Newhaven Town

Result!

2008-06-07T07:36:00.000-07:00

A pleasant surprise then, the byelection result.

Liberal Democrat 610
Conservative 497

On a turnout of 28.58% - a pretty high turnout for a Town Council byelection, which I would have thought in this case would have favoured the Tory, as they seemed to have a lot more people on the ground.

If they can't take a Town Council seat in a single byelection when they can throw people from all over the constituency at it, then I think that augurs well for the Lib Dems here.

Whether we would be better off with a Conservative or a Labour government at national level is now, amazingly, a bit of a moot point. The biggest issue for me is ID cards, which the Tories claim they would scrap - though I have my suspicions that once in power, when they see a. the control it will give them (rather than someone else) over the populace, and, b. the costs of getting out of the contracts, that promise might fall by the wayside.

In any case, I can vote for a Liberal Democrat MP in the knowledge that though he's not perfect, that's one more small voice of liberal sanity (or indeed sane liberalism) in Parliament.

Town Council Byelection

2008-06-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

I moved to Newhaven in 1986, having known from the age of about sixteen that the package of views and beliefs that I held marked me out as a liberal. During the 1987 General Election campaign, I finally got around to joining the Liberal Party, in the final year of its independent existence. However, for some reason I didn't vote in that election. Having been too young by a couple of months to vote in '83, the first election I actually voted in was for East Sussex County Council in 1989. That was the year that David Rogers, previously a councillor in Brighton, first took the Newhaven County division for the Liberal Democrats. He holds it to this day, and is one of our oldest friends - an older friend of Jim than of me, in fact; I first met Jim at David's birthday party. Who's that grumpy bugger, I thought.

Anyway, I quickly become quite an active party member - Newhaven branch and then Lewes constituency secretary, among other things (motto: The minutes of the meeting should reflect the lies that were actually told at the meeting, not the lies one subsequently wishes had been told (Norman Tebbit - obviously not all bad)). And in 1991, I stood as one of the slate of candidates for the then 16 (there are now 18) seats on Newhaven Town Council. We made a clean sweep that year, of 16 Town and 6 District seats to add to the County one. Newhaven was 100% Lib Dem, and has remained so ever since - seventeen years.

That might be about to change, though. A few weeks ago, polling cards landed on our door mat. I hadn't known there was going to be an election, but it turned out that one of the Town Councillors had been disqualified for non-attendance. This is what happens if you fail to turn up for more than six months - not a lot to ask, one might think. I ran into David on the train, and offered to do the odd leaflet delivery, for old times' sake, and I did, this morning. Then we went along and voted - including Baz, in his first ever election. There are only two candidates: the Liberal Democrat and a Conservative.

The thing is, we get the definite feeling that the Tory might snatch it. They have been out on such force, canvassing, leafleting, and with a big presence at the polling station. They're taking it very seriously. In the scheme of things, technically, it shouldn't matter. The Town Council is relatively unimportant; and it's only one seat out of eighteen. But it's a straw in the wind. The wind that is changing across the country. For the past seventeen years the Liberal Democrats here, where the only potentially serious opposition is Conservative, have benefited from Conservative unpopularity. If that unpopularity starts to fade, who knows what might happen?

The Gambling Den

2008-05-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

Continuing our stroll down the High Street, we come next to this very sorrowful looking building. We know it as the Gambling Den because its last incarnation was as an amusement arcade. The shop has been empty for a while now; I'm no good at keeping track of time but I would guess a couple of years. Jim thinks that before that it was a bookies, but I honestly can't remember. Funnily enough though, in the next shop down - also currently empty - the windows are filled with photos from OurNewhaven, the website which is collecting photos and stories about the town, and one of the photos was of this building. I really would have liked to put a link in to it but I can't find it on the site - it may be that they haven't uploaded it yet.

Anyway, it told me that the building in question was build in the 1920s to house the town's first dedicated optician, a Mr Gray. Previously glasses had been sold by the chemists, who also extracted teeth.

