Spirits of Hastings

Hastings looks, from the seafront, like a town that has made its peace with the present. The neon of the seafront arcades, the craft beer taprooms, the smell of chips and the hum of summer traffic present the cheerful clutter of a place that has reinvented itself several times and is broadly pleased with the current arrangement.Look down the twittens, however. The narrow alleyways threading through Hastings Old Town are older than the shopfronts above them, and the stones underfoot have absorbed more than two millennia of footsteps: Anglo-Saxon before the Normans came ashore in 1066; medieval; Elizabethan; Georgian smugglers moving contraband through the dark; a ghost sighting in 1978 that nobody has satisfactorily explained. The Untruth Seekers have collected twelve stories from this layered history, each anchored to a physical place in Hastings where the traces are still visible: a twitten, a cellar, a stretch of shingle that has barely changed in eight centuries. The past in Hastings has not gone anywhere. It is waiting in the narrow places.