its wealth and popularity - to the town and the community we would recognise today.  More on that in due course.

Jane Austen in Eastbourne

This post is about "Sanditon", the novel that Jane Austen left unfinished at her death in 1817; and what it might tell us about Eastbourne in the years before the railway came (in 1849), and before the Duke of Devonshire started his great building spree.

Of course, the fictional town of the title is most likely not intended as a representation of Eastbourne.  Or rather, Jane Austen wanted readers not to think of it in that way.  She describes her town as a newly developed coastal resort somewhere between Eastbourne and Hastings.  But she also says some of its houses are built on downland, which would seem to make that location unlikely.  This lack of precision contrasts with the book's otherwise careful approach to the detail of Sussex's geography.

Some of the local landscape depicted certainly could describe the Eastbourne of Jane Austen's time - before all the houses came; before the town took the shape we recognise today.  There's the big estate, the farms, the scattered villages and the occasional new building.  We've seen this topography in some of the early landscape paintings of the town.

But what about the visitors?  The hotel?  The houses built for holiday accommodation?  

Well, we know that there were such visitors to Eastbourne. And we also know there were some basic facilities provided.  The Brighton historian, Sue Farrant, pointed this out in a paper we looked at a few weeks ago.  And the novel's opening sequence certainly encourages the Sanditon-Eastbourne association.  Its carriage accident takes place in a village Jane Austen names as Willingdon.

But we should not get too excited over this.  Once the travellers get moving again, the journey onwards to Sanditon seems to cover more than just a couple of miles.  Others have suggested that Worthing is Jane Austen's more likely inspiration - since it's documented she was well-acquainted with that town.

In the end, this can only be speculation.  Sanditon is most probably an imagined combination of several seaside settlements, drawing together characteristics Jane Austen had either witnessed or heard about.  All to serve of course her sadly unfulfilled fictional purpose.  

These characteristics include the nervous local landowners, seeking to increase their fortunes through property speculation; waiting for well-to-do visitors, whether from the West Indies, or from a London school, to take houses and apartments, and pay their rents.

They include the acute class consciousness of all those in the town, the need to be seen, and, more importantly, be seen with the right people, during the self-conscious walks they take along the seafront, towards the headland.

There's the in-fashion neurosis about health and dubious health remedies, including the milk of Lady Denham's milch asses.

And finally, the circulating library - an institution certainly present in Eastbourne at the time - with its books and periodicals for loan, and trinkets and curiosities for sale. 

So I'm going to conclude that you would have found all of this this and more in the Eastbourne of the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and leave it at that.  I'm pleased to have read Sanditon.  I'd been put off for years.  Some of it is written in fragments and notes, that's true.  Some of the characters are undeveloped caricatures.  But occasionally the writing takes off, and you know you're reading Jane Austen (whether or not she's writing about Eastbourne).

Muslims in Eastbourne

In recent posts, I've been concentrating on Eastbourne's origins as a Victorian holiday resort. But I don't want to lose touch with more contemporary developments.  One such is the increasing diversity of the people who live in the town.   This is reflected in the number of Muslims in the local population.  And the existence of a mosque where they can worship.  

I've found a pamphlet with a study of this mosque and the people who meet and pray at it.  It's called "The History of Eastbourne Mosque Community - East Sussex Muslims - 1995 to 2013".  Its author is Sevket Hylton Akyildiz, who is a post-doctorate research associate at SOAS.  The study covers census data on the Muslim population in the town and wider region.  It then presents information about the mosque itself and the people who attend it.

Unsurprisingly, Eastbourne did not attract large numbers of Muslims during previous waves of immigration.  Those new arrivals made for cities or industrial centres where the work was.  It is the case that Eastbourne's hotel and catering sector employed immigrants, particularly for work whose conditions did not suit local people.  But these workers tended to come from Mediterranean countries - such as Cyprus, Portugal and Spain.  

That said, from 1960 onwards, there were some Muslims living in the town.  Bangladeshis ran Indian restaurants, and brought over chefs and waiters from their country.  The children of wealthy Arabs, Africans and Iranians attended private schools.  And students from Gulf Arab states studied English at the town's language schools.  

The number of Muslims settling in the town increased in the 1990s.  Government policy was to disperse refugees and other immigrants more evenly across the country.  International events, for example the break-up of former Yugoslavia, as well as instability and conflict in other regions, increased the number of Muslims heading for the UK, and the range of countries from which they were either fleeing or relocating.  But even then, the numbers finishing up in Eastbourne remained low, and the increase over time was steady, not dramatic.  

It was about this time that a place for prayer was first established, above an Indian restaurant.  Prior to this, worshippers travelled to Brighton, where a mosque had been established in a converted nursery on Dyke Road some twenty years before.  Or they went to London.  

In 1995, some local Muslims purchased a building in Ashford Square, near the railway, which they converted into a Sunni mosque.  The property had previously been used as a social club by the South Eastern Electricity Board.   Those behind the original purchase (and actually the running of the Mosque till this day) comprised local Palestinians, Mauritians and Bangladeshis.  There were no wealthy overseas patrons or donors.  Nor any external ideological influence seeking to set a theological or political agenda.  All fundraising was local. And, interestingly, the biggest provider of funds was an Iranian woman (therefore Shia) who never used the mosque or involved herself in its management.  

As for those using the building, they come from all across the town and beyond, and are of varying heritage and socio-economic background.  Where once the Muslim community in the town was made up primarily of South Asians, there are now Algerians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Moroccans, Egyptians, Libyans and many others.  

After ten years of use, the mosque became too small to accommodate its growing numbers of users.  The management sought permission to knock  the original building down and construct a new one.  The local community's concerns about these plans - the noise from building, impact on parking - were predictable, and the application was rejected.  Those at the mosque then worked hard with wider community groups to address concerns and in due course a new application -  actually for a bigger building - was submitted and approved.  Building started in 2016, but the study ends before its completion.  I've not visited the new mosque myself, but the photographs I've seen suggest if nothing else a big improvement on the building it replaced.  

So where does this leave us?

The modest presence of Muslims in the town, and their mosque, tells us how far Eastbourne has come in recent times. But people from overseas have settled in the town to work for many years.  The Greek Cypriots are one example.  The Spanish another.  There is a bigger story to tell.  We'll return to this in future posts.

The Fortnight in September - R C Sherrif

In recent posts, I've been looking at some academic papers which analyse Eastbourne and other resorts along the Sussex coast.  I think I'm starting to get a better understanding now of the big national shifts that influenced the direction these towns took at various stages in their history.  

The first such shift is the emergence of the idea of a holiday by the sea.  The idea was made possible by wealth created during the industrial revolution.  People now had more disposable income, and the free time, to take such holidays.  It was this idea which brought Eastbourne into being in the first place. 

The second is the arrival of the railway.  People could now get to the coast quickly and easily.  This also affected the way towns like Eastbourne were organized, with their populations concentrated around the station.  Wealthier people could build new villas a little further out.  Some commuted to London. 

The third is the shift in the main selling point of these seaside holidays.  They were no longer primarily about health, although that remained part of it.  Visitors expected entertainment.  Hence in Eastbourne the pier was built, the bandstand, the parks and baths. But the permanent residents were keen to maintain the town's appearance - and its tone – and not fund things of no apparent benefit to themselves.  Tensions arose.   

Finally, the bus appeared, as an alternative, more flexible means of transport.  Now working people could live further from their place of employment.  In due course, the motor car came too, giving wealthy motorists even greater independence.  Towns became less concentrated around the station.  Housing estates spread over adjoining farmland and countryside.  