It looks as if this building - which is detached - is going to be demolished. A planning application to replace it with a block of five flats has been warmly received by the Town Council. The Town Council - of which more later - has no actual authority over planning matters, but makes recommendations to Lewes District Council, which is the planning authority. I cannot see there being any opposition to the building going though; there might however be reservations about the loss of a shop (well, there always were when I was on the Council), and perhaps more importantly, about parking - although there may be space at the back.

Down the High Street

2008-05-21T02:02:00.000-07:00

OK, third time lucky - though what luck has to do with me keeping this up I don't know. Hopefully the better weather now will inspire me to get out and about taking more pictures and reporting on various Newhaven related snippets.

This is the start of a tour of the High Street - down one side and up the other - which should hopefully fill a few weeks. The High Street, which used to run through from the Brighton Road, to the west, at the top, down to Chapel Street taking traffic back onto the A259 and so on towards Seaford, and the coast, was pedestrianised in the 1970s. This has been blamed ever since for the lack of trade to the shops in the town centre. Indeed, looking at the town through strangers' eyes, as I am doing to write this, it is a pretty sorry sight. The first three shops that we see going down on the left hand side are empty, and they're by no means the only ones. In my view, though, for what it's worth, it's not pedestraianisation nor lack of parking that's sounded the town's death knell as a shopping destination. A population of 11,000 simply does not provide the critical mass required in the age of the car and the superstore. Since I've been here, we have lost two butchers, three greengrocers (we now have none of either); a splendid old-fashioned hardware shop, a couple of banks - I shall think of more as I stroll down the High Street. We are lucky to have retained, so far, a Somerfield (not the greatest shop on earth but infinitely preferable to walk down there with the basket on wheels that drive out to the overwhelming mega-Sainsbury's. Whether Somerfield will survive the coming of a Tesco Express on the old Saxonholme site, or indeed the company's own troubles (I was quite excited at the prospect of it being taken over by the Co-op, but that all seems to have gone a bit quiet lately.

Anyway, we start with the post office. At what was arguably the nadir of British architecture, the fifties and sixties, one body was pulling out all the stops in an effort to create buildings of the most oustanding ugliness even by the standards of the time: the GPO. This building housed both the sorting office and the local main Post Office. Under the mad semi-privatisation a few years ago, it was decided that the Post Office Counters side of the business had to be hived off from the sorting office and located in a shop. However, no local shop seemed to want to take it on - or couldn't for some reason, so a shop premises was purschased specially, set up as a greetings card emporium, and the Post Office relocated into there, about half way down the High Street. It's called Occasions. However, possibly predictably, the card business went no where - there are two other major suppliers in town, plus Woolworths - and the entire new shop is now to all intents and purposes a Post Office, its display shelves stacked with bubble wrap and brown paper. So all the cost of new premises - for what?

Meanwhile, the old Post Office languishes empty. I was told that all the while the sorting office is located there they can't sublet the other part of the premises for security reasons. I would like to say, though, that the sorting office provides a fantastic service. You get the impression, as you post a letter into one of its boxes, that it is immediately leapt on and dealt with. Certainly when I was writing every day to someone over a period of four months, sometimes posting late at night, my letters arrived without fail the next morning. The local postpeople (they are all men, actually) who operate out of there are great too, always cheerful and efficient.

The Rail Replacement Bus

2008-03-01T10:13:00.001-08:00

I had to go to work today - ah, poor me (not, I love my job), and I had to be in Stratford (East London, not Warwickshire) by ten o'clock. Easy peasy... I checked the train times, and saw that my train to Victoria left at 0735 rather than its weekday habit of 0740, and accordingly left the house five minutes earlier.

This photo - which (or part thereof) will, when I discover how to do it, grace the top of this blog - wasn't taken this morning; it was taken the other week when it was still frosty and misty. But this was where I turned up this morning, as I do three or four mornings each week, to be greeted on this occasion with the announcement that 'this station is closed today...' because of engineering works. OK, I should have known; no weekend is complete without Network Rail wanting to dig the track up somewhere, and they appear to have been tinkering with the bit between Lewes and London for quite some time, and clearly have their fingers in the Lewes-Seaford bit too (unless that's a knock-on effect from the other bit as trains from Lewes to London have to be routed via Brighton meaning that our little train has to keep off the Seaford-Brighton line...)

