Weekend of festivals grows town's national reputation

The weekend's independently-organised jazz festival brought 30 New Orleans and Classic bands to the town.

Town leaders who have been fact-finding in Le Touquet where a 1m-a-year festival budget brings in massive income, hope that, together with a re-vamped Panoramic, such events can play a key part in town regeneration.

Though the first jazz venture was not the box office triumph for which the organisers had hoped, it was successful in drawing dedicated followers of the genre from as far afield as Scotland and quickly swamped the town's available bed spaces.

Artistically, favourable comparisons were made with established New Orleans festivals such as Bude.

The private directors now have to examine their figures in detail once the last bills are in and assess whether enough sponsorship can be obtained to make the Bexhill Jazz Festival an annual event.

Meanwhile, Rother council is undertaking an in-depth scrutiny of July's Panoramic festival of sound, light and architecture at the De La Warr Pavilion.

While a special meeting of the authority's district services committee has been called so that key players in the staging of the event can be questioned as part of the scrutiny process, Rother's options are being kept open with a recommendation to cabinet to include 40,000 in next year's budget for a Panoramic-style event next year.

Both festivals have received under-writing sponsorship through the Bexhill Regeneration Partnership.

Partnership chairman Malcolm Mitcheson was a member of town MP Gregory Barker's fact-finding trip to Le Touquet to see how the once-ailing French resort has been regenerated by establishing itself as festival venue.

Does Bexhill have the potential for doing the same? Yes, I think we have.

"Clearly, there has to be more investment in our infrastructure, but it's a question of chicken-and-egg. People say we don't have the hotels but we don't have the hotels because there is no reason to come here.

"The way forward is to start with good education and good cultural festivals. Le Touquet spends 1m a year on festivals! Their domestic population is five or six thousand and they pull in 100,000 most weekends.

"They really are a leisure town - they have gone into the culture and leisure business. They have these rolling programmes of festivals every year.

"Like Southern England, Northern France suffered exactly the same way because the French started going to the Mediterranean or abroad.

So they lost their July-August trade and now they are into the short-stay people.

"I don't think the good citizens of Bexhill are ready for that, but that's the way they went.

"Looking at Le Touquet, the public support in terms of infrastructure has been absolutely massive. They have created a lovely park. They have sectioned off plots for hotels to come in. They have graded the hotels.

"The hotel does not look after the infrastructure. It just leases the land the hotel is on.

"The park is all public park. That's just one example. The only things that are privately owned are the golf courses. The rest is all partnerships between public and private sector in some way.