It happens that all these big shifts are reflected in some way in the pages of one of the books on my summer reading list - "The Fortnight in September", a novel by "Journey's End" dramatist R C Sherrif.  For those unfamiliar with it, the novel details the preparations of a South London family for their eagerly-anticipated annual trip to Bognor. It goes on to explore the degree to which the subsequent fortnight meets their various expectations of it.  Published in 1931, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more richly observed account of the holidays taken during that period. 

The shifts are reflected in the social standing of the Stevens family, where they live, what they do for a living.  They are reflected in the account of the holiday itself, where the family stay, what they do.  And finally, they are seen in the changes the family see around them, as Bognor expands, and the effects of buses and cars are seen. 

The father of the family, Mr Stevens, works as an invoice clerk in a warehouse in the city.  He commutes by train from his terraced house in Dulwich.  The family home backs on to the railway embankment.  In the garden, and in those around and on both sides of the track, survive gnarled old apple trees.  The housing estate, and the railway track which runs through it, are built on the site of what would once have been a country orchard.  Mr Stevens is one of the new lower-middle class, house-proud in a recently built suburb, with sufficient time and money to take his family on an annual holiday by the coast.   

For the fortnight itself, the family stay loyal to the ageing landlady of a fading guest house, on a street set back from the sea.  They eagerly anticipate the healthy colour they will achieve after a few days spent in the sun and the sea air.  But that's only part of it.  They are here for the bathing and joining the crowds on seaside walks along the prom. They watch the Pierrots and the minstrels.  They listen to the military band. 

Throughout the pages, however, we pick up that Bognor is changing, as is the countryside about.  The fields just outside the town, where Mr Stevens used to take his country walks, are now turning into building sites.  (But he can now take the bus further out, to the South Downs).  The low point of their holiday is the reluctant visit they make for tea in the newly built villa of an important customer of Mr Stevens' firm.  The family observe its sterile, bare garden, its opulent, joyless rooms.  And the disdain of the customer's wife for holiday makers in general and the activities they get up to.

None of this dry observation above explains the appeal of the book to the many who have read it.  It was a bestseller on publication.  It remains popular to this day.  It's something about the honest decency of the Stevens family I think.  The achievement of the writing is to make us really care whether the holiday works out for them.

Sewage on the Beaches

There's been a lot of concern over the past week or so about the state of our coastal waters.  Recent heavy rain, falling on ground hardened by weeks of drought, overwhelmed some sewage systems in the country.  Under an arrangement permitted by the regulator, water companies released untreated sewage straight into rivers and the sea.  This step prevents the unpleasant flooding that would otherwise occur in homes, hospitals, offices and along roads.  The Environment Agency issued warnings about water quality to sea bathers all along the south coast.

The centre of Eastbourne's sewage infrastructure is the fort-like works at Langney Point.  This is where Southern Water treats the sewage from the town and the settlements around.  It then pumps it out to sea through a long outflow pipe.   

Further west, by the Wish Tower, is the Granville Road Storm Overflow.  This discharges raw sewage directly on to the beach at times of heavy rain.   I think there's another one at Langney doing the same thing (probably more often).

I've been trying to educate myself on how this all works and how we've got to this point.  I've found a paper to help me put it all in context.  It's titled "Were Health Resorts Bad for your Health?  Coastal Pollution Control Policy in England 1945-76", and was published in the Environment and History Journal in February 1999.  The author is John Hassan, a historian at Manchester Metropolitan University who specialised in water. 

The article traces the beginning of the systematic practice of sewage discharge into seas and rivers back to the industrial revolution.  Coastal towns, as their resident and visitor populations grew, abandoned their old practice of depositing effluent in dug-out cesspools.  Instead, they built short drains through which they directed sewage straight into the sea.  The common view was that the sea's salt and mass would disperse and dilute the waste.  

All this sat uneasily with these towns' main selling point for visitors - their offer of an invigorating, healthy natural environment.  It soon became apparent that the sea was not as clean as it might be: unpleasant items were visible;  an occasional stench blew in with the tide.  

Local government, however, was reluctant to take action.  Resident ratepayers objected to costly schemes whose main beneficiaries were the visiting tourists; or neighbouring councils who themselves may have done nothing to address their own polluting.  

So authorities confined themselves to carefully positioned outfall pipes at or beyond the low tide water mark, from which their town's untreated sewage was debouched.  Here in Eastbourne, such an outflow was placed off the then remote Crumbles shingle bank (where it is today of course, although the surroundings are now built up). 

As time went on, concerns grew, and in particular fears of disease from bathing in these filthy waters.  Inshore fisheries became contaminated, with poisoned shellfish causing death or serious illness.  Outbreaks of Cholera and Typhoid occurred.   But official medical opinion remained sceptical.  A direct link between sea bathing and serious disease could not be established.  These illnesses equally affected those who had been nowhere near the sea.    

After the second World War, coastal pollution began to attract more attention.  Official surveys of our tidal waters indicated deterioration.  At the same time, seaside holidays were becoming ever more popular.  Rising living standards and the advent of holidays with pay reinforced the trend. Development of coastal resorts intensified, but investment in infrastructure to address increased pollution failed to take place.  Further concern was expressed about health risks, in particular the fear that sea bathing might be behind the Polio outbreak in children. 

The authorities for their part saw pollution controls as too costly.  The country could not afford higher environmental standards while there were more pressing demands on public funds.  The official position acknowledged that some beaches were aesthetically revolting.  But there was no evidence swimming off them caused serious harm to health.  Then occurrence of such illnesses as Cholera and Typhoid began to reduce.  This was actually down to wider, unconnected public health improvements, for example the Polio vaccine.  It masked the absence of any effort to clean up our bathing waters.   

The 1960s saw the emergence of the Coastal Anti-Pollution League, a pressure group founded by a husband and wife whose daughter had died of Polio after swimming in the sea.  In addition to its conventional campaign, it published an annual list of clean beaches - damning those omitted.  Whatever the league and its founders actually felt about the evidence for health risks, they focussed instead on aesthetic and amenity considerations.  Support grew.  A degree of pragmatism was involved - the campaign acknowledged that raw sewage pumped a mile or so out at sea might present less health risk than fully treated sewage debouched closer to the beach.  Official resistance began to soften.

This trend was mirrored in mainland Europe.  Fledgling European institutions placed environmental considerations at the top of their priorities.  The way was clear for the UK to implement the European Bathing Water Directive of 1976.  Campaigners and pressure groups now had a potent legal basis on which to take action against polluters.

This is where my paper's study ends.  There's no doubt more to consider as the water industry built new treatment works, and the EU published further directives.  The privatisation of water and sewerage was significant.   Brexit will provide a new chapter in the story, now or in due course.

For us and our investigation to understand better our town, the analysis gives us a couple of things to ponder:  

• the speed of development and population growth in coastal towns, and the struggle to build infrastructure to keep up with it; 

• the tension between resident taxpayers, and the interests of visitors and those whose livelihood depended on them.   

More on this in due course.

Settlement in Sussex 1840-1940

To recap, I've been looking at some old academic studies (across various disciplines) which use Eastbourne, or its surroundings, as their subject matter.  

Last time, I finished off a look at a study of the development of Sussex's coastal resorts from the middle of the nineteenth century to halfway through the last.  We learnt about the significance of industrialisation and its effect on people's spending power and leisure time.  We saw how pre-existing settlements along the Sussex coast grew to meet the market for Londoners seeking holidays or taking up residence.  

