Local author shows Hastings in a new light

​Marshland, written when he was living in London and exploring the landscapes and legends of the Hackney marshes and Lee Valley, developed his unique voice and was the precursor for a number of works about Hastings and the surrounding area that sparked into life after he moved here.

There we find find tales, not without actual substance, of bears and crocodiles haunting the marshes, a lost world of Victorian filter plants and the ghosts of old toy factories, as Gareth maps out the shifting, unsettling landscape, accompanied by his Cocker spaniel Hendrix.

Perhaps his finest work is The Stone Tide, exploring and puzzling through the mysteries of Hastings and its surrounding environs, while coping with the raw, personal trauma of a marital breakdown. I recognised many familiar and thinly veiled local characters within its pages. It caused me to see the town where I was born and have lived all my life in a strange new light.

Then there is his book Car Park Life, an odyssey exploring the retail car parks of Britain, which was sparked by a night-time short cut home through Morrisons car park in Queens Road, Hastings.

Gareth, arguably came to wider attention with his well received book Unofficial Britain: Journeys Through Unexpected Places. The book explores a Britain that exists outside of the official histories and guidebooks, places where modern life speeds past but where people and stories nevertheless collect.

The re-print of Marshland is a beautiful edition that comes with a brand new introduction by the author, in which he notes: “Every place has a story to tell if you take the time to look and listen, no matter how ugly or mundane; a supermarket car park, , new-build housing estate, business park, factory or hospital outbuilding. Folklore can take root in places like these.. Monsters and murderers can stalk their corridors and enclaves. Ghosts can haunt their ruins. Memories of love and loss can cling to their concrete, asphalt and steel.”

When you meet Gareth it’s easier to understand where the writing is coming from. He is kinetic, speaking with a fervour and enthusiasm that bounces off in many directions - all of them fascinating and compelling. It’s this energy and current that pulses through his writing. He claims he is a magpie, flitting from one branch of ideas to another. I can see this but he also does himself down here, the ideas may be myriad but they are fully formed. He’s not so much lining his nest with shiny things but creating new realities from them. He shows a temporal sleight of hand, stacking translucent realities on top of each other. Excavating previous incarnations of the Morrisons car park, time-shifting through the origins of The Black Arches, carved in the cliff face near the top of the East Hill.

In his short story collection Terminal Zones, Gareth explores the way people interact with the shifting climate and ecology changes in unexpected ways. It features a story based on the crumbling cliff edge at Fairlight, which has seen many people lose their homes to the sea over the years. Time becomes a play thing in his hands. He thinks nothing of engineering an encounter between black magician Alistair Crowley and television inventor John Logie Baird, on a wind-swept promenade. He captures the essence of Hastings and all its strange undercurrents and interstices.

The human element is never overlooked in his work. No matter how bleak and abandoned urban landscapes may appear, he is alive to the imprint of others who have interacted with them in some way.

This is visionary, hallucinatory, writing, intimate, often with an inward gaze, but with an over-arching perspective that travels outward, always suggesting the things we don’t quite know, or haven’t yet glimpsed, destinations we have yet to arrive at.

His books are available locally from Printed Matter in Queens Road and Hastings Bookshop in Trinity Street.

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