A history of the 'non-existent' St Leonards

The town of St Leonards that gave up the ghost in 1875 was actually what is now known as Burton’s St Leonards – the seafront from just west of London Road to the east end of West Marina Gardens, and the streets immediately behind the Royal Victoria Hotel. This town had been created by famous London architect James Burton in 1828 on land that he owned, aiming to produce England’s first high-class seaside resort.

Burton’s attractive new town quickly became a magnet for other developers. From the 1860s many expensive detached houses were built to the north of Burton’s municipality, in places like Upper Maze Hill and Pevensey Road, and to the east in and around Warrior Square. But these properties and Burton’s St Leonards itself all lacked working class housing, shops and services like laundries and stables. Luckily, all these quickly appeared in the streets around the bottom of London Road, becoming known today as Central St Leonards. At the same time, by 1860 the construction of the Hastings seafront west of White Rock had led to Hastings joining up with east end of St Leonards.

An early upper-class development north of St Leonards was Hollington Park Road, where construction of many big residences in large gardens had taken place by 1875. One of these properties was to become the setting of what is known as the most influential working class novel ever written: Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. This semi-documentary book describes how ordinary people were forced to lead lives of poverty, exploitation and misery in the typical provincial English town of Mugsborough - Hastings and St Leonards - in the early 1900s. Most of it was set in a detached house called Val Mascal in Hollington Park Road by Tressell, an Irish decorator and sign-writer who moved to Hastings in 1902. He spent much time working for the builders Adams and Jarrett, a firm that still exists in Norman Road, now selling domestic electrical equipment. He died in 1910, but the publication of his book in 1914 significantly influenced the setting up of the Welfare State in 1948 and much of post-war Labour politics.

By the 1880s all the borough west of White Rock had become known as St Leonards, although it had no official identity, and had no town hall or council. At that time St Leonards, wherever it was, was commonly accepted across as being a different place to Hastings. This diversity became clear as the two towns became bitter rivals in the rapidly expanding tourist trade. This followed the construction in 1869-72 of the highly successful Hastings Pier at White Rock, which prompted the building of the competing St Leonards Pier in 1889-91. But this pier was a financial failure, and when much of it suffered bomb damage in World War Two it was abandoned and then demolished in the early 1950s.

In 1895 Hastings Council knocked down the biggest landmark of Burton’s St Leonards. A tall attractive archway that stood across the seafront just west of the bottom of London Road was covertly flattened during the course of one January night. The demolition had been strongly opposed by many people, so it was done without prior publicity, and at high speed by the Borough Engineer and twenty labourers. The archway had been built by Burton in 1830 as the symbolic entrance to his new town of St Leonards. It was a beautiful architectural feature, but caused traffic problems, being only 17 feet wide between the arches. The more influential people in the local establishment forced through the demolition,

Today, although most of the western half of the borough is known as St Leonards, there is no local authority map showing what is St Leonards and what is Hastings. The 1888 national reorganisation of all local government created the County Borough of Hastings, but not the County Borough of Hastings and St Leonards. So how do people know if they are living in St Leonards or Hastings? Where is the dividing line?

The nearest thing to an answer (as far as there is one) has been provided by the Post Office. Until the late 1870s there had been only one postal sorting office in the borough. This was the Hastings one, which stood where the north-west corner of the traffic lights are at the top of Havelock Road is today. The Hastings Post Office itself was in Queens Road, now the Halifax bank.

By the late 1880s so much development had taken place around the borough that the Hastings Post Office management set up a separate new post office and a sorting office in Kings Road. But they had to decide the separate delivery areas of these two sorting offices, and therefore which properties were going to describe themselves as being in ‘Hastings’ and which in ‘St Leonards’ (even though St Leonards did not exist officially). This meant that the Post Office had to find somewhere to draw a dividing line.

The nearest thing to a logical starting point was the seafront at the west side of Hastings Pier, as this was where Hastings had ended until it started spreading west along the seafront. In the 1880s there was still something of a green belt running north from the pier, across Summerfields and up the Old Roar Valley, and then to the east of Bohemia, Silverhill and Hollington. The post office chose to draw its boundary line through this green belt, and there it remains roughly today.

But much of the green belt was built on in the following decades and so the dividing line had to be constantly updated and redrawn. Today the St Leonards/Hastings boundary is where postcode TN37 meets TN34. On the map I have drawn, the boundary runs from the pier up Falaise Road and Bohemia Road to Magdalen Road, and then across Horntye to the top of Amherst Road. From there it curves eastwards to Buckshole, then up to the east side Sedlescombe Road North, along to the St Helens Road junction and then in a curve along the north side of Ghyllside Avenue to Hillside Road and then the Ridge.

So St Leonards today is not a town, just a TN37 postcode helping the Post Office sort out its mail delivery.