Now I'm going to have a look at a study exploring the impact of transport changes - specifically, the arrival of the railway, followed by the car and bus - on the size and organisation of Sussex towns.   

The article is titled "Settlement in Sussex - 1840-1940", and was written by W H Parker.  It was published in the journal of the Geographical Association in March 1950.  The paper itself was read out at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Brighton a couple of years earlier. 

The dates we need to keep in mind are 1840 or thereabouts, when the first railway is put down in the county, and then some fifty years later in 1890 when the network there is more or less complete.  The car appears first in 1895, with the bus ten years later.  But railway is dominant until the end of the first world war, and there is no general use of either cars or buses until the 1920s.  The final date to mark is the electrification of the railway in 1930, which speeds up journeys, particularly into London.

We'll look first at the situation just before the railway appears.  Then look at what happens when it does start to roll out.  Then we'll look at the impact of the car and bus.  Finally, we'll touch on faster trains enabled by electrification.  

So just before the railway, we find that newly wealthy families have already started to settle in Sussex.  Those with more leisure time than previously are seeking diversion through visits to the coast.  And former labourers - no longer working in the open air, but in factories or stuffy offices - feel the need periodically for holidays in the fresh air by the seaside.

As for Sussex towns, Brighton is busy and fashionable by this time, as is Hastings.  Towns like Bognor, Worthing, Seaford and Eastbourne have felt the effects of this growing visitor interest, but they remain small, stagnant and seasonable - probably as a result of their poor roads.  Sussex's ports no longer play the prominent role they once did.  Rye remains the biggest, with Shoreham, Littlehampton and Newhaven all carrying on some business.  Like the coastal towns, they have stopped growing.

In contrast, the inland parishes are getting bigger.  The ancient boroughs of Lewes and Chichester have solid populations.  Smaller market towns such as East Grinstead, Arundel, Petworth and Horsham remain busy as market towns for local farm and artisan produce.

So then the railways arrive.  

First the towns.  On the coast, they begin to grow.  Brighton spreads into Hove to its west, and Preston to its north.  Likewise, Hastings absorbs St.Leonards.  Eastbourne, Worthing, Bexhill and Bognor all get bigger.  The ports likewise become small towns. 

The increased population of these towns becomes more concentrated. Workers need to live within walking distance of their work.  They move in from the rural parishes around the towns.  Given much of the work is personal or domestic - working for other people living nearby - this compounds the concentrating effect.  Slums result.

The railway station becomes the heart of the population.  It becomes the source of most necessities of life as well as being a point of arrival and departure for journeys.  This means that people need to live near it.  And new settlements don't expand out from the station, but rather from the next station along the line.  The original town and the new settlement expanding from the next railway station eventually meet.  A bit like Eastbourne and Hampden Park. Or Brighton and Hove.

The railway has a further impact on the inhabitants of inland Sussex.  Rail-connected market towns now distribute imported produce, rather than goods sourced locally.  Unemployment and depopulation of the rural parishes follows.  The population is then replaced - to a certain degree, and only in certain railway connected places - by people moving to the countryside to take residence in villas.

Railway stations create new settlements, in addition to boosting existing ones.  They can't be built on hilly downland or forest ridge.  So new towns may appear around a station in a valley - perhaps down from the existing ridge settlement.  Heathfield is an example of this.  

And the company building the London to Brighton line deliberately places stations between villages, so it can serve more than one place - and settlements duly grow around them.  So Three Bridges comes about, between Crawley and Worth.  As does Haywards Heath between Cuckfield and Lindfield, Hassocks between Hurst and Keymer.  

 

But despite the growth of the towns, there is no new development in other locations along the coast - for the obvious reason that people can't easily get to them.  In fact, the population of non-urban coastal parishes falls.  Whole lengths of the Sussex coast remain in a natural state.

This is the position with the railway well-established.  Then the car arrives.  

An obvious point first.  Roads don't have stations.  Their impact is felt continuously along their course.  And they reach all settlements. Every town will have road access.  Also road is unaffected by the limitations of physical geography.  A road can climb a hill.

So immediately roads begin to reverse the previous concentrating effect of the railway.  Houses are now dispersed across land bought cheap as a result of the agricultural depression.  Buyers could set their houses among extensive grounds.  Towns are cleared of slums.

The empty spaces between towns along the coast are now developed, as the car makes them accessible.  The natural coast begins to disappear.  Ridge top sites become popular again, as do some of the villages whose rural labour occupants left for the town during the railway period.  

The final element in this story is the electrification of the railway.  It boosts places like Haywards Heath.  The town is still a railway station settlement, with residents commuting to Brighton and London.  But the car permits houses to sprawl across the countryside.  Other Sussex towns become London commuter dormitories.

Bringing this all together then, what have we learnt?

• Before the railway, we have some prosperous people beginning to visit or settle in coastal Sussex.  But most of the county is dominated by agriculture and market towns, hampered by poor roads.  There are a few ports.  

• The railway comes and the coastal towns expand as places of tourism and residence.  The population concentrates around railway stations and slums result.  Livelihoods of rural labour in inland Sussex are destroyed, with the countryside  vacated, replaced in some railway towns by commuting villa residents.  

• The car comes and disperses the town population, cheap agricultural land is developed for more spacious housing, and existing towns expand.

• The town of Eastbourne is benefiting from all these changes.

This sets us up well for our future investigations.

London by the Sea - Part 2

I said that I would have another look at the article by Brighton academic Sue Farrant  - "London by the Sea" - with its analysis of the development of Sussex's coastal resorts from 1880 to 1939.  I wrote about what she said about Eastbourne specifically in my earlier blog.  I'm now going to cover some of her broader analysis.

We start at the beginning of the Nineteenth century.  Coastal resorts across the country tend to be places solely for the aristocracy or otherwise wealthy.  In Sussex, we see Brighton and Hastings already established as fashionable resorts.  Smaller settlements are scattered about the coast elsewhere, but their facilities are limited.  

What starts the change is industrialization.  This creates new social and economic groups, in particular those working in services.  Members of these groups have some disposable income, and the time and wish to take holidays.  Existing coastal resorts start to change to cater for these new visitors.  And new resorts are built, to meet the overall increase in demand. 

The outcome is specific resorts favoured by different social classes.  And in some resorts, the seasons are segregated along similar lines.   

Resorts also grow into substantial residential towns.  Convalescent homes come too, as do private schools.  A tension emerges between those whose livelihood depends on visitors, and permanent residents whose priority is to maintain the character (and social "tone") of their town.   

These trends are seen most obviously in Sussex.  Its resorts are closest to London - where this new demand is greater than elsewhere. Since Sussex has no industry, the coastal resorts can draw on under-used rural labour from the Weald to work on construction sites and enable rapid development.  The population more generally migrates to the seaside.

These broad forces affect all the Sussex resorts.  They all have differing starting points, before developing in their separate ways.  But they can be split up into four broad categories.  

Brighton and Hastings, the older resorts, are able to adapt quickly to the widening market and build on earlier success.  Brighton's industry and employment is not solely dependent on tourism.  But Hastings' is, and suffers dire unemployment in bad years - a theme picked up in Robert Tressell's "The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists".  

The progress of the smaller Georgian resorts - Seaford, Bognor and Worthing - is stuttering.  Development companies fail before completing their projects. 