Listy interlude... the branch line goes: Seaford, Bishopstone, Newhaven Harbour, Newhaven Town, Lewes, Falmer, Moulsecoomb, London Road (Brighton), Brighton. To get to London one generally changes at Lewes and picks up a train that has come from Hastings or Eastbourne, although there are a few through trains each day: up at 0710 and 0828 (too early and too late for me respectively), and down at 1717 - from platform 17 at Victoria - which I usually try to get.

Anyway, this morning... I wasn't so much cross that they were having their engineering works, which are no doubt vital to stop the whole caboodle grinding to a halt; no, I was cross because they hadn't seen fit to mention it during the week - just a little announcement (god knows they repeat the totally stupid and pointless ones often enough); a notice, saying DON'T BOTHER TURNING UP HERE ON SATURDAY, WE HAVEN'T GOT ANY TRAINS or something would have helped. Yes, I'm sure it was on the website, maybe there was even a little official notice up somewhere, but really, it would have been a kindness to draw my attention to it.

So I turned around and headed for home, using the miracle of mobile telephony to get the OH out of bed and on standby to drive me to Lewes, and thenceforth completed my journey to Stratford uneventfully. On the way back, though, no lift was available and I put myself at the mercy of the dreaded Rail Replacement Bus. One reads such tales about the rag tag collection of superannuated Routemasters and white vans pressed into service by unregulated contractors that I was delighted to board a new, modern single decker and even more delighted when it left Lewes station no more than ten minutes later. It was only when we were nearly out the other side of Newhaven and the driver asked 'So, does anyone know where the train station is then?' that my prejudices were reassuringly confirmed. Fortunately there was on board an employee of the Southern Railway who was able to give him directions, and also to instruct him 'Then you go on down there to Newhaven Harbour, there won't be anyone there but you have to go anyway, then try to find somewhere to turn round and come back past here, and there's the road to Seaford...'

I'm not moaning, you understand. I love all this stuff.

The Hope Inn

2008-02-25T02:31:00.000-08:00

I am totally useless as a source of local information. I can tell you almost nothing about the Hope Inn, on the West Quay (West Pier, it says on Google Maps, but to me the words West Pier will only ever denote a starling-inhabited wreck off the coast of Brighton).
It looks - there's a photo of the exterior here - like an Art Deco style building, all curvy ocean-going liner-shaped white concrete. You have to look hard to see that though as it's almost entirely obscured by large square conservatories top and bottom, and some timber cladding for good measure.
To the left, the pink building is Sea House, which was also at one point an inn. I always quite fancied living there. And then further to the left, that low brick construction is part of the Fort
This sign I can only presume was an earlier or original one, though it might have come from another pub entirely, and it now hangs in the interior. In the lower conservatory, in fact. Where we were seated, finally, belatedly, celebrating No. 2 son's eighteenth birthday last night.
The Hope is a nice enough pub, quite food orientated. I've been there many times over the years - as long as twenty years, in fact, as it was quite a favourite of my father's. The food has always been fine, and the beer is certainly good, with a good selection or real ales including Harveys and London Pride which were both fine yesterday, and not too cold (being a bit of a philistine, I actually like my beer a bit too cold). The interior has lots of wood and is a bit nautical, but I suppose that's allowed, in context. Lovely wooden floors.

A view you won't see any more

2008-02-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

A259, Newhaven ringroad and swing bridge

This wasn't all that long ago - don't be fooled by the fact it's black and white, that was just me trying to be arty farty; or the dreadful quality - that's mainly because of the way it's scanned. I found this set of photos of Newhaven when I was sorting through my photo boxes last week. A few of them have my elder son in, aged about four, which would put them in the late 1980s/early 1990s (but that does lead me to wonder, if it was then, what had I done with younger son (b. Feb 1990)?)
North Quay

But all the same, you won't get quite this view again. These pictures were taken from the pedestrian bridge across the ringroad, which was demolished a few years ago and replaced with a pelican crossing. No one ever used the footbridge, except to hang banners off it (or occasionally take photos, I suppose). It was quite hairy - very high, and I swear it swayed as you walked across. Also there were lots of steps each side, and even if you didn't want to take your life in your hands it wasn't far to a crossing.
Footbridge over the ringroad, with small no.1 son. Denton Island behind

There are other pictures in the set of the town centre and the West Quay, so I thought it might be fun to do some 'then and now' comparisons. I say it wasn't long ago - but no. 2 son is eighteen the week after next, so we can at least show him how things have changed here over his lifetime. But there won't be any more taken from this vantage point.

