Hastings is a highly underrated town

I do wonder how often Adam visits this, the place of my birth, and what parts of it he sees that warrant his constant disparaging remarks about it being run down.

Perhaps he can tell us, in one of his subsequent articles, if things are so bad, why house prices there have risen 268 per cent since the Millennium, which is the eighth highest increase in the value of houses in the entire country outside of London.

Perhaps he also has knowledge of anywhere else in the UK that attracts tens of thousands to the oldest part of its town which has, among many other things, two cliff railways, a castle, visitor-attracting caves, and is the site of the Europe’s largest beach-launched fishing fleet.

Not to mention, elsewhere in the town, the BMX skate park, which won the Historic England Angel award for the best rescue of an historic building, a fantastic crazy golf course that stages an annual international competition that attracts competitors from all over the world, and the beautiful Alexandra Park, which covers nearly 100 acres and was totally revamped a few years ago at a cost of nearly three and a half million pounds.

Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention the £812,000 grant it received from the Coastal Communities Fund and which will be used to refurbish the promenade between the pier and the skate park.

Sorry Adam, you are wide of the mark on this one.

If you really want to see a resort that is, to use your own words, “suffering acutely from deprivation”

then do as I did last week when I was holidaying in Kent.

Just visit Margate, a town which the local council seems to have given up on, and where you will see what a run-down coastal town really looks like.

Hastings, thank goodness, bears no comparison to it and you will have to agree with that statement, Adam, once you have had the chance to compare the two.

Eric Waters
Lancing