How should the bicentenary of St Leonards be marked?

Following the recent article on James Burton (1761-1837) as the original DFL, Bernard McGinley reports on tentative steps to celebrate 200 years of the town Burton founded, St Leonards-on-Sea. There will be a public meeting at the Horse & Groom, Mercatoria, on Monday 5 June, at 7:30 p.m, in the converted garage. Come and contribute to an undefined festival.

St Leonards-on-Sea is not an organic town like most others: it sprang purpose-built, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. For this uniqueness and others it deserves to be celebrated. Making a festival is a difficult undertaking, but possible.  

What should or could a bicentenary festival look like? Celebrating what? What’s it the bicentenary of: is it James Burton? his St Leonards? all celebratory aspects of SLoS since?  

Questions are many, for now. Does the festival have a name? No, but working titles could be Jas B 200 or SLoS 200 or Lensville.

For how long should the festival run? A weekend? A summer? How long have you got? There’s no shortage of local heroes and ideas. What sort of events should be attempted? Theatre? Film? Exhibitions? Photography? Walks and talks? Tournaments? How could music fit in?

Clearly there’s a need for support and sponsors, and costs and budget, and a secretariat, [eventual] website and communications. Above all there’s a need for volunteers to help take the project forward.

When is the bicentenary? 2026 is a fair choice of year, given the fundraising and organisational lead times. What’s all the fuss about? That’s a DFL question.

Some residents

St Leonards is the town of many curious people — doctors, artists, politicoes, suffragettes, eccentrics, rogues, philanthropists, and others. They included:

Walter and Leonora Ison, who in the 1940s and ‘50s re-established the architectural importance of Bath, eventually relocated to St Leonards whose battered grandeur appealed to them.

Sir George Evans, who fought against the Americans in the War of 1812 and against the French at Waterloo.  

Alan Turing, whose mathematical gifts were first recognised at his school in Charles Road (not far from Aleister Crowley’s old school in Pevensey Road). His contribution to computer science and to the Allied victory in WW2 was great.

This is where Queen Victoria lived as a girl. See the painting by Joseph Josiah Dodd.

Sir Joseph Napier, sometime MP, judge and antidisestablishmentarian, lived in St Leonards. So did Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, and Mary Harris Smith, the first woman chartered accountant.

Annie Besant (1847-1933) lived in Warrior Square, and was married in 1867 at what is now the Greek Church in St Margaret’s Road. She was involved in various progressive causes (including birth control, and the Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888). Later she was long active in the campaign for Indian self-rule.

Dr Anna Kingsford (1846-88), the vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist, was also here.

The Fellowship of the New Life, a consciously progressive organisation of the 1880s, had a sizeable presence in St Leonards, through luminaries such as Edward Carpenter, whose grandfather lived in the East Colonnade. An offshoot was the Fabian Society, which led on to the Labour Party.  

Robert Tressell and his Social Democratic Party pal Alf Cobb were here, beholding Mugsborough.

Herbert ‘Survival of the Fittest’ Spencer (1820-1903) had a house in The Mount, near Archery Road. The influential social thinker was a close friend of the novelist George Eliot, who also liked St Leonards.

So did Gavin Martin (1961-2022), the prolific music writer and performer-poet, who liked sea swimming.  

Colonel Edmond Eaton, who in 1928 was sentenced to four years imprisonment for major fraud, lived in St Leonards.

The American William Gardner, inventor of a particularly effective machine-gun, lived here, and is buried in Hastings Cemetery.

Visitors

Noteworthy visitors were as plentiful as interesting residents. Jane Welsh Carlyle, ailing wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle, visited in the summer of 1863:

I went some three weeks ago to St Leonards, the pleasantest place I know; and stayed from Monday to Saturday, in circumstances the most favourable to health that could be desired. The finest sea air in the world — a large, airy, quiet house close on the shore . . .  

In the 20th century the visitors included Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, on their first British tour in 1933. (They played at the Regal, now the site of Ocean House.) Louis Armstrong got here in 1934. The British film of the popular radio drama Life with the Lyons had its world premiere at the Regal in 1954.  

European visitors were also plentiful, as when the ex-royal family of France were in St Leonards in 1849.

Other visitors included the novelist George Gissing (who stayed in East Ascent in 1894), and Charles Gounod, the French composer. David Bowie played Marine Court several times in the 1960s. David Hockney was in West Hill Road for a while. (And so, endlessly, on.)

Architectural

After the 1825 advertisement in the Morning Herald, James Burton’s interest was marked. As an experienced Georgian builder he knew the possibilities. He bought tracts of land and made drawings. Hastings Museum & Art Gallery has some of the drawings, dated 1827. (The Keep at Falmer has plenty of other relevant documents.) That same year, a Parliamentary private act, the Eversfield Estate Act, allowed the trustees of the Eversfield Estate to grant building leases and make sales of Eversfield land. 

Though St Leonards is often thought of as built by James Burton and his architect son Decimus, many of its notable buildings are by other noted architects, such as H Goodhart-Rendel, Frederick Marrable, R Norman Shaw, Adrian Gilbert-Scott, Alexander Wyon (a one-building architect!), John Loughborough Pearson, Philip Tree, Philip Powell and Hidalgo Moya (of the Skylon and much else), Edwin Lutyens, and many others.

Meeting

For too long St Leonards-on-Sea has been in the shadow of its 1066 neighbour and friend. There’s no lack of artistic and administrative talent, or enthusiasm and civic pride, to showcase this town. A working group might achieve a broadly based popular programme, and the makings of a bicentenary festival. Fundraising will be tough.  

To explore these and other issues, an initial meeting will be held at the Horse & Groom (in the converted garage at the back), Mercatoria, St Leonards, on Monday 5 June at 7:30pm, for an hour or so: it’s a James Burton building. Those interested in discussing how a festival could happen are welcome.

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