The fashionable self-contained settlements built alongside bigger resorts - St. Leonards and Hove, and Brunswick Town - develop in different ways:  St. Leonards is absorbed by Hastings; Hove maintains its independence from Brighton.  It thrives.  

The Victorian new towns of Eastbourne and Bexhill, covered in my earlier blog, benefit from active and determined local landowners.  They maintain their high social status up to the Edwardian period and beyond.

From 1914, as we saw in Hastings, the problem facing all these resorts was seasonal unemployment.  But some towns compensated with specialist services and independent manufacturing.  The other constraint was lack of any other means of transport but the train. This meant facilities were over-concentrated in inner towns and the central seafront areas.

From the 1920s, all the resorts grew as a result of the boom in building.  Cheap farm land was released for development.  Capital was available to invest.  Emerging modes of travel - car and bus, as well as the growing train network - enabled large-scale private and council house-building further out from centres.  At the same time, pressure groups formed to lobby for greater protection of nearby threatened downland and otherwise precious green spaces.

From the 1930s, two new rivals emerged.  First, the so-called "planned" resorts.  Second, the more informal, dispersed coastal developments.   

Examples of the former were Goring Park near Worthing and Ham Manor near Littlehampton.  These were carefully laid out, socially-zoned estates, both built in grounds of large vacated country houses.  

Informal, unplanned resorts - for example Selsey Bill and Camber Sands - were made up of scattered railway carriages, buses, huts and bungalows.  Such settlements were only accessible to car owners.  They had a marked and controversial effect on remote coastal spots.  

Peacehaven was perhaps the most infamous example of this.  Planned initially in a grid lay-out, it developed haphazardly, absent of effective planning controls.  Small houses were built in purchased plots, scattered untidily over a large area.  For planners working for local authorities all along the coast, Peacehaven became a lesson in exactly how not do it.

So where does this leave our investigation of Eastbourne?  What we know now is that its early years were driven by wider social, demographic and economic forces which affected similar settlements nearby.  We're slowly accumulating further articles and books to help us understand this better.

More in due course.

Ravilious - Drawn to War

Like many others it seems, I enjoyed the new film about Eastbourne artist Eric Ravilious - "Ravilious - Drawn to War".  So much so I've already seen it twice - once at the cinema, once at home on Curzon's great new home streaming service.

The film is framed by Ravilious's death in the Second World War.  His life, marriage, affairs and of course paintings and designs are all explored - up to the point he disappeared on an RAF flight off the coast of Iceland.  The story's told in extracts from letters and his wife Tirzah's autobiography; interviews with admirers, experts and family members; and rare photographs from family collections and some previously unseen footage (of Ravilious and Tirzah's marriage in London in 1930). 

It's this footage which particularly sparked our interest - for what it showed about how Eastbourne's different social classes interacted in the first half of the last century. I thought I detected in the film's grainy sequence the unease felt by both Eric and Tirzah's families at what was happening that day.  

Tirzah was the daughter of a well-connected Lieutenant Colonel who'd retired to Eastbourne.  And her mother came from a wealthy Belfast shipping family.  Eric on the other hand was the grammar school educated son of a shopkeeper.  

Tirzah's class were those wealthy individuals and families who'd first holidayed in Eastbourne in the Victorian times, then settled in the large villas across the town in the decades following.  The villas now converted into nursing homes, split into multiple occupation, or otherwise knocked down and replaced by modern blocks of flats.  

The family home was on Arundel Road.  This was on the margins of the wide tree-lined avenues, elegant terraced squares and public gardens that made up what would have then been clearly identifiable as the Upperton estate.  (The house, like many of its kind, is gone now, replaced by a 1970s block of flats.  But some of the old trees remain in the gardens at the back - the house was called Elmwood, as is the block which replaced it.)

Tirzah's father served as a Poor Law Guardian, overseeing arrangements at the Old Town workhouse - a role then regarded as philanthropy.  He dabbled in politics, standing unsuccessfully for a ratepayers' party whose sole political aim was to curtail local government standing.  Tirzah attended one of the many private schools which existed in the town - West Hill, on the corner of Mill Road and Carew Road - again demolished.  Then to the art school, where her teacher was Ravilious.

Ravilious's background was the other end of the social scale.  His family lived in a modest terrace on Glynde Avenue, north of Hampden Park.  His father sold antiques (or maybe bric-a-brac) from a shop at the back of the Grand Hotel - so a living dependent on selling goods to people like Tirzah's parents.  He was declared bankrupt eventually, and also had an eccentric religious side - behaviour which caused Eric much embarrassment.

Tirzah was expected to marry someone else - a local man from a similar army family who took up a role with the Colonial Service in Africa.  Tirzah's account in her autobiography of how this dilemma played out is a screenplay waiting to be written.  But it was Ravilious she chose, and her life took a course quite different from the one on which her social background might otherwise have sent her.  

As ever in life, these things are never quite black and white.  Tirzah's father grew fond of Ravilious, and showed kindness to Eric's father during his final illness.  Her family always seemed at hand to support the couple as they navigated children and then her illness.  And Tirzah herself wrote warmly of Eric's mother.  

In the end, the thing which strikes anyone who grows familiar with the Ravilious story is this - the main characters all have their foibles, whichever layer of society they belong to; but they're still people you'd love to have known, to have met.

 

London by the Sea

As mentioned last time, I'm currently looking at some old academic articles that use Eastbourne as their subject of study.  I first examined one about housing development and its impact on local people's appreciation of the natural environment.  Now I'm looking at a study entitled "London by the Sea: Resort Development on the South Coast of England 1880-1939".  

The article was published in the Journal of Contemporary History in January 1987.  The author is Sue Farrant, who lectured in history and tourism at Brighton Polytechnic.  (I've since discovered that Sue is still writing about local history - under the surname Berry - and has published several books about Brighton).

The article introduces some of the economic and social forces driving development of resorts along the Sussex coast.  It then goes on to assess these resorts' similarities and differences in the decades that followed.  It covers a fair amount of ground, so I'm going to look at what it says about Eastbourne first, then write another blog about its analysis of the other resorts and the bigger picture.

Eastbourne is one of a group of Victorian resorts built on sites where there'd been some small-scale resort-related building in the Georgian period.  Bexhill is another.  The original settlement took the form of clusters of facilities with one or two boarding houses nearby. 

The town's subsequent development into a larger resort relied on risk-taking by the main landowner, the Duke of Devonshire, whose estate was directly involved in building and the funding of new infrastructure.  From 1849, his agents sought to develop the town into a high class resort.  And the town went on to flourish during the national building boom of the late 1870s and early 80s, becoming the fastest growing resort in Sussex.

Initially, the estate far outspent the town's local government on resort facilities.  It supported among other things construction of the pier, Eastbourne College, the Devonshire Baths -  as well as gas, water, drainage, the sea defences, the parades, and the scenic road from the town to Beachy Head.  

In 1891, the new Duke (the 9th) decided to reduce this spending.  The investment's original purpose - to generate income for the estate - was not being achieved.  The council stepped in.  By 1914, it was taking greater responsibility for the provision of basic services, and was maintaining the promenades,  developing landscape parks and providing facilities such as golf courses, libraries and museums.  

The initial development by the Devonshire estate (and by the Gilbert family, the other big landowner) was socially "zoned".  The south western area was a high class residential suburb.  The centre was shopping.  The north east contained working class housing.  The estates' agents imposed strong building controls which reinforced these differences.  Councillors - made up of builders, professional men, tradesmen providing for high class clients (for example, booksellers), plus those who had moved to the resort to live - continued to strive to preserve the town's image as a high class resort.  