Maybe I'm redundant

2008-02-07T02:17:00.000-08:00

I was prompted finally to start a Newhaven blog when I got talking to Jackie Williams, who had just set up the Our Newhaven website; I thought it was about time I got on with what I'd been thinking about for ages.
But now I wonder whether I'm really necessary. Our Newhaven looks to be an excellent site. I've just registered. It's easy to use, well organised and a pleasure to read. It also has the makings of a brilliant resource. I hope they'll get loads more stuff, and be able to maintain the organisation and ease of use. You don't have to register to look, only to upload stuff.
Still, I need an outlet for my personal meanderings...

Seagull in the mist

2008-02-05T09:38:00.001-08:00

Yes, I really must try to keep this a bit more up to date. But it's been cold, and when I'm working I'm never here in daylight. This was last week; a misty morning, and I whipped the phone out and took this on the way to the station. When I got there, it was to find that the trains were all severely disrupted because of ice. Well, I couldn't see any, even further inland, when I finally did get going.

I will really try to post more often here. Warrior's blog got off to a slow start - no posts for a month after I first set it up, so hopefully, especially once the weather improves, I will find more to put down. I must also get myself an OS map of the area, so that I can randomly pick bits of town to go to and report back on. And I must do a Newhaven links list. Ah, promises, promises.

The graveyard of Christmas

2008-01-06T06:30:00.000-08:00

Well, that's it over for another year. The front room seems surprisingly large again, without a bloody great tree in the corner. And here is where they go - the corner of Bay Vue car park. I see most of them have considerably more greenery left on them than ours did when it was finally wrestled out of the front door, leaving its entire complement of foliage on the floor.

Still, someone's happy about being packed away for another year.

Rear window

2008-01-02T11:27:00.001-08:00

This is what I can see (or could last June) if I go up into the attic and stick my head out of the Velux and look in a roughly north easterly direction. You should be able to get a bigger picture by clicking on it.

It's low tide, and the boats are sitting on the mud at Meeching boats. The building with the shallow pitched roof to the right of the picture is on Denton Island, and the river goes round to both sides.

Where the orange container is is a ballast wharf, at the very top extent of the North Quay. The road about half way up the picture is the A26, and the white chalkface on the right is the Artex Quarry. Beyond that, the South Downs.

On the roofs in the foreground are some baby seagulls, one adult one, and an artificial cockerel, which someone has taken the trouble of placing on their chimney.

My local

2007-12-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

It's rather nice actually, isn't it. A proper backstreet pub, one of the few remaining in residential roads, at least around here. As I understand it, the property to the left was originally a pub too, and bore the name The Prince of Wales, but this one has clearly carried that name for a long time.

I love those green tiles on pubs, and here they are, a gem on my very doorstep - well, literally three minutes away; I timed it this morning - and I hadn't been in there since about 1993. I used to live in the same road, in the flat above the fish and chip shop almost opposite (so it doesn't matter that the Prince of Wales doesn't do food; the barmaid didn't seem to mind a chap bringing his chips in the night we were there. What could be nicer, after a hard game of toad in the hole, than a pint of Harveys and some hot salty chips?)

There is one negative factor to report: those doors. I think they are still the original, wooden, doors, but they are most definitely not the original windows. Up until a couple of years ago, the original ones were still there, frosted glass with the words 'Saloon Bar' and 'Public Bar' spelled out in leaded glass. I remember how furious I was at seeing them removed, and the new ones are horrible; they don't even make an effort to be nice.

Still, we must be grateful that the tiles survive in nearly all (barring a few chips and screwholes) their glory.

