Culture

“I get things done” says Dawn Dublin, as we sit down together to chat about her company, Black Butterfly. Amidst dashing outside to tell a random passer-by how cool he looks and cuddling her hot chocolate, she tells me about a phone call she’s just had on her walk here involving motherhood, miscarriage and marginalization. I can already hear the cogs whirring in her head, ideas sprouting of what she (or we as a community) can do to support people in these situations. There’s

Oh no, there isn’t!  Pantomime audiences at The White Rock Theatre’s Jack and the Beanstalk are in for a real treat this Christmas.  I know this first-hand, as I was lucky to spend a side-splitting day last week with Mark Two, the traditional pantomime dame playing Dame Tilly Trott.  Mark Two is appearing as part of a talented panto cast including Richard Blackwood as Jack and Tim McArthur returning as Fleshcreep by popular demand.  The whole theatre is being transformed fo

If you’re a child of the 70s or 80s, the word ‘wrestling’ might conjure up thoughts of Big Daddy or Giant Haystacks and Saturday afternoons huddled round the big telly, booing whilst slurping a carton of E numbers through a skinny straw.

Richard Upton is a creative entrepreneur, a visionary, a lover of art, architecture, sculpture, people, history and community. He is passionate about the ‘quality of place’ no matter whom or what the place is for. He is from humble beginnings in Stepney, East London. “There wasn’t a lot of money at home but there was love. So I’ve always been entrepreneurial out of necessity and adversity,” he says.

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.

A Play by Local Twin Sisters, Anna and George

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.

In the depths of last winter, musician and sonic artist Isobel Anderson found herself alone at an Abba night in a caravan park in Romney Sands. She’d booked a week-long stay in the flat, featureless coastal landscape near Dungeness, to creatively explore the subject of existential grief for a new project, End Times. And it’s fair to say Abba hadn’t featured in her plans.

This September, artist Sophie Barber opens her show, Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, never long wet, never long dry at Hastings Contemporary. Like many great stories, this is a journey that starts here, travels the world, sort of, and returns home triumphant. Born in 1996, it has taken less than thirty years to have a museum show of international importance in the town of her birth.

Friday saw the launch of three new major exhibitions at Hastigs Contemporary Gallery at Rock-a-Nore.

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.

Tullis Rennie is a sound-explorer of many parts: part improvising trombonist, part electronic musician and part composer. Often to be found performing live around town, sometimes accompanied by digital animations and alongside many local collaborators. I chatted with Tullis about his work, background and musical style.

Words by Gareth Stevens Portrait by Piers Golden Artworks by Richard Butchins I meet with Richard Butchins in his windowless studio along...

Blending live performance with responsive virtual reality, this new one-woman show unfolds in a fully digital environment that shifts in real time with the performer’s movement and emotional state.

Craig Mason almost ‘broke the internet’ with his fake bamboo and he gave the dogs at Battersea a pop-art inspired room that was fit for a King Charles Spaniel, but it was his pub in Edinburgh that had Interior Design Masters on BBC1 sending him back to us in Hastings. Most definitely their loss, our gain I say!

Two years ago, Ibi Meier-Oruitemeka (Studio IMO) was not a painter. In fact, she had never really considered it as an option. But on the morning of her birthday in May 2023, she woke up with the inexplicable urge to buy some paint. She followed that feeling, and since then, painting has become not just an artistic pursuit but a radical shift in the way she sees herself.

Beccy McCray will be no stranger to those working in Hastings and St Leonards’ art scene, local environmental activism, or simply out and about around the place. Keen-eyed Get Hastings readers may even remember her from Louise Coulthard’s 2023 piece on allotments. Working across multiple disciplines, blending visual storytelling with the natural world and social themes, her disparate interests coalesce into a wild creative practice that sees Beccy grace this issue’s cover sho

Katja has lived in Hastings for many years and runs the incredible Katja’s Cakes from her studio at The Yard. We caught up with her (and the very gorgeous Staffordshire Bull Terrier Roxy) to eat cake and chat baking, ceramics, creative inspiration and Yard life!

This hugely innovative and creative film focuses on the neurodivergent experience and has its feet firmly planted in Hastings. Gareth Stevens explains why he thinks it is not so much about autism, it is of autism.

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.