Pedestrianise the next obvious streets

Where we're starting from — a hunch, not yet a case

George Street works so well it's hard to remember anyone ever argued about it. Stand on it on a Saturday and then walk the two streets that most obviously want the same treatment: High Street in the Old Town, and Kings Road in St Leonards. Both are lined with independent shops, both are walked far more than driven, and both still give their space to vehicles first.

What we can already source

The Old Town's pedestrian priority is already a national calling card: it was named the Ramblers' Best Walking Neighbourhood in 2018, with the Open Spaces Society praising the council's traffic restrictions, widened footways and preserved twittens ¹. The case here is finishing a job the town is celebrated for starting.

In the town centre the direction is already set: the southern stretch of Queens Road is pedestrianised with controlled service access ², and after the 2024 public realm consultation — where re-routing buses through it was the standout objection — the county dropped the buses and committed to "further enforce pedestrianisation and increase pedestrianisation times in Queens Road and Wellington Place" ³. Backing that commitment, and asking how far it can stretch, is an open door.

Kings Road is the gap. It is the heart of St Leonards' celebrated independent-shop revival ^{4 5}, runs one-way in the community-mapped data ⁶ — and, as far as we can establish, has no published public realm proposal at all. The Town Deal's ten projects all sit in and around the town centre; none reaches St Leonards ⁷. The town's best-loved shopping street outside the Old Town has nobody's plan attached to it.

What would make (or kill) the case

• The servicing and access facts for both streets — deliveries, blue-badge access, what a pedestrian zone with timed access would mean in practice; this is where George Street's lessons live.
• Trader sentiment measured, not assumed — the retail evidence says owners overestimate car-borne custom threefold ⁸, but the case needs Hastings numbers, gathered street by street.
• The right lever for each — what the county would need in a traffic order, and where the borough's conservation-area powers help.

How you can help

If you trade on High Street or Kings Road, we want your honest view first — the fears as much as the hopes: say hello via the join page. Everyone else: photograph these streets at their crowded, car-free best (market days, festivals) — those photos are the argument.

Streets too narrow for everything they're asked to do

Where we're starting from — a hunch, not yet a case

Plenty of Hastings' residential streets — Lower Park Road and Priory Avenue are the ones we hear about most — simply don't have the width for parked cars on both sides plus two-way traffic. Two cars meet, somebody reverses, pavements get mounted, walking them feels like trespassing. Our instinct was that many should just go one-way. The evidence below suggests our instinct may be wrong, which is exactly why this is in the casebook and not on a case page.

What we can already source

The national design guidance leans against us: Manual for Streets, the government's residential street design manual, recommends that one-way operation is generally avoided in residential networks — it needs more signing, lengthens journeys, and narrow widths are better handled with short single-lane pinch points within two-way streets ¹.

Hastings' own commissioned evidence agrees, sharply: the Station Gateway study for the borough and Homes England found the Priory Street one-way system produces speeding vehicles and a poor pedestrian environment, and recommends converting it back to two-way ². One-way streets invite speed; that is the trade nobody mentions at the kerbside.

And when the county examined the Lower Park Road corridor for cycling, it formally discounted on-road options as technically infeasible, routing through Alexandra Park instead ³. As far as we can establish, no published proposal of any kind exists for calming or converting the named narrow streets — the problem is real and nobody's plan touches it.

What would make (or kill) the case

• The measurements — carriageway widths, parking occupancy and two-cars-meet conflict counts for a dozen candidate streets; a tape measure beats an adjective.
• The full menu, fairly compared — pinch points, parking cells, timed filters, junction treatments — against the one-way instinct, with the speeding evidence on the table.
• What residents of those actual streets want, asked properly — the people who live with both the conflict and any cure.

How you can help

Nominate your street via the join page, and tell us the scene: where exactly do two cars meet and what happens next? If you'll spend ten minutes with a tape measure when the survey starts, say so — this case will be built kerb by kerb.

The missing cycle network (and somewhere to lock a bike)

Where we're starting from — a hunch, not yet a case

Try cycling from Ore to the station, or locking a bike outside a Queens Road shop, and the town's answer is the same shrug: very few protected routes, and hardly anywhere to park a bike when you arrive. For a compact town with a traffic-free seafront path at its heart, the network around that path is strangely absent.