Initially, Eastbourne's dependency on the railway and lack of any other form of cheap transport confined the development of facilities to inner towns and central seafront areas.  But by the 1890s, the advent of the motor car began to change this.  From 1920 onwards, a building boom led to increased urbanization.   The depressed price of land, the availability of capital to invest in building and greater choice of travel facilities (for example car, bus or train) resulted in large scale private and council housing development on newly released farmland.

The town was not without its employment challenges .  Agricultural workers from the Weald had come to Eastbourne and other resorts and worked in building.  Their wives and daughters sought positions in domestic service.  But the local economy was vulnerable to seasonal and cyclical recessions, which depressed demand for these services.  There was unemployment when the tourist season was poor or when demand for housing from newcomers to the town temporarily declined.  There was little other employment - the construction of a major railway engineering works which would have broadened the town's economic base and created jobs was blocked.  In 1887, there was a parade in the town to ask for more action to relieve unemployment.  In 1911, the local newspaper highlighted over-crowding in houses on small estates not owned by the Devonshires or Gilberts.    

So bringing all this together, Eastbourne enjoyed great success as a resort from the middle of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the Duke of Devonshire's patronage.  It sought to maintain its "superior" tone as it grew.  But like other resorts, it began to face challenges - changing clientele, suburban development, employment, and housing for the lower paid. 

I'll cover this bigger picture in a future blog.

 

The Impact of Suburban Expansion on Landscape Quality

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.

A walk in Eastbourne - 6 March 2022

We (well, my dog and I to be specific) spent the day in Eastbourne three weeks ago.  I thought I'd share a few thoughts I had while we were there.  

It was a fine, clear day, a little blustery, but perfect for walking, so that's what we did - along the seafront and up to Beachy Head via Whitbread Hollow; then northwards along the ridge to Willingdon.  We then came down and headed back on lower ground to where we started, via Hampden Park and King's Drive.  On the way, we paid our usual homage to the site of the childhood home of artist Tirzah Garwood, on Arundel Road on the Upperton rise.

I had two things on my mind as I walked:  one, the town's coastal geography and sea defences, and how the latter are going to need to be rebuilt as the sea level rises in the decades ahead; and then two, the state of the downland escarpment, as all the ash trees die and are removed, and the replanting which will follow. 

Both developments will change the way the town looks in years to come.  

I guess it's easy to overlook that the layout of Eastbourne's seafront is anything but natural.  As you walk along the lower promenade from the Wish Tower towards Holywell, as we did, you are walking along a concrete sea wall.  And its primary purpose is to protect the now landscaped higher ground from erosion by the sea.  The shingle on the beach is placed there to absorb the power of the waves.  The timber groynes were built to limit the effect of long shore drift, the process by which the tides drag shingle and sediment further east up the coast.

The old maps show a huge tidal lagoon covering what we now call Pevensey Levels, but the water extended also to the lower lying eastern parts of Eastbourne.  The long-shore drift then created the Crumbles, the huge shingle bank on which the roads of Seaside and Sovereign Harbour now stand. Its formation cut off the lagoon and allowed the land to be reclaimed.  With the seas now rising, there is a risk that this area, in whole or part, will be subsumed once again unless the sea defences are raised.  And the problem is that thousands of houses and infrastructure have now been built on the land where this will happen.

The Environment Agency and the local council are currently sharing information with the public on what lies ahead if we do nothing.  They are less specific at this stage on what must be done to prevent this, seeking first public opinion on all the relevant considerations.  I assume what we're looking at, although it's not yet said in clear terms, is a raising of the sea wall. The present one is already a major piece of engineering, but it's less visible from the pier to the east, and at Pevensey Bay it doesn't exist at all as such.  

Further engineering - so-called "hard" engineering - will need to happen in the years ahead.  Its result will no doubt dominate the coastal view for many miles either way.

From the cliffs, we walked inland along the ridge of the scarp, with views of rolling downland to the west, and floodplain levels to the east.  But for me the striking sight was the spreading devastation caused by ash dieback disease on the scarp beneath.  The dead trees are now falling and the woods look like the aftermath of a battle.  

If you look at old photographs of the scarp, you see that at one stage they were almost bare of trees, except for the odd plantation, like the one on the Marquess of Willingon's former Ratton estate.  The hills were still quite bare up to the 1970s, when I was growing up.  I had thought ithis was the result of grazing sheep, but apparently it was rabbits keeping scrub growth down.  Once Myxomatosis begun to kill the latter off, bushes and blackthorn began to spread, with larger ash and sycamore trees following.  Soon gaps reduced, then disappeared altogether, and the slopes became wholly wooded.

Half of me wouldn't mind a return to those old days of open downland.  Indeed, the most exhilarating part of the walk was the clear part above Chalk Farm from which we descended.  But equally we need more trees.  There are various plans to create a virtual forest along the slopes with more diverse trees than the sycamores which would otherwise replace the ash if nothing were done.  So I will go along with that.

The final stage of our walk was our pilgrimage to Elmwood, 5 Arundel Road.  Once the family home of artist Tirzah Garwood, it was a large semi-detached Edwardian villa, big enough to accommodate a large family with housekeeper and gardener, with a wood of elms at the back (hence the name),  a tennis court and kitchen garden.  Now it is a five-floor 1970s block of flats, with outbuildings housing garages.  The only evidence of its former life is a couple of old elms at the back.   

It was time to go home.

Further reading/viewing on the subjects above

Eastbourne's coastal defences

An FAQ document on the Environment Agency's plans for the coastal defences.

https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/solent-and-south-downs/pevensey-bay-to-eastbourne/user_uploads/202112-peveb-faq.pdf

The Downland scarp

A talk by Eastbourne-based environmentally-minded Tory peer on plans for replanting the scarp - with some fawning deference to Her Majesty the Queen at the beginning  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CY1c4E3cSs

A site with an aerial video of the effects of ash dieback on the scarp.

https://actionashdieback.co.uk/action-on-ash-dieback/

Tirzah Garwood

Long Live Great Bardfield - Tirzah's autobiography, with a superb evocation of 1920s Eastbourne life.

Update - 21 February 2022

Welcome to our latest update.  This is a quick run-through of some of the things which have been attracting our attention in recent days.

We're still trying to work out what might happen in the town at the next General Election.  There's been talk in the papers of a "progressive alliance", with Labour holding back in seats where the LibDems have the best chance of unseating an incumbent Tory - and LibDems doing the same where Labour is the main challenger.  The Greens are also involved.

Given the LibDems' dominance in the town's local politics, and their past success in General Elections, it would make sense for Labour and the Greens here to give the LibDems a free run.  Indeed, if you look at the low Labour and Green vote shares in recent elections, it's probable the progressive alliance is already a reality in Eastbourne, and has been for some years.    

On the other hand, we are seeing a surge in Labour support in coastal constituencies with demographics not dissimilar to Eastbourne - Worthing, for example, where Labour is winning Council seats, and Bournemouth, where it's overtaken the LibDems to become the Tories' main challenger.  But it's hard to see this carry across to Eastbourne, certainly in the short-term at any rate.  One to watch though.  

We've also been looking at the performance of the LibDem council.  It's fair to say it's encountering some turbulence.  

