The garden created by Transition Town Hastings at Warrior Square station.

Transition Town Hastings celebrates 10 years of greening the town

Transition Town Hastings celebrates 10 years of leading the town towards greening ways of living. Its activities tend to pass under the radar, but in a quiet way it has made its mark on our environment. Nick Terdre reports.

“This April marks the 10th anniversary of Transition Town Hastings’ visioning day at the White Rock Hotel and the start of a veritable bouquet of actions, events and activities that have changed our town for the better over the past decade!,” says Sherry Clark, a leading light in the movement since its formation.

The group will be celebrating this anniversary at Warrior Square station between 5 and 7pm next Tuesday, 22 April, appropriately enough Earth Day, when all are invited to join them for refreshments on platform 2, the site of a major achievement.

Here they have transformed what was a derelict and rubble-strewn hill at the side of the platform into a stunning community garden, with flowers and vegetables, a popular community notice-board, the biodiverse winding wildflower path and the awe-inspiring ‘Welcome to St Leonards’ community mosaic.

“TTH members have contributed thousands of hours over 10 years to improve our local neighbourhood for all who live and work here,” says Sherry.

“We’ll also be sowing wildflower seeds at The Space on St Johns Road, where Guerilla Joe has been hard at work clearing the sedge-choked, litter-strewn area to transform it into another beautiful new garden.”

Communal composting bins in Gensing Gardens.

Under the radar

TTH often goes under the radar but has a lot going on. Among the initiatives it has helped ‘seed,’ as Sherry puts it, is community composting, a means for people in flats or without gardens to dispose of their organic waste and create compost if they want it. It now has communal compost bins at nine sites around town, including at Warrior Square station.

TTH was also a moving force behind the Sustainability on Sea festival, now sadly defunct, and lends a helping hand where it can – its Learning to Grow group recently provided the Alexandra Park Greenhouse Group with a £500 donation to acquire a water cart to improve its watering.

“There are quite a few projects in the pipeline at the moment,” Sherry says, “Including a new licence to garden a space in Priory Square, and new grants for activities through Town Grown and Learning to Grow, as well as our ongoing involvement with the Town Deal Public Realm project and continued care of the Robertson Street, Trinity Triangle and OB alley gardens.”

The group holds monthly meetings and hosts Green Drinks – also open to all, bring your own refreshments – on the first Tuesday of every month at Archer Lodge (34 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea TN38 0QX) from 6pm.

The Transition Town movement aims to help local communities manage the transition into the era of climate change, cutting fossil fuel use, promoting green ways of living, supporting local food production, and so on.

There is, not surprisingly, an overlap of members with the local Greens, though Sherry says, “We have to regularly remind people that TTH is not an affiliate Green Party group – but the Green councillors are very supportive of all we do locally, as you can imagine!”

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