The new Jerwood Gallery, Hastings opened today. A couple of months later than originally planned, but so very much worth the wait, and finally the town has a space, a place for people to come to and be inspired by that reflects the creative spirit that is alive here.
Hastings is an odd place. Oddly special, oddly neglected, oddly itself. It worms its way into your thinking. I grew up mostly in rural West Sussex, had a grandmother in Worthing, and the particular flavour, both architectural and psychological, of English seaside resorts has become a central strand in my writing. But East Sussex is not like West Sussex. It’s weirder, more remote. There are fewer people, fewer main roads. The sizeable tract of land – cliff path and marshland and levels – east of Hastings is the last stretch of unspoiled coastline in the whole of Sussex.
Chris said something interesting today, that Hastings has sat so long in the shadow of 1066 that people have come to believe that’s all there is to the place. What’s almost never talked about outside the town itself is the extraordinary number of artists and writers who have a connection to Hastings and its environs. Attracted by low property prices, a mild climate and a rare abundance of natural beauty and historical detailing, artists and writers come here for a while and end up staying.
It’s a strange place. There’s something about it, a secret undercurrent of self awareness that hovers uncertainly between the numinous and the uncanny. The Stade, where the new Jerwood gallery stands, is itself an oddity, the last working fishing beach in England where the fishermen drag their craft out to sea manually straight off the shingle, a jumble of boats and shacks and net shops and rusting machinery that sets the writer’s pulse racing just to look at it, the most evocative of locations, a fully functioning quotidian reality that is at the same time a storehouse of the symbolic and the imagined.
To the north of the Stade are the cliffs. Between the cliffs and the Stade stands the Jerwood, a window on and a showcase for both realities.
It’s a beautiful building. Formal yet intimate, striking yet able to blend in so perfectly with its surroundings it’s difficult to believe it’s not been there for years. And inside – it’s a treasure house. Walking around the galleries – warm with wood, bright with glass, so full of light and at the same time almost cosy – I found myself close to tears. I’ve rarely if ever visited an art space so obviously designed with the pleasure of the visitor in mind, not just those consummately at home with art but those – and as word begins to spread about the Jerwood I feel sure there will be many – who are dipping their toe in that ocean for what might be the first time.
I’ve visited and enjoyed the Towner in Eastbourne, the Turner in Margate, the Delawarr in Bexhill. I love what’s being done to promote the arts in Folkestone, a town I’m extremely fond of. But what’s different about Jerwood is that this fine new gallery is to serve as the permanent home for the Foundation’s own collection, which is as good a survey of British 20th and 21st century painting as you’ll find anywhere in the country, including London. There are rooms full of the paintings I love – paintings I recognise instantly by their colour and texture, the way the paint has been arranged on the canvas, even before I’ve fully focussed on what is being depicted, as the work of old friends. Keith Vaughan, Ivon Hitchens, John Craxton, Carel Weight – all specialists (horribly underappreciated) in what you might call the mystical landscape, and all particularly loved by me for many years. There’s a wonderful portrait by Stanley Spencer of his niece, Daphne with a Green Scarf. There’s a gorgeous, sunny Christopher Wood, The Bather, a woman surrounded by shells who just might be a selky. Almost in front of you as you enter the galleries hangs a stunning Prunella Clough (I’m obsessed with Clough, she quite literally spent most of her career painting rubbish: street detritus, the scattered contents of pockets and waste bins), a dozen shades of grey and dirt with a characteristic shimmer of pink, a dropped sweet wrapper perhaps, towards the upper right corner.
There’s one of Winifred Nicholson’s rare portraits, painted in the 1920s when she was still married to Ben Nicholson. It’s as luminous as her later, almost abstract still lifes.
There’s a John Bratby – he lived in Hastings, had a fascinating and slightly sinister house here, which Chris showed me last year – and an Edmund Burra, an artist I always associate with London because of his Soho paintings but who, I discover today, was born in Rye and, like Bratby, died in Hastings.
There is more, a lot more. The place was packed. The whole thing is marvellous.
I knew that Hastings was beginning to work for me when I started to write about it. My new book has a lot of London in it, but it is also permeated, wormholed by the raddled strangeness of Hastings. The two central sections are set here. The town’s steep inclines and ragged edges characterise it, leave their scars in the minds and memories of its characters. It’s kind of a Hastings book. Weird but true.
I’m happy to report that the novel now stands at 78,000 words in first draft. Not quite sure how that happened, but I’m relieved that it has. Another 20,000 to write, give or take, and then I can begin on the second draft. I’m looking forward to that, very much. I know so much more about the book now than I did at the start.
And I know that the cafe terrace of the Jerwood, directly overlooking the Stade, will be the perfect place to sit and untangle all those final, crucial details.