First, it's officially the worst performing council in the entire country when it comes to meeting its housing targets.  To be fair to the council, some experts have doubts about the methodology used to project population growth (which drives the targets).  And the council points out it has approved a number of sites, but it's the developers who are dragging their feet and haven't built the houses. The Borough's geography doesn't help much either.

Whatever the case, the consequences are serious for the town.  The council loses some of its planning powers.  There is now a presumption that applications for housing will gain approval, even where there might be significant local concern.  It is not a good position for the council to be in.

Second, it's found itself in trouble with Central Government over the state of its finances.  Like many local authorities, it was badly exposed when the pandemic struck.  Its tourism and conference revenue dried up.  It had to spend more on social services.  The problem for Eastbourne was that it had already raided its reserves to finance capital projects.  So it was one of the few councils compelled to beg for Central Government financial help to keep it going.  

A condition of this help was that independent accountants appointed by Government would review the council's performance and make recommendations.  They've now done this and their report makes tough reading.  They have suggested the council needs to rebuild its reserves while warning against over-reliance on tourism revenue - which won't fill the funding gap.  The council's basically got to sell things it owns, like companies and land.   

We think the council's been unlucky and has done its best over the years to compensate for the cuts in Central Government funding first imposed by the Conservative-LibDem coalition.

One of its more unusual projects is its relationship with a building in Leicester.  This is a tower block housing student accommodation, a Premier Inn and the offices of an insurance company.  The owner of the block has a loan from Canada Life.  Eastbourne Borough Council acts as guarantor - of both the loan and tenants' rents - in return for a fee and an annual payment.  It's an unusual arrangement, designed to bring in some revenue for the town - but it has perplexed the Council's auditors and slightly concerned the Government accountants.  Again, one to watch.

On a lighter note, Magnus, one of the Society's followers, has written in to say how much he enjoyed a recent stay at the Devonshire Park Hotel.  He was intrigued by the surprisingly large concealed green space that lies behind it. We recall a photograph of lawn tennis courts here, back in Edwardian days, but we will investigate further.

Next time, we will look at the Environment Agency's plans to improve the town's sea defences - topical in view of the recent storm and high spring tides; plus the tree planting taking place on the town's downland escarpment, following the decimation by disease of all the Ash trees.

In the meantime, have a good week.

Update - 31 January 2021

Welcome to our latest update.  This is a quick run-through of some of the things we're currently looking at.  One of these is a book we've come across about local government in the town.  We've also been reflecting on the decision, now confirmed, of the University of Brighton to close its Eastbourne campus.  

As we've said previously, one of our society's aims is to better educate ourselves on the reasons Eastbourne is the place it is today.  To that end, we discovered a book in our local library.  It's a municipal history of Eastbourne and it covers the years 1938 to 1974.

It's written by a man named J C Aspden, who was the council's Chief Education Officer for many years until his retirement in 1971.  It's an official commission, so it has its fair share of dry lists, tables and data.  But we've found the account interesting nonetheless, and its insight into the thinking of those whose decisions shaped the town gives plenty of food for thought.  

We'll have more to say on the book's contents in future posts - not least the plans, which never came to fruition, for a dry ski slope at Whitbread Hollow!  For the moment, we'll reflect on some of the context it gives for the town's development during the years it covers.  

The first thing the author notes, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the town's location - with its seafront, its climate made healthy by the shelter of the downland escarpment and Beachy Head, and its proximity to pleasant countryside and places of historic interest.  These natural circumstances gave Eastbourne an advantage from the outset.

The next thing is that these circumstances were enhanced, not compromised, by the attitude taken by the main landowners who initially sought to develop the town.  There were no planning restrictions in force when the Compton and Davies-Gilbert estates first drew up their designs for elegant streets and squares, and put in law covenants over the land they in due course sold on.  These covenants put barriers in the way of inappropriate development or buildings which might run counter to their original vision. And, aside from some notorious exceptions - the Southcliff Tower comes to mind - they seem to have worked.

With these advantages, the town soon became a popular destination for prosperous holiday-makers whose spending fuelled the local economy.  Hotels were built along the front to accommodate increasing visits.  Following on from this, Eastbourne began to support a lucrative conference trade, as political parties, trade unions and other organizations favoured such locations for their annual gatherings.

Another factor influencing the early economy was private education.  The town was seen as an ideal, healthy setting to situate boarding schools for the children of parents based overseas, where the father was in the armed forces, government service or colonial enterprises of one sort or another.  These schools multiplied across the Meads and Upperton areas and along the upper end of the sea front.  But the social and economic circumstances of the 1930s quickly reversed this, and many schools merged or closed.  A majority of those remaining left during the war, and did not return.  By this time, of course, the local authority had expanded its own provision, on top of the voluntary schools which had existed in smaller numbers up to that point.

Eastbourne also became popular as a retirement destination.  At first, those who chose the town were well-to-do,  with successful careers behind them in business or public service, often, like the boarding school parents, based overseas.  They settled in the large villas and fine houses of Meads and Upperton, accommodating domestic staff, gardeners, drivers and the like.  In due course, the war brought about a greater social mix among the town's retired community.  

A consequence of the high number of elderly residents was significant pressure on medical and social services, certainly relative to the population of the time.  Doctors and hospitals struggled to meet the demand.  

Its other effect was to make dominant a conservative attitude of mind, among those who voted in local elections at any rate, and this tended to resist public expenditure - so longer-term investment and big capital projects were repeatedly voted down, much to the frustration of officials such as the author of the book.  It was all about keeping the rates low.  

By contrast, this elderly, conservative community were the mainstay of a thriving voluntary sector.  Many of the services which these days we'd expect the state or local authority to provide became the work of charitable organisations,  populated by wealthy retirees with time on their hands.

We'll come back to the book in future posts.  One development of note, however, is its account of the arrival in the town, back in 1947, of the Chelsea College of Physical Education, and its importance, alongside other further education institutions, to the town's efforts to rebuild after the war.  Several mergers later, the college was absorbed by the University of Brighton and became its Eastbourne Campus - a campus which we now know for sure will close, with its departments and facilities moving to Brighton.  

Growing up in the town, we rather took for granted Chelsea College, and its successor manifestations.  We probably adopted a rather superior attitude to an educational institution dedicated to sport and sport science.  We certainly had no intention of studying there.  The more we learn about its work over the years, the more ignorant we realise that view was.  Innovative and ground-breaking research took place at the campus, and many leading sportsmen and women had links with it.  Its departure will surely be a loss for the town and we must hope that some kind of educational organization will in due course take its place, but we are not optimistic about that.

On that rather downbeat note, we will bring our update to a close.  Many thanks for reading.

Update 11 January 2022

Welcome to the society's latest update.  

This week, we're trying to understand what lies behind the current bin strike in the town; we're going to try to answer the question - when is a new hospital a new hospital? Finally, we're going to look at some opinion polls which purport to show voting intention at constituency level - and we'll see what they say about Eastbourne.

So first the bin strike.

As we've said before, we no longer live in the town, so we can only imagine how inconvenient and unpleasant the current situation is for those who do.  Here's hoping the dispute is resolved soon.  At the time of writing though, this does not seem likely.

The strike is about wages, particularly for the HGV-qualified drivers in the workforce.  But it's also about some of the conditions at the depot.  On one side of the dispute is the GMB, which is one of the major general trade unions, representing workers in all kinds of industries and sectors.  On the other is Eastbourne's LibDem-run council, which outsources its refuse collection services to a private company, albeit one it wholly owns and whose board comprises LibDem councillors and senior Borough Council officers.