What we can already source

The plan exists; the delivery is the story. The county's walking and cycling plan proposes a 28-route cycle network for Hastings, HS1 to HS28 ¹ — but the plan itself says it shows "potential alignment", not detailed proposals ². Hastings Urban Bikes' freedom-of-information campaign, reported by the Hastings Examiner, found £10.6m allocated to cycling and walking infrastructure in East Sussex since 2020 with, in their words, not a single infrastructure project or kilometre of new bike path delivered ^{3 4}. For scale: the county's confirmed new cycle track in 2025 — a legal order, consulted and enacted — was 98 metres of footpath near Queensway ⁵. There is movement: the Havelock Road segregated cycle track finished its traffic-order consultation in June 2026, with construction due this autumn — Town Deal money, not the county allocation ⁶.

Bike parking is not audited, let alone provided: neither council publishes any list, count or map of public cycle parking in the town, and the 2014 Hastings Walking and Cycling Strategy promised an audit of "the quantity and quality of cycle parking provision" that we can find no published result of ⁷. The town-centre public realm scheme does include "cycle parklets" ⁸, and 55 residents petitioned the county for on-street bike hangars over the winter ⁹.

Meanwhile the direction of travel is down: Sport England's Active Lives data has adults cycling at least monthly in Hastings falling from 14.1% in 2016 to 9.1% in 2023, and cycling for transport is now too rare here for the survey to publish a figure at all ¹⁰. Census 2021 put cycling to work at 1.3% ¹¹.

What would make (or kill) the case

• The itemised FOI — which grants make up the £10.6m and what each was for; the headline needs its breakdown before we build a case on it.
• The rack map that doesn't exist — a crowdsourced count of every public bike stand in Hastings & St Leonards, which doubles as the audit the 2014 strategy promised.
• Which two or three of the 28 routes are cheapest and most used if built first — so the ask is "start here", not "do everything".

How you can help

Help us map the bike racks: photograph every public stand you know, note where there's obviously none (your street? the shops?), and send locations via the join page. Riders: which single missing link stops you cycling a trip you'd otherwise ride? Also — Hastings Urban Bikes are the ones who forced the £10.6m question into the open; join them.

Bikes at the station: a hire scheme for the flattest ride in town

Where we're starting from — a hunch, not yet a case

A visitor steps off the train and the whole seafront — Rock-a-Nore to West St Leonards, and on towards Bexhill — is a few easy minutes away by bike, with no hills in the way. There is no bike to grab. No dock, no app, nothing at the station. It feels like the most obvious missing piece of visitor infrastructure in town.

What we can already source

The ride is already built: National Cycle Network route 2 runs 3.6 miles along the Hastings–Bexhill waterfront, 97.9% traffic-free, and the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust (as Sustrans is now called) rates it ideal for beginners and families ¹. What's missing is the bike, not the path. We can find no record of Hastings ever having a public bike-share scheme; the council ran a small weekend cycle-hire hut on the prom in 2020, whose booking page now returns a 404 ². What exists today is monthly rental via the county-backed Pedal Power ³ and private hire shops near the front ⁴ — good, but not the grab-and-go station-to-sea trip.

The seaside comparators are striking. Brighton & Hove's Beryl share — 780 bikes, 60% electric, 108 hubs — passed one million journeys in March 2026 with over 129,000 users ^{5 6}. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole's scheme has logged over 1.8 million rides since 2019, which the council credits with replacing 650,000 car journeys, and has been extended to 2028 ⁷. Worthing runs an app-based scheme ⁸. The honest caveats ride along: Eastbourne's small five-dock hire manages only about 2,500 hires a year ⁹ and Folkestone's Click2Cycle network is currently marked closed ¹⁰ — scale and e-bikes appear to be what separates the million-journey schemes from the quiet ones.