Toad in the Hole at a pub with no food

2007-12-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

My sister came to visit us from Wales yesterday, and we were at a bit of a loss as to what to do while the dinner was cooking. So I thought perhaps we would go to a pub. In the past we've been in the habit of going into Lewes for such purposes, usually to the Snowdrop (which I learn with some consternation is now closed, but that's another story). The last pub I went to in Newhaven was probably the Ark down on Riverside, which is OK but a bit trendy (although that is certainly an improvement, and they do serve Directors, which is one of my all time favourites).

But, I thought, when we're off boating we're always ready to try out a new pub, and sometimes we've been pleasantly surprised, and it's very rare that we've had a total failure. So I suggested we try our very nearest pub, which is only about three minutes' walk away. This is the Prince of Wales in South Road, and I haven't been in there for about fifteen years. Sister, son and I went and had a look, and found a nice, old fashioned, street corner local. No food; no jukebox (but nice enough music); no fruit machines. One real ale - but it was Harvey's, so that was fine, and it was in pretty good condition. At six o'clock on a Wednesday night, the place was empty; for quite a while literally, completely empty apart from us.

Other good points included original tiles in the loos (as it was so empty I was able to sneak into the gents for a quick look; very impressively, the copper pipework was polished); parquet floor in the public bar, and green glazed tiles on the floor adjacent to the bar.

And, best of all, Toad in the Hole.

Toad in the Hole is an old Sussex pub game, which involves throwing metal discs at a sloping table top which is covered in lead and has a hole in the middle. You score two points for getting one in the hole and one for it resting on the top, and the first person or team (me in this case) to get down exactly from 31 is the winner.

Roll up, roll up

2007-12-14T11:54:00.000-08:00

For Late Night Shopping in Newhaven. It was only a few years ago that local shopkeepers decided that it would be a good idea to institute a Late Night Shopping event in the run up to Christmas. As I recall, it started with the shops themselves, and a lovely Rotary Club Santa's Grotto. Local organisations set up stalls with tombolas and raffles and gifts for sale. Then came the twirling teacups and the bouncy castle, and now - I've just been down there and bring you this report from the front line - it's a full blown fairground, crammed into the pedestrianised high street, complete with an inflatable slide as high as the surrounding buildings, big wheel, loads of other rides, rip-off stalls, two rifle ranges, screaming girls and huddled, smoking, boys. You can't see the shops, and now I come to think of it, many of them weren't open anyway.

So it's no longer really late night shopping, rather, Newhaven Town Centre Fairground, one night only (thank god). Worst of all, there was no Rotary Club Santa's grotto.

There was a candy floss van

And, rather less explicably, in December, an ice cream van.

There were a few local organisations represented, but their small, unilluminated, stalls were lost in the general melee, or relegated to the outer darkness of the bottom of the town: Newhaven Square.

It's not that there's nothing to say...

2007-12-09T04:13:00.000-08:00

It's that there's too much. There are so many things, seeing as I haven't written about any current events or issues so far, that are interesting, and that are going on in Newhaven at the moment, that I don't really know where to start. I would love to tell the stories of the proposed East Quay development (premised upon the recently discovered imminent collapse of said quay); the history and uncertain future of the Parker Pen Company; and, of course, the proposed incinerator, which rumbles on and on and on...

All these stories though are complex and involved, and would require me doing some research, and going out specially to take photos, which, much as I would love to do all those things, I really don't have time for - at least not this week. So please forgive the paucity of these early offerings, and I will try to get my act together (possibly when the weather improves).

The West Beach

2007-12-05T12:44:00.000-08:00

Say what you like about Newhaven, but where else on the South coast offers you a beach like this? Washed clean by the tide twice a day, oh-so-gently sloping sands, sheltered from the wind by the sea wall... The West Beach has to be one of the best things about Newhaven. It's a brilliant place to take young children, as they can't get lost or hide. The sand is perfect for sandcastles; there's no nasty pebbles or shingle underfoot. The tide goes out a long way, so there's plenty of sand, and it comes all the way in so you get a brand new canvas twice a day. There's a car park right at the top of the steps, which costs about two pounds a day, I think.

