Community

If you were to write a recipe for TYGERMYLK's music, it would be a heady mix of unimpeachable purity, authenticity, resistance and emotional intelligaece. A rare feast indeed.

So much more than a small seafront shop, the Full Moon Revolution on White Rock does sell intricate and colourful handmade kilim rugs created by Kurdish women in Iraq, but is also a community space and a centre for social impact.

1 person in 5 minutes - Simon Gregor

Nestled on the edge of Ore Village lies an unassuming building. It may look like an ordinary workshop from the outside, but inside, the Hastings & St Leonards Men’s Shed is quietly rewriting the narrative of ageing and loneliness in East Sussex. In this corner of Hastings something remarkable is being built – not just beautifully crafted birdboxes and clocks, but friendships, purpose, and hope.

Alexandra Park has been awarded the best tennis Park Venue of the Year and Hastings based Joe Adams has won Coach of the Year at the Lawn Tennis Association Awards. In light of these awards, Get Hastings chatted with Joe and Ross Cudmore, who coach from the park, to find out how they’re breaking the exclusivity of tennis and proving anyone can play.

A childhood passion for fixing things led Prince Tino to build a business that’s helped tens of thousands of South African children become computer literate. Now living in Hastings, he says his mission is far from finished.

The Dove Café is a shining example of how grass-roots activism can have a profound impact on the lives of refugees, asylum seekers and everyone who lives here.

As my lemon and ginger tea cools on the table beside me and my interviewees get situated, I look around the space. I’d never been inside Afri-Co-Lab before, and it’s so much more than I’d imagined.

Glenn Veness and his wife, Kathy, are a couple on a mission. A mission to create peace, love and happiness amidst a suburban council estate in Hollington.  I was buzzing earlier this year when I popped my Glennstonbury Festival cherry.

It was a few years ago that I first experienced ‘Mackerel Day’. It was blissfully warm and I’d been on the beach in front of Marine Court with friends and family and some small cans of gin and tonic from the shop. It was late afternoon, the light was soft and the beach was full of people enjoying the good weather, scared it wouldn’t last.

It’s the motto imprinted on badges, flags and the forearms (I like to imagine) of soggy folk across the land. Emma proudly declared it as I joined her for coffee, along with the rest of the St Leonards Blue Tits… Blue Bells or Mermaids.

Each of the shops in this guide has donated £15 to the brilliant, local charity: Seaview Project. This year, shopping local means more than ever!

Project Art Works, an inclusive rights-based art organisation in our hometown supports people who have complex support needs in a way that not only helps give them a platform of communication they feel comfortable with, but turns the table on societal norms and is striving to change the generalisation and assumptions around people often invisible from public life.

The importance of having land designated or communities to grow food on is a long-standing British tradition. In World War II we were digging for victory on allotments, in 1845 the Victorians passed laws compelling local authorities to provide them, in fear of a peasants’ revolt and even the Anglo-Saxons had them.

‘Never eat shredded wheat!’ a helpful person yelled to aid with the confusion of which side of the pillar was South West and which was North East. It was a sunny Thursday morning in August and an army of volunteers had come together to paint Bottle Alley, an initiative organised by creative collective, ZEROH. Spirits were high and people of all ages were eager and ready, yielding rollers, paint trays and brushes, awaiting their instructions.

Anyone who knows me will know that I’m very much an advocate of gender equality: I’ve written children’s books about it, created animations and made t-shirts and I’m not shy to shout about my feminist agenda and how much inequality angers me. So when a member of the Get Hastings team suggested that we do a feature on Hastings United Girls Under 12s, I jumped at the chance.

I wake up and it is Monday – notorious for the start of the working-mans’ week, or a death toll for students under pressure. I belong to the second category, however fortunately for me, Mondays are when I have English: two hours of arguments, debates and Christina Rosetti – I can think of nothing better.

Words and photos by Caitlin Lock Hastings is an ever-popular relocation choice for city dwellers in search of a better quality of life....