It’s most famous for another battle, one that took place almost a millennium earlier, more than ten miles out of the town.
But it was the conflict between Hastings Council and the town’s fishermen (much less bloody, only a little less fierce) that led to the town’s most distinctive buildings.
Rows of tall, thin and black wooden sheds, rising out of the shingle on the Stade like a mini Manhattan. A series of buildings totally unique in England.
To understand how they got there, you need to go back to the beginning.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different story each week.
A fishing town without a harbour
Hastings has a long history as a fishing port. For over 600 years, fleets have launched themselves from the town – which is funny, because the town doesn’t have a natural harbour.
This means that ever since the first entrepreneurial Sussex fisherman pushed off from the sand, all the way to now, fishing boats have been stored on the beach itself.
As a result, Hastings’ fishing fleet has always been pretty distinct, made up of smaller boats than neighbouring towns. To this day, it’s home to the largest beach-launched fishing fleet in Europe.
This, too, created another problem. Storage. Fishing came with a lot of equipment, and without the space for larger boats, the town’s fishermen needed another storage solution. So beginning many centuries ago, all sorts of shacks started popping up on the beach. They were known as net shops.
By the early 19th century, Hastings, like much of the South Coast, had started becoming a seaside resort. Tourists travelled down from London, believing the sea air could cure all manner of ills.
But Hastings was a small town, with a small beach. There wasn’t a lot of space. And so this led to a peculiar, Hastings-version of a tension that has repeated itself all over the world again and again: the needs of the locals against the needs of the tourists.
The tourists vs the fishermen
Tourism in the 19th century was a booming industry. Wealthy Londoners flocked down to Hastings from London, ready to spend their money. But they needed hotels, shops and restaurants. And they’d pay a premium for those amenities to be on the seafront.
The only problem was that the seafront was already taken. The fishermen needed it to store their nets; the net shops especially were taking up space along the beach, filled with all that stinking fishing equipment.
Hastings’ fishing industry brought money in, and historically this had been the town’s main source of income. But this was nothing compared to that promised by a growing tourism industry. So when it came to deciding how best to use that prime real estate by the ocean, Hastings Council had a pretty clear priority.
So in 1824, they took action. They began dismantling the net shops to make space to widen the road.
The fishermen, naturally, didn’t take too kindly to this. In one particularly colourful incident in 1824, a fisherman named Thomas Tassell threatened to chop off the hand of the first person to touch his net shop.
It nearly turned into a riot, and the police were brought in to keep the peace. Several men were arrested. The council backed down. But they weren’t done
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Longshore drift provides a solution
Hastings wasn’t the only place experiencing a tourism boom. Just a little along the coast, the newly developed resort of St Leonards had sprung up in the late 1820s, which came with a number of sea defences.
These interrupted the natural flow of shingle along the coast, and Hastings’ own beach began to erode as a result. So in 1834, the council built a groyne at Rock-a-Nore to protect the Old Town. Groynes work by interrupting that same shingle movement, and this one caused a large build-up of sand and shingle on the western side.
If all this physical geography feels a bit confusing, don’t worry. What really matters to the story is this: Hastings suddenly had a whole new strip of beach where previously there had been none.
The fishermen didn’t hang about. They immediately claimed it for their net shops.
But the land, new as it might be, was still technically owned by the council, and they had their conditions. They didn’t want the fishermen taking up any more space than they had to, and so they forced the fishermen to sign an agreement.
And here we get our answer to the main question that kept going round my head as I explored the Stade…
Why do they look like that?
Under the agreement made in 1835, and to protect space, strict regulations were put in place. The fishermen could build their net shops there, but each plot could only be about 8 or 9 feet square (roughly 2.5 to 3 metres).
The fishermen responded in the same way urban planners would in Manhattan just a few decades later. Tightly packed in and deprived of space, they built upwards.
This gives us a remarkable piece of heritage, entirely the accidental result of planning restrictions. And though they look oddly ancient, almost all of the Stade’s net shops date from after this agreement in 1835.
They’d originally have looked even more distinctive, too. The area was still vulnerable to the sea, and so they were put on stilts, but as more shingle was deposited and the beach grew larger, the sea no longer reached the huts.
On top of this, they’d have been covered in tar (yes, you read that right). The sticky black stuff came cheap from the Hastings Gas Works and helped to waterproof the shops.
But this also, of course, made them very combustible, and several were lost to fires. The worst of these came in 1846, when around 20 net shops burnt down in a single blaze.
The fires aside, this story feels like it’s reached a happy resolution. The new beach, caused by longshore drift, provided a solution to the dispute between the fishermen and the council. But it wasn’t that simple.
The war wasn’t over yet
The following decades brought the railway revolution, with Hastings getting its own station in 1850. And with it, of course, many more tourists. This brought back up all that old tension.
The council desperately wanted to build more facilities for tourists. Though they did directly remove several net shops in order to build more and wider roads, they also took a slightly more wily tactic.
When they put groynes up to protect the town, they didn’t put any in front of the Old Town, hoping the unprotected area would wash away the remaining net shops. They almost got their wish, when a storm in 1875 washed 14 away.
But plenty remained, and an outcry from the fishing community eventually led to protections being put in. This also led to more shingle being deposited, and the beach grew again, to the size we see today.
A few more net shops were removed later, most notably in the 1930s to widen modern Rock-a-Nore Road, but by the mid 20th century they’d become a tourist destination in and of themselves. No longer a nuisance but an asset.
The remaining 39 net shops were Grade II listed in 1976 and upgraded to Grade II* in 2010. One has been turned into a small museum you can look inside, and the old church that used to serve the fishermen has been turned into an excellent free Fishermen’s Museum.
Most of the net shops are still in use though, storage space for what is still the largest beach launched fishing fleet in Europe.
So who won this Battle of Hastings, the council or the fishermen? Both, in the end.
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