| Football club chairman found dead The chairman of a south London football club whose owner was linked to the cricket match-fixing scandal is found dead with a bullet wound to the head. bbc.co.uk |
The tragic battle for Hastings | Feature Last week's devastating fire is the latest blow for a town continually let down by planners and developersHastings is a town that doesn't know how beautiful it is. Slung between cliffs, crowned by a Norman castle, it has an old town of steep streets which, if there were nothing else, would make it as famously picturesque as pretty, posher, Rye along the coast. It has history: it's hard to get more historic than to give your name to a battle that changed a nation, a culture and a language.There is however much else. Parts of it are average and decrepit terraces, or misguided stabs at regeneration over the last 50 years that help explain why the town is not more celebrated. But it also specialises in urban one-offs, marvels that are not quite like anything anywhere else.There is, for example, Pelham Crescent, a Regency curve poised before an unruly cascade of rock, which faces the spectacle of the sea like a theatre balcony. There is the Stade, where enigmatic rows of tarred wooden towers, built to store fishing nets, stand on the shingle. There are two funicular railways, travelling up the cliffs to crenellated stations, engineering and medievalism meeting as they do at Tower Bridge. There is Marine Court (technically in adjoining St Leonards, but outsiders wouldn't know the difference), a block of flats modelled on the superstructure of the Queen Mary, which does indeed look like a liner rounding the point. As a native of Hastings (well, St Leonards), and growing up nearby, I learned gradually to appreciate its unusual charm.And there is, or was until last Tuesday, the pier. From a distance this was a turreted citadel, miraculously suspended above water. It was a piece of town beneath which the land had somehow disappeared, in a piece of anti-gravity slapstick worthy of the acts that once took place here. Its light steel-and-timber construction imitated heavy masonry forms like towers and domes, enhancing the sense of mass over nothing. The dead straight line of its deck, dictated by the not-to-be-trifled-with geometry of tides, contrasted with its fanciful skyline. It was essential to the physiognomy of the town. It would be a smaller loss if the Norman castle vanished.Close up, no matter how decayed its attractions, the pier offered the chance to see the town in a new way, to get different perspectives of cliffs and sea, to breathe a different kind of air, to experience the gentle vertigo of land over water. Or at least it did until it was locked up by its owners, the Panamanian-registered company with a bizarre Harry Potter name, Ravenclaw Investments. Until last week, Ravenclaw had been completely silent for four years.Now the pier has joined the sad list of intractable seaside relics damaged in more-or-less mysterious fires: Dreamland in Margate, the west pier in Brighton, the piers at Weston-super-Mare and Southend. Similar themes recur, with variations, such as struggling business plans, neglect, sometimes obscure owners, and then the smoke drifting across the town and fire crews almost helpless as, without the equipment to fight flames at sea, they watch the piers go up like balls of newspaper.The particular sadness of Hastings is that, after years of struggle, it seemed that something might be about to happen. Local people had organised themselves, campaigned and fundraised, and eventually persuaded the borough council to set about the compulsory purchase of the pier. An architectural competition had been launched which, even if another such competition 20 years ago led nowhere, was at least a sign of hope. There was a chance for a town that had not always done right by its unique fabric to redeem itself. Hastings, as proponents of improvements always remind you, is the second poorest seaside town in the country, and in the desperate search for jobs and investment, pieces of its soul are sometimes lost.The cricket ground, a green bubble in the very centre, disappeared under a shopping centre in the late 1990s, remembered only by an insulting statue of a batsman. In 2003 a grandiose competition was launched, with architects of international renown, to build a commercial development between Pelham Crescent and the sea. It was won by Foster and Partners' stunningly inane plan to complete the original crescent as a glassy oval. As if this was what the original architect Decimus Burton had really wanted but had somehow been too stupid to realise. As if, if you doubled a semi-circle – let's say the Greek theatre at Epidaurus, or Royal Crescent in Bath – it would automatically be twice as nice. Thankfully the state of the economy means this project is unlikely to proceed, but at a cost in fees, energy and boosterism that might have been better spent on existing treasures, like the pier.More recently the Jerwood Foundation, a sensitive, thoughtful charity dedicated to promoting the arts, proposed a sensitive, thoughtful gallery designed by the young architects HAT Projects. Now under construction, it is located among the fishermen's huts on the Stade, and provoked probably unexpected fury from some local fishermen, who saw it as an unasked-for intrusion on their realm by artsiness and gentrification. This, after all, is a working zone, the base of the largest beach-launched fishing fleet in Europe, not an abandoned brownfield site.For me the Stade is essentially perfect, a place like none other with the added benefit of good fish-and-chip shops alongside, which needs little improvement. The Jerwood project is so scrupulous and careful that the objectors' fears may prove unfounded, but there still could have been a case for putting it in a part of town more obviously in need of help. Had the pier's ownership been less of a mess, for example, the Jerwood might have been a good catalyst for its rescue.All, though, is not lost. If the west pier in Brighton has stood as a defeated wreck for years, others have done better. The accident-prone Southend pier has often been repaired, and the pier at Weston-super-Mare is due to reopen soon, only two years after its fire, albeit in a form so gross and plastic that you wonder if it was worth the effort. Whatever restoration happens should now focus on the essential: the idea of a deck projected towards the horizon, on which many activities may happen.Before it burnt, Hastings pier was being touted as a pilot project of David Cameron's "big society". An active local community have a clear idea of what they want, and a willingness to contribute whatever they can. What better chance for the Government to show a baffled public what they mean? And many cities gamble many millions on acquiring "icons". Hastings has one already, which only needs to be brought back to life.ArchitecturePiersDesignRowan Mooreguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
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