healthy resorts | Liz Milner

*_{The charming St Leonards Warrior Square station, built in 1851}*

If you continue westwards from Hastings pier (see previous post) along the seafront, once you reach Warrior Square you will have arrived at the relative newcomer of a town, St Leonards. Warrior Square is unmissable – it’s an expansive rectangular park surrounded by very large 19thC seaside apartment houses, but the square is misleadingly-named. It’s less a memorial to fighters than smugglers; “the name Warrior is most likely a corruption of ‘Warehouse’ – smugglers being known to secrete goods in the vicinity”. St Leonards was originally conceived as part of a planned seaside resort in the mid 1820s – “a place of elegant houses designed for the well-off” Continue reading →

*_{Bexhill on Sea in the 1950s, unused postcard, photo from flickr by Phil Sellens,}*
*_{Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0}*)

Four miles or so further west along the coast from St Leonards (see post here) is the odd (my personal perception!) town of Bexhill-on-Sea. I spent several summer holidays there in the mid 1950s staying with my slightly melancholy grandparents who’d moved to a utilitarian bungalow when my Grandfather retired. There were some recurring pleasures to our stays but even as a child the town seemed a bit dull and full of old people! I have only recently found out that comedian Spike Milligan (treasured by my family for his absurdist antics in the Goon Show) was Continue reading →