Chapter 6: Victorian Occupants

By 1850, the status of Hastings, and particularly of the Old Town, was changing. A glimpse of this is provided by the account of the town that appeared in 1848 in the compilation, The Land We Live In, by the popular journalist, Charles Knight. After explaining how, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hastings ‘grew to be perhaps the most fashionable as well as one of the largest of the watering-places on the southern coast’, Knight went on:

Now, those who are disposed to grumble - or, what is the same thing, those who pride themselves on their gentility - perceive symptoms of a new change in the character of their town. The railway has brought it within the reach of a larger class, and it seems as though there is danger that it may lose its ‘select’ and genteel character, and fall to be ‘no better than Margate’ - which may the Fates forbid!

Though he went on to sing the praises of St Leonards as an up-market alternative to Hastings itself, and though he still made much of the attractions of the town as a whole, there is no mistaking his perception of the changing character of what had previously been deemed a highly genteel neighbourhood.50

50 Knight, The Land We Live In (London: n.d. [1848]), p. 274, and pp. 273-88, passim.