Changes in the Old Town enshrined in 5 High Street

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood had strong connections with Hastings and its hinterland. Holman Hunt stayed at Clive Vale Farm. D G Rossetti and Lizzie Siddall had 5 High Street in the Old Town, previously the site of George Wooll’s printshop and ‘Repository of Arts’ in the 1820s. A new book – Jenny Ridd, Walls, Beams, Love and Dreams: The People of  5 High Street, Hastings (2024) – explores this address through the prism of social and sexual change. Richard Saville has reviewed it.

The visual splendour of Hastings old town architecture has long been a great tourist backcloth, ideal for encouraging civic activity, for pirate and LGBTQ parades and processions, for local politics and street activity and the constant activity demanding buildings preservation.

Beyond the old town, the fishing trade, the buffeting of the Channel, the squares of St Leonards, the old hotels on the front, all possess layers of class and community and the appeal of cultural activity.

The new book from Jenny Ridd on the four centuries of the lives of 5 High Street covers these and more. Her dig in the gardens at No. 5 – home to Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal – recovered intact lots of household utensils and crockery plus bottles, smokers’ pipes and tea pots, etc., from the mid-eighteenth century.

Using deeds and other surviving legal papers and letters, Ridd pieces together much about the residents: thus we meet John Knight builder, ‘opportunist’ and general dealer who opened the first Hastings Library in 1788; George Wooll, an industrious lithograph publisher and printer whose business included the ‘Repository of Arts’ with prints for sale by Augustine Aglio. Wooll realised that the Napoleonic era allowed Hastings and other Cinque Ports to expand on the increasing demand for fresh air and water cures.  Wooll also employed George Rowe, the lithograph painter and printer whose precision on dozens of prints sold well, and are still sought today.

Of the four ‘repositories’ in Hastings in Wooll’s time at No. 5, Sarah Austin owned another at the Battery, and a Mrs Cohen at 2 Pelham Place; many other female owned businesses blossomed in the Georgian years in Hastings, as in several of the Cinque Ports, business acumen and a certain toughness being essential.

In Hastings, the attractions of the old town and the new building west over the Priory stream towards St Leonards offered potential: good road links to London, a fast same day postal service, safe and healthy places for visitors – early town guides waxed lyrical on the sea breezes and clean air with their health and curative qualities.

If ladies wanted clear and sound breathing then the atmosphere of Hastings was ideal.  Also for arts people wanting a nice place with soirees and literary circles and lots of nice people to get to know.

Ridd’s digging extends right across Hastings middle class life, and connects to the LGBTQ ‘arena’, notably with the revelations from Anne Lister, who stayed at No. 5 in 1831/2 and elsewhere in the town. Lister’s encoded Diaries (now translated) the UN proclaimed as ‘a pivotal document in British history’, basic to understanding lesbian history and to the unfolding of social life in Hastings in the boom years of Victoria and Edwardian England.

The demand for quality services for modern fashions, female servants and ladies’ maids, assistants and governesses, for actresses and theatre presentations, poetry evenings, and, above all dances, these were the lives of the hotels and assembly rooms.

Were Anne Lister and others in this LGBTQ ‘arena’ distinctive people who gave Hastings such a boost in the nineteenth century?  Women decisive in enabling the business shift towards a wider gender balance of this era and in ensuring Hastings was an attractive place to stay? Jenny Ridd emphasises all this, with an obvious plea to preserve buildings and also, clearly proven, the gardens as well.

 

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