Bottle Alley
Bottle Alley, Hastings, 12 Jan 2022.
I spent much of last year feeling out of place in Hastings and St Leonards, even though I’ve lived here for 4.5 years. A feeling that was no doubt amplified by the pandemic and working on my book, which as well as being about music is also about the city and people I love most in the whole world.
This year I’ve committed to exploring Hastings & St Leonards in detail through different stories and long and short term photography projects, some of which you are starting to see here.
My hope is that among other things, this exploration will help me to better understand this town by the sea and it’s communities, and my place within it.
As part of this mission, today was an epic day of photography, which included planting myself at Bottle Alley as the sun was low and golden in the sky.
My initial goal was to photograph some of the graffiti on the columns, and traces of the endless battle with the council in which graffiti appears, is painted over, reappears, is painted over etc adinfinitum.
While I did achieve this, it was being in and around one spot watching people of all ages walking and running past me, or sitting on near by benches that I enjoyed the most; a group of young people sitting chatting about COVID, a toddler attempting to join their conversation, before being swooped up by their mum, an older man taking photos on his phone, kids being kids and of course the obligatory dogs and seagulls that are just as much part of the community as the humans.