The bin workers look to their equivalents in Lewes.  After all, Eastbourne and Lewes now manage their refuse collection under a joint brand - Environment First.  The Lewes workers are directly employed by the local authority.  The Eastbourne bin workers are not, and say that their counterparts in Lewes are paid more.   

The Eastbourne drivers are looking for a 25% pay uplift.  The Union argues it's less about the rate of increase, more about a decent hourly rate.  The Council has offered 7%, which the strikers have rejected.  

So the dispute continues.  GMB members are picketing the depot on strike days.  The Council has sought to get round the strike by using HGV qualified supervisors to drive the vehicles.   The picket line, made up of strikers and GMB supporters from elsewhere, has prevented them.

If anything, the two sides seem to be getting further apart.  The council thinks those who didn't vote for strike action should be allowed to do their work, and is taking legal advice.  The GMB is consulting members working in refuse collection in other local authorities.  Its General Secretary is taking a direct interest.

At some stage, this dispute will be resolved, and the bin workers will return to work with better pay and improved facilities.  The issue will be how much it all costs.  The Council will need to find the money from somewhere to foot the bill.  

Second, when is a new hospital not a new hospital?

Boris Johnson made his announcement about hospitals back last year.  Eastbourne would have one of the 40 brand new hospitals promised for the country.  Local Conservative MPs celebrated.  They made much of their roles in securing the outcome.  

When we heard the news, our first thought was where in the town this brand new hospital might appear.  And what would happen to the old District General Hospital.  Would it go the way of St.Mary's, the Princess Alice or even the old TB hospital by the Downs - converted into flats, or knocked down?

We now know that the words "new hospital" have quite a broad meaning in the minds of officials in the Department of Health and Social Care.   They extend to "major refurbishment and alteration of all but building frame or main structure, delivering a significant extension to useful life..."

A more prosaic account of what is proposed is found in the statements of the East Sussex Healthcare Trust, the NHS body which runs the DGH and other hospitals across the county. What is planned is a major and much-needed overhaul of the hospital's ageing estate.  

Whether these plans will satisfy Eastbourne residents is another matter.  The Trust provides acute health care services to over half a million people in East Sussex and beyond, primarily through the DGH and the Conquest in Hastings.  It regards the DGH not as Eastbourne's hospital, but as a District hospital that happens to be in Eastbourne.  Its past efforts to arrange services in what it sees as the most effective way have run up against a highly energetic local group, "Save the DGH", endorsed by local politicians of all parties, and one which campaigns against any proposal to move core services from the town.

Talking of politicians, we continue to look for signs of what might happen here in the next general election.

We came across a couple of MRP polls.  These aim to reflect voting intention at the constituency level.  MRP stands for "multilevel regression and post-stratification".   We won't pretend to understand what this really means.  We think it's the use of very big samples, where lots of demographic detail is obtained alongside voting intention.  The voting intention is then projected onto a constituency population, matching the demographic detail to surveys by the Office of National Statistics and the Census.

(Or something like that).

The technique has a proven record of spotting otherwise unlikely developments - like the 2017 Labour surges in Canterbury and Kensington.  So we were interested in what these polls - conducted by Survation and Focaldata - were showing in southern coastal towns similar to Eastbourne.  They show growing Labour strength, with the party standing to pull off dramatic wins in the two Bournemouth seats, and one of those in Worthing.  This is on top of holds in Brighton, wins in Hastings and also one of the Thanet seats.  Labour is becoming a party of the south coast seaside town.  

What they don't suggest is any change in Eastbourne, at least not yet.  Both show narrow Tory holds.  In one of them, Labour comes out in second place, and that does not sound right.  

Either way, we'll watch for more of these.  In the meantime, have a good week.

Update - 4 January 2022

Welcome to our third blog update.  A Happy New Year to you.  Thank you for looking in.

We've been considering three things over the last few days.  First, Charleston Farmhouse, not far from the town, and the track that leads up to it - this was the subject of a Daily Mail report a few days back; second, some reflections on the type of MP voters of Eastbourne expect, on the back of recent comments made by the new LibDem Parliamentary candidate; finally, our efforts to understand a bit more about the Rachel Charitable Trust, the organization which owns the TJ Hughes building and which has submitted plans for its demolition.

First, Charleston Farmhouse.

The Daily Mail's headline and its article's first few paragraphs suggest a Tory peer got his hands on so-called levelling up money to fix the potholes on his stately home's driveway.  As it happens, by the time the reporter got to the end of their story, they had actually set out what we have since discovered is more or less the true position.  Nevertheless, the Mail retained its headline and first distorting paragraphs.  

The facts as we understand them are as follows.  Charleston Farmhouse (or rather the charity which owns and runs it) applied for the money.  This farmhouse used to be part of Firle Estate, which belongs to Viscount Gage.  It was rented by the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant for many years.  

After the latter's death, ownership transferred to the charity, and the farmhouse became a museum dedicated to the painters' work and a centre for events and festivals.  Its visitors continue to come from far and wide, or at least did before the pandemic, and their visits benefit the local economy.

The track leading to the farmhouse is indeed part of the Firle Estate.  While OK for the estate's purposes, it had become unsuitable for those driving specifically to visit the museum.  The charity applied to something called the Getting Building Fund for money to fund its repair.  This fund is released by Central Government to Local Enterprise Partnerships - who allocate grants for infrastructure projects supporting employment and the local economy.  

The bid was approved, money spent and repairs undertaken.  There is nothing secret about this.  It is all in the public domain.  

Yet the Mail's false headline was enough to spark a flurry of angry tweets and outraged letters from the Labour Party and others, all repeating the misleading presentation of what had gone on.  Our view is that this fuss has obscured a more important question - was it right to prioritize a project such as this, given all the other pressing claims on public finances? 

Second, the type of MP Eastbourne expects.  

We've been listening to the opinions of Josh Babarinde, the new LibDem Parliamentary candidate.  He takes a dim view of Caroline Ansell, the sitting Tory. No surprise there of course.  He claims residents don't like her; that she is invisible; that she doesn't respond to constituents.  Josh believes that an MP should be someone the town looks up to, feels pride in.

This got us thinking about the personalities of previous MPs for the town.

We were brought up here during the Ian Gow years.  He certainly met Josh's criteria.  He was everywhere - a flamboyant, larger than life figure. In the paper every week.  People in the town loved him.  Everyone had a good word, even his political opponents.  

His Tory successor, Nigel Waterson, less so.  He was an effective Parliamentarian, and respected for his expertise on pensions.  But the town did not warm to him in quite the same way.   No-one was that surprised when the expenses scandal exposed his main family home to be in Beckenham.

Stephen Lloyd was more in the Gow mould we would say, certainly more so than Nigel Waterson.  Even die-hard Tories (or our parents at any rate) acknowledged the work he did for the town.  

What is clear is that, fair or not, this criticism of Caroline Ansell will be one of the LibDem attack lines locally.  They have others and we'll be looking at them in future posts.  

Finally, the Rachel Charitable Trust, and its plans to demolish the TJ Hughes building.

There is a big row brewing over this.  A petition has been launched.  Heritage organisations outside the town are watching. The building's architect was Peter Stonham, well-known and important to Eastbourne.  Few people who care about the appearance of the town would want to see a Stonham building pulled down. 

We've been trying to find out a bit more about the Rachel Charitable Trust and what its purpose might signify for the site.   