What would make (or kill) the case

• The demand arithmetic — station footfall, seafront visitor numbers, and what Brighton-level usage would scale to in a town our size, honestly done.
• An operator's view — what Beryl-class operators need from a town this size to run viably, and what it cost the comparator councils.
• The station piece — Southeastern/Network Rail's requirements for a hub on station land, or the nearest council-controlled alternative.

How you can help

If you run a visitor business: would your guests use it? Say so on the join page — operator conversations go better with a dozen B&Bs behind them. If you've used the Brighton or Bournemouth schemes, tell us what worked.

The bleak prom: greening Carlisle Parade

Where we're starting from — a hunch, not yet a case

Walk the promenade along Carlisle Parade and count what grows there: nothing. Between the pier and the town centre the prom is car parking, bollards and tarmac, with literally zero planting on one of the most prominent quarter-miles in town. It doesn't need sanitising into a resort frontage — scruffy seaside beauty is fine, and is rather the point — but bleak is a choice, not a fate.

What we can already source

The precedent is thirty metres away and ninety years old. Sidney Little's Bottle Alley — the lower deck of his 1933–34 double promenade from the pier to Warrior Square — has tens of thousands of pieces of broken bottle glass embedded in its panels ^{1 2}: reclaimed-material public art before anyone had the phrase. And it is being revived right now by community artists, with lighting and art projects bringing it back into use ¹. Beautifying the seafront with what's to hand is not an import to Hastings; it's a local tradition with a blue plaque's worth of history.

The council is already trialling exactly the planting this stretch lacks: the We Dig Hastings pilot at Denmark Place is testing climate-resilient, biodiversity-rich seafront planting with Transition Town Hastings and Great Dixter's gardeners, explicitly to shape the town-centre public realm designs ³. The question this case will ask is why the trial's findings should stop at Denmark Place.

Trees and green infrastructure in the right places cool urban air by 2–8°C in heatwaves ⁴ — and the ward canopy surveys put Castle and Central St Leonards, the town's two seafront wards, at 7.5% and 9.7% cover, the lowest in the borough and less than half the UK urban average ⁵.

What would make (or kill) the case

• What Carlisle Parade's exposure does to planting options — salt, wind and the deck structure beneath parts of the prom constrain what can grow where; the We Dig trial's plant list and results are the evidence base to borrow.
• Who controls each strip — highway (county), promenade (borough), and the Foreshore Trust boundary — so the ask lands on the right desk.
• A costed comparable — a seafront greening scheme in a similar exposed, low-budget seaside town, with what it cost and what survived the first winter.

How you can help

Photograph the bleakest stretch (and anything that does grow along the front against the odds — that's the plant list writing itself), and send it via the join page. If you garden in salt wind in this town, we want ten minutes of your expertise.

Scruffy beauty: cleaner streets, more planting, more art

Where we're starting from — a hunch, not yet a case

Hastings has a reputation for grubby streets, and it isn't entirely unearned: litter, overflowing bins, gum and grime in exactly the places most people walk. The fix we want is emphatically not a sanitised town — scruffy is part of the charm — but grubby and beautiful are different things, and the difference is planting, care, and art. A town confident enough to embed broken bottles in its promenade can do better than bare tarmac and a black bin bag.

What we can already source

The reputation has a measurable edge to test it against: Keep Britain Tidy runs graded local environmental quality surveys — litter, detritus, graffiti, staining, scored site by site on a national methodology ¹. What we have not yet found is a published street-by-street survey for Hastings — which is why the first job below is counting, not complaining.

On the art side the town already has a working model: Bottle Alley's artist-led revival is turning a neglected 1930s structure back into a public space with light and art projects ².

What would make (or kill) the case

• Data before adjectives — a repeatable litter/grime survey of a handful of representative streets (Keep Britain Tidy's method is published), run quarterly, so "notoriously grubby" becomes a number that can go up or down.
• The comparison — Hastings' street-cleansing spend per household against similar councils, from published accounts.
• A pilot street — one street that gets planting, a mural wall done with the owner's blessing, and a measured before/after on litter, footfall and how people say it feels.

How you can help

Volunteer for the first street survey when it runs (say so on the join page), and tell us your candidate for the pilot street: somewhere loved, walked, and let down by its state.