Curated by Richard Butchins & Manick Govinda

Locus: the place where something happens or the central area of interest in something being discussed. (Cambridge Dictionary) 

There’s a popular legend that the cult-occultist Aleister Crowley had put a curse on Hastings. Crowley spent his last days at Netherwood boarding house from 1944 until his death in 1947. The boarding house was demolished a long time ago, but it was here that he allegedly cursed our town, that if you lived in Hastings you will never be able to leave, you will always come back. The only way to leave would be to take a stone with a hole with you from the beach, as a talisman. 

The Observer newspaper in April 2005 reported that a certain person called Reu Hickman “still feels nauseous whenever he returns to Hastings”. It’s a miserable, depressing account of higher than average murder rates, bed & breakfast guesthouses filled with the unemployed and the mentally ill, “it was a stinkhole for people whose lives weren’t going very well” (The Observer, 10 April 2005). 

Nowadays, Hastings and its sister town St Leonards, have become hip with creative and media-types. Apparently, us ‘DFLs” (Down-from-Londons) saved the area from a wretched existence. The Spectator, The Telegraph both report how “the cool crowd are moving to this gritty alternative” (The Telegraph, 5 January 2023). 

I’m a DFL and I used to regard myself as being part of the cool crowd, having moved from Streatham to Hastings at the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown on 31st March 2021, when we all panicked that the then Chancellor Sunak would end stamp-duty relief. 

Hastings is layered, it is still cursed with social and economic problems, it receives additional grants from central government, it’s caught up in a cycle of regeneration-degeneration, which it is still unable to break free from.

However, while the area is not known for Aleister Crowley’s Sex majick, there is a sense of magic in Hastings. Frayed at the edges, the beautiful stormy-rain-swept melancholia, the sea, the day-trippers and holiday-goers, the countryside and numerous independent shops, bars and restaurants thrive and dive, rubbing shoulders with charity stores, retro-shops and chain-store supermarkets. 

It’s a mash-up, an aesthetic, topographical collision where social-realism meets magical-realism. The photographs selected for this exhibition capture that togetherness and separateness, an inter-class rub, a milieu that is liminal, contiguous, haunting, textured, tonal/atonal, a town of both communal joy and solitude.

The selected photographers distil the truth, real and illusory, through a lens of mechanical clicks of long still pauses or everyday life at a fraction of a second, stealing and freezing moments from the passing of time, and its vast spectrum of light. 

Photographers:

Emily Allchurch, Alexander Brattell, Richard Butchins, Natalya KD, Bob Mazzer, Tim Rich, Agnieszka Szuba, Patricia Webb, Gary Willis.

Text by Manick Govinda: DFL, writer, curator.