REVIEW: Taking the plunge with Eastbourne Alive
Silent concentration was interspersed with ‘oooh’s of delight and ‘oh’s of resignation as a group of us gathered for a printing workshop in the empty Motcombe Pool caretaker’s house in Eastbourne Old Town. We were experiencing the unpredictable process of printing using a flexible silicone gel plate rollered with paint then imprinted with images or […]
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REVIEW: Mad Catter Cat Café
The first item on the agenda to note is … this place has a lot of cats. In fact, there are 16 featured on the website, not all of which are visible to the naked eye inside the café. I forgot to count how many were draped across hammocks, tucked inside cat igloos and festooned […]
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REVIEW: Battle Abbey
Is this where the Brexit vote came from? The spot where King Harold was slain by the invading Norman French 957 years ago. William of Normandy was respectful of where his enemy died, so a stone tablet marks the place. Standing on the ridge of Senlac Hill, one strains to imagine thousands of Anglo-Saxon […]
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REVIEW: Polegate High Street
Polegate High Street should be a delightful place to shop and linger. It could feature in a classic Ladybird illustration of Shopping with Mother, wholesome girl and boy at her side on a sunny day as they visit the bakery, the greengrocers and butchers. There’s a mainline railway station, a church (below) opposite Victorian villas […]
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REVIEW: Where the grass is always greener
There is one modest oasis of green among the baked yellow-brown lawns which lie dormant under the relentless sun. The grass at Motcombe Gardens is still the correct English summer green. It is a startling sight to drought-weary visitors as a hosepipe ban comes into force. I only noticed this verdant phenomenon, pictured below, when looking […]
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REVIEW: Old Town Recreation Ground, Eastbourne
‘The Rec’ means, as we all know, a recreation ground. And ‘the Rec’ also often means a rectangle of bare ground, tufts of grass, maybe a climbing frame, possibly some crooked goal posts, often a weed-spattered stretch of tarmac which may be meant for ball games. It frequently connotes an urban spot, populated with imbibers […]
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REVIEW: The Sovereign Centre, Eastbourne
A large part of Eastbourne’s charm is that it doesn’t trouble itself with any more of the 21st century that it absolutely has to. So there is an airy new extension to the shopping centre and pale-brick pavement and road combo, but still plenty of very English cafes serving stuff with beans and B&Bs which […]
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REVIEW: Top deck of the 12X bus from Eastbourne to Brighton
By Rebecca Maer There are three main reasons to travel by bus to Brighton rather than drive: 1. The ability to gaze lingeringly at rolling downland, a coastal panorama and the skyscape without a head-on collision 2. The voyeuristic frisson from the top deck with a grandstand view of other people’s gardens and, if you’re […]
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