Britannia Enterprise Centre, Hastings

The Town Centre’s last industrial workspace under threat…

Tucked between the exit road from Morrisons and the railway line is a unique business environment that is under threat from Hastings Borough Council. Erica Smith goes back to explore her old haunt…

When I first moved to Hastings ten years ago, I worked from home until it started to drive me mad. It was too easy to sit at a computer for 18 hours a day, never getting out of pyjamas unless I needed to buy more milk. I realised I had to find somewhere else to work from, and there weren’t many options… this was pre-Media Centre, and at a time when graphic designers were still a rarity in town.

Henry Gastall, landlord at Britannia Enterprise Centre, Hastings. Taken June 2009

After exploring the options, I realised the solution was literally on my back doorstep – the funny little industrial yard behind the terrace of houses where I lived. I sought out the ‘Manager’ – a stringy Australian with a fag in his mouth – and negotiated rent for a 4 metre square lock-up. I became a ‘Yardie’ – a member of a raggle-taggle crew of unique small businesses. When I first moved in, there was everything from blacksmiths to double-bass makers. With a few stalwarts to keep the collective memory alive, the Yardies have always been a fluid crew. There are always builders and car mechanics there – including Mini Pete, the diminutive mini expert – but there are also an unexpected range of businesses from cake decorators through to the editor of an academic publication concerned with international urban and regional research! Some businesses thrive and move on out to greater places. Others don’t make it, but with no major investment, it’s a safe starting point to experiment with your business dreams.

Henry Gastall, the lanky Australian landlord, has always supported small businesses and charities and given a second chance to young people who otherwise would have gone to the dogs. The Yard is not a glamorous place, but it is a place where people who don’t fit in to the world of office jobs feel comfortable and can set up businesses doing ‘dirty work’ – spraying, welding, woodworking – that wouldn’t be allowed in any other town centre spaces.

Britannia Enterprise is the former ‘Corporation Yard’ – 100 years ago, when Robert Tressell was alive, it would have been servicing the municipal needs of the town, and today this is still done through the services of metalworkers, as well as social enterprises like the Community Fruit and Veg Project and the Hastings and Bexhill Wood Recycling Project. Whilst Hastings Borough Council (HBC) own the property, it has been managed for ten years by Henry Gastall on a repairing lease. The lease is now coming to the end, and HBC, rather than extend it, want to evict Mr Gastall because he has not, in their opinion, fulfilled all the maintenance requirements.

The back story may be a little more sinister… HBC say they don’t have a problem with the businesses in the Yard, just the landlord. But Britannia Enterprise is the last remaining town centre brown field site, and has been ear-marked in the Local Development Framework for future commercial development. By getting rid of the landlord and giving individual businesses shorter term contracts direct with HBC, if development of the area is on the cards, the businesses could be asked to move out at short notice for commercial re-development work to begin.

Terry McBride, editor, Yardie and a local resident is backing Henry’s role as Yard landlord all the way. “Gentrification of the yard would dissolve our mixed community and assign part of it to the welfare state; redevelopment would simply eradicate it, along with its social history, its educational possibilities, its industrial and artistic heritage. This historically significant site is important to the town, and to the town’s distinctiveness. I am convinced that the preservation of the yard, and its unique culture of business and artistic community, and of genuine social mix, has much to do with the current proprietors of the yard, and this distinctiveness would be eroded by a more top-down, or profit-driven and inflexible management model.”

To find out more, visit the Yardie’s Facebook page.
To support Henry Gastall’s case to remain head leaseholder at Britannia Enterprise, visit the HM Government e-petition.

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