The charity belongs to a very successful property investor and philanthropist called Leo Noe.  He uses it to run a number of business sites around the UK - alongside his other companies' purely commercial activity.  The revenue funds grants for various purposes.  These include social care initiatives for the Jewish community in the UK, and an organization set up to integrate ultra orthodox Jews into mainstream employment in Israel.

I think it's fair to say that the charity - given this purpose - cannot be expected to sit on an empty building indefinitely.  And any plans need to realise as much revenue for the charity as possible.  I suppose they've already considered alternative plans which stop short of demolition.

It is strange to think this familiar Eastbourne building is at the mercy of interests which go well beyond not just the town, but the UK itself.  But it's not the only such site.  Looked at one way, the Beacon shopping centre, owned by the major financial institution Legal and General, is just a small, modest element of that organization's wider investment strategy.

But perhaps that's best left for a future post!  Thank you for reading.

Update - 19 December 2021

A very warm welcome to our second blog update.  Thank you once again for looking in.

This week, we've been considering housing development and the impact of recent national events on the local political outlook.  And we were very pleased to receive some messages from society followers.    

First, housing.

Let's face it.  Planning is never an easy issue for local authorities.  No community likes to see its open space built on. Or nice old houses with big gardens knocked down and replaced by ugly flats or infill.

But Councils are in a tricky position.  Their officers must work on projections of local population growth and set targets for new housing.  Elected councillors for their part know there are few votes in building over green spaces.

The current controversy in the Eastbourne area is Morning's Mill Farm.  You see its fields on the right when you take the older of the two main roads out of town, just as you leave Willingdon for Polegate.  There's been application for a couple of years now - by the Vine farming family - for permission to build hundreds of houses on the farm's land.

It's no exaggeration to say such a development would have a dramatic impact on the appearance of the area - effectively joining up Eastbourne and Polegate in one suburban sprawl.

The farm is actually the other side of the northern boundary of Eastbourne Borough.  The decision-maker is therefore Wealdon District Council.  Their Councillors have now rejected the application - twice - despite their officers telling them there are no technically permitted grounds for doing so.  In this, the Councillors are surely doing the bidding of those who elected them.  

Unfortunately, for the elected local politicians, and for the campaigns influencing them, I fear their celebrations will be short-lived.  The matter will most likely be resolved in court.  And the reasons given by Councillors for their refusal will, I suspect, be picked apart by developers' legal teams.

We shall see.

Second, North Shropshire.

It's been a long and exhausting week in national politics to be sure.  The LibDem victory this week has got the pundits looking for parallels in the 1990 Eastbourne by-election - in which David Belotti of the LibDems overturned a similarly big Tory majority.  This outcome arguably marked the beginning of the end for Mrs Thatcher.  Will it be the same for Boris Johnson?

Maybe.  

But what preoccupies us more is the significance of the North Shropshire result for Eastbourne.    We're pondering all those Brexit voting, Tory voting switchers to the LibDems.  They didn't stay at home (much).  They did not choose the Reform party, or whatever it calls itself at present.  They went to the centre.

This confounds my assumption that Brexit might hamper LibDem progress in the town.  If this trend holds, even in part, it's encouraging news for Josh Babarinde and his team.  

However, we must complete the picture.  

David Belotti's tenure as Eastbourne's MP was short-lived.  Less than two years later, the town returned a Conservative, with a comfortable majority.  It remained blue (although becoming more marginal at each election) for all of eighteen years!

And as for Belotti himself, his post Parliamentary career was - how shall I put this?  - eventful.  He became the CEO of Brighton and Hove Albion football club and oversaw the sale of its Goldstone Ground - a set of events which almost destroyed the club.

So my advice to Josh Babarinde - don't put Belotti's photograph on your leaflets....

To end this week's update, we were delighted to receive a couple of messages from Society followers.

Magnus from Fulham let us know of an enjoyable evening he'd spent visiting Meads.  A pint of Harvey's at the Pilot, then Lobster and Corn soup at Xing Fu.  Magnus noted a surprising number of inhabited camper vans parked along St.Johns Road.

Thanks, Magnus, for your entertaining message.

Ian from Cambridge drew our attention to a fascinating BBC documentary entitled "Surgeons:  At the Edge of Life", in which several medics with an Eastbourne background, including Ian himself, were featured.

Ian was brought up and educated in the town, and makes regular visits here to catch up with mother Mary and sister Jean.

Ian's message reminded us - if indeed we needed reminding - of the tremendous debt we owe our health professionals - both now and in less problematic times.  I will be doing my best this next week not to add to their workload

Happy Christmas to you all.

Update - 12 December 2021

A warm welcome to the first of the society's blog updates.  Thank you for looking in.

Our society is for those who are interested in Eastbourne, who've lived in the town in the past or who live there still.  We're trying to understand what's happened over the years to make it the place it is today; and what is going on now which might shape its future.  

We're looking at the big things.  We're not interested in trivia (well, not much).  

This weekly update will run through what we're currently looking at.   

First thing:  the Council's three big projects, financed by Central Government's levelling up money.  The Council's going to tart up the end of Terminus Road, and make it a pedestrianised outdoor dining area.  It's going to put down some kind of art trail around the town.  And it's going to put a tourist centre at Black Robin Farm near Beachy Head.  

You can see what's going on here.  The Council wants to make Eastbourne a more interesting, fun place to visit.  It needs the visitors, and it needs them to spend money.  

On the subject of money, the pandemic has hit the Council's finances hard.  No tourists or conferences.  Yet an increased demand for social care and other services.  Central Government stepped in with cash (not the same as above), but on condition its accountants review the position.  They've told the Council it needs to do more than rebuild its tourism and conference offer.  It needs to sell off things.  I don't know what the Council owns, except for the Eastbourne Downs farms.  It's not going to want to go back there surely.  This is going to be tricky.

Second thing:  there's a big consultation underway about the town's sea defences.  Climate change and sea level rise is going to mean breaches, and thousands of houses built on the flood plain will be at risk.  The Environment Agency will probably want to raise the sea wall east of the pier, going down all the way to Cooden.  It might think about whether the levels - the marshy ground through which the train line runs - can accommodate occasional storm surge water.  Watch this space.

Third thing: another consultation, this time about Brighton University's future in Eastbourne, although we suspect it's a done deal.  This marks a probable end to a line of further education in the town.  Eastbourne will feel its loss - the students will go; I guess the buildings will either be knocked down or renovated for housing.  

The history of education in the town is interesting - from the art school which educated Tirzah Garwood and her husband, Eric Ravilious, to the emergency use after the war of empty private school buildings to train up teachers.  The ghosts of a hundred plus such schools haunt many Meads and Upperton roads.

Fourth thing:  we're watching the political situation in the town.  The Liberal Democrats have chosen their candidate to fight the next General Election, and what a CV he has (OBE in his twenties for social action).  But he and his team mustn't underestimate the challenge, as I'm sure they won't - the Brexity, Conservative vote here is resilient.  The Libdems' best chance is to harness growing Labour support towards the loan of tactical votes. And the candidate will need to do all he can to get himself noticed (which, with his "Eastbourne OBE Roadshow", he is already surely doing). 

We would have said that Eastbourne was probably out of the Liberals' reach a few weeks ago - because the Labour and Green vote had already gone their way.  Now we're not so sure.  This writer holds no political affiliation (nor an Eastbourne vote for that matter).  So we'll just attempt an impartial view on developments.  We know one thing, though - it's going to be a right battle.  

That's all for now.  Do feel free to comment or feed back.  In the meantime, have a great week and stay safe!