It’s easy to miss the Admiral Benbow on London Road, St Leonard’s. Painted a sombre battleship grey, it’s only the neon “fun” sign in the window that offers a statement of intent – a small taster of what lies within.

For the past four years, the building has been the home and studios of lighting designer Philip Oakley and his partner Olivia Yip, a Central St Martins fashion graduate, who have transformed the 180-year-old pub from a place where pool cues were thrown through windows to an address beloved of boutique owners and art collectors.

The couple first viewed the pub in the dark; the estate agent waited outside while they trod gingerly through boarded-up rooms with a torch.

“We didn’t fall in love with it,” says the phlegmatic Oakley.

“But it was cheap and big.”

Today, the building is illuminated with light both natural and manmade.

We drink coffee in the former snooker room, which buzzes with the sound of the neon – a crucifix here, a giant star there – and is home to a dinky elevated bar hidden behind an oil painting.

Their two cocker spaniels, Jarvis and Joe, snuffle around on a sofa made of stitchedtogether vintage tapestries.

Oakley started out as a collector, buying and selling old fairground lighting and other ephemera.

“When you grow up without much money, there’s a tendency to collect things with the idea you can always sell them if times get hard.”

But what started with a collection of 1,000 strings of fairy lights swiftly escalated into trips to Blackpool to snap up redundant illuminations from the city’s famous festival of lights.

He then developed a fondness for old medical equipment – an operatingcum- dining table takes pride of place in the former snooker room – and has only recently managed to sell one of his rashest purchases – a fullyequipped 1960s ambulance that he was forced to rent a barn to store.

Now, fully “junked-out”, as he puts it, he prefers to focus on designing and manufacturing his own work. This ranges from easily affordable table lamps to large-scale neon texts, including a tribute to maternal love based on the words of the priest at his mother’s funeral and another the sign-off from a letter she once sent him.

Oakley’s taste for the darker side of life manifests itself in an Edgar Allen Poe quote from The Masque Of The Red Death and, hanging from the skylight, a giant illuminated noose.

Downstairs is a rather jollier affair, a glorious jumble of orphaned children’s rides and old signage.

In one corner hangs a colony of disco balls of all shapes and sizes. On the ceiling, coloured light bulbs chase up and down, giving a funhouse effect that’s replicated in the couple’s flat on the third floor, where every room is aglow with some sort of light feature.

“Our electricity bills aren’t that high,” says Oakley, reading my mind. “We’re very good about turning things off again.”

He has worked extensively in shop design – his work can be seen in Shoreditch’s Start fashion boutiques and gastropub The Electricity Showrooms among others – and spent a brief period employed as the director of Blackpool Illuminations, where he was tasked with rejuvenating the world-famous festival, founded in 1869.

Despite his success in Blackpool – he won an industry award within the first six months – it was a trying time.

There was a “big difference’ in what Oakley wanted to do and what the festival was prepared to do and they eventually parted ways after Oakley branded the event a “dinosaur” that was in dire need of modernisation.

“There’s a misconception that Blackpool is tacky, all stag and hen nights, but if you look at the city’s history it was very innovative.

“It had the first streetlights in Europe, the first electric trams in the world. Blackpool Tower was a feat of engineering when it was built.

“But when air travel became popular in the 1960s, people started holidaying elsewhere.

“As soon as something starts failing, people want to reinvent the past rather than moving forwards and it never works.”

He believes Hastings is suffering from the same affliction. He feels the town has the potential to be transformed in a similar manner to Shoreditch, which went from an unpopular industrial area to the beating heart of creative East London. But progress is being thwarted, he says, by an unprogressive council lacking in commercial nous.

“I can see it happening with the pier. It’s very sad that it burnt down but everyone’s saying oh, we’re going to have a new pier, we have £14m of Lottery money and we only need another £6m. But what will we have at the end of it? Just another old pier.

“St Leonards desperately needs to bring in new investment and I don’t think replacing something that had been there for years is the way to get people interested in the town.”

Nonetheless, change is afoot in Hastings and St Leonards.

The Admiral Benbow, tucked amongst established junk shops and arty startups, is representative of a growing creative community determined to make its presence felt on the down-at-heel, windswept streets.

The studios of celebrated wallpaper designer Deborah Bowness stand just across from the building, while nearby Norman Road is home to fashion and interiors boutique Shop, Lucy Bell’s fine art photography and Wayward’s vintage haberdashery and linens.

The aptly-named Bohemia Road, which runs parallel to London Road, is popular with many more artists, designers and makers.

If there is to be light at the end of the tunnel for Hastings, Oakley is surely well placed to make the most of it.

*The Admiral Benbow, 2 London Road, St Leonards on Sea. Open by appointment only, call 01424 424119