And if you don't like gently sloping sands, then there's another beach the other side of the breakwater, steeper, with pebbles, and where the tide doesn't come right up. So if you like swimming, sore feet , stale seaweed and old plastic bottles, your needs are catered for too. (Actually that's unfair; the pebbly beach is mostly lovely too, below the high tide mark at least.)

Brill!

2007-12-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

Although not, perhaps, if you are a fish. I couldn't resist this fine specimen, captured at the Fish Festival last year, because to my eye he bears an uncanny resemblance to our well known local MP, scourge of the Hutton enquiry, Channel 4 Opposition MP of the Year (2002) and Spectator Inquisitor of the Year (2001).

North Quay

2007-12-03T13:40:00.000-08:00

Just a picture tonight, to keep things ticking over. The North Quay on an October morning last year, featuring some satisfyingly orange aggregate.

As mentioned elsewhere

2007-12-02T05:13:00.000-08:00

Well, here's a nice picture to be going on with, taken from the West Quay.

I suppose I don't primarily intend this blog as an information resource for people who actually live in Newhaven - although local readers are very welcome! - but more to give a taste of the place to people who are maybe expatriates (exurbiates?) or who have never been here, a little bit of vicarious small faded industrial coastal town living. I've plenty of pictures anyway, so can stick them up even when I've nothing to say.

As I mentioned yesterday, Newhaven has featured a few times in my narrowboat blog, nb Warrior, which I've been doing since April 2006. So for a quick catch up, here are some links to Newhaven posts on there.

Here's the river on a misty morning, and again on a September evening. Here's the swing bridge, and the raft race. I've told the world about the fish festival, and its advance publicity. I've built a sand boat on the West Beach, and uploaded loads of photos which are linked to from those posts. I went out with the camera in January too. I've visited the museum, speculated about what this blog might look like from the West Quay; I've written about a local boat, and about the town in general on the twentieth anniversary of my arrival here. And if you want to go straight to the photos, they're here.

Next I'll put a links list together for this blog - any ideas welcome.

Hello, good morning and welcome

2007-12-01T02:02:00.000-08:00

... to Newhaven Town. Yes, to those already familiar with nb Warrior, I have finally succumbed. On my narrowboat blog, I sometimes mention my home town, on the pretext that as a river runs through it it has boating connections. But there are all sorts of other things I'd like to say about Newhaven that maybe don't fit there, and I've long toyed with the idea of starting a separate blog to talk about the town. It may be the first, it may not - I don't know, but I hope I'll soon find out.

I was finally prompted to get on with it yesterday, when I was at the celebration of NCDA's tenth anniversary. I met Jackie Blackwell, who has set up the Our Newhaven website for people to share photos and memories of the town. Amazingly, I'd already discovered this relatively new site whilst Googling to try to find out what the pub used to be called that is now Philip Mann estate agents (answer, the Riverside Inn, and formerly the Crown, but that was thanks to Sean next door). I suppose another inspiration is Diamond Geezer, who translates his life in London into such an interesting and informative blog.

This blog will be very much my own take on Newhaven, looking at the things that interest me and expressing my (no doubt often uninformed) opinions, but I hope that people will read it, and post comments, and maybe even get some debates going. And I hope people will bring things to my attention, and if there are other blogs and sites out there, that we can link to each other and make Newhaven a town that punches above its weight in cyberspace as in so many other things (as we were constantly reminded in the interminable speeches yesterday).

So what are my credentials for starting a Newhaven blog? Well, the first thing of course is that blogging requires no credentials ... but... I've lived here since 1986 and genuinely like the place; I served on the Town Council for two terms (1991-99) and was one of the founding members and original company secretary of NCDA... but really I just like blogging and musing and ranting and (more often, I hope), raving about the town.

I have to go and make my Christmas cake now, but I post again soon with links to the Newhaven-related posts that I've already done over on nb Warrior, and I will tweak the site a bit, hopefully to include a link where people can email me. I'll try to update at least once a week (I try to do Warrior at least every other day!) but it won't be every day so it might be as well to subscribe via Atom (no, I have no idea how that works, but fully understand it to be a Good Thing).

Keep reading, I'll be back soon.