Hastings Town Deal
Vision & Impacts

Our Vision

❝A healthy, vibrant and quirky seaside town that people love to visit, live and work in and say,  ‘I can #MakeItInHastings’.

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Please note that this page is more than six months old and the information it contains may be out of date. Please contact towndeal@hastings.co.uk if you have any specific questions.

Through the Town Deal investment we will see: 

The story of the Norman invasion and 1066 come alive, living and breathing in the minds of our residents and visitors. The story will reach beyond the 35,000 foreign students who currently visit our town each year, and the castle will be a national destination in its own right, befitting of the world-renowned Battle and story it symbolises, and its significance on our history.

The South East’s first green garden town

Visitors will also want to see the South East’s first green garden town. Green arteries buzzing with biodiversity will connect our old Norman harbour of a town centre to its nationally recognised countryside parks, seafront and urban parks. This, coupled with the wider movement and access plans and curation of our street scene, will deliver a town that allows room to breathe, think and dwell – pushing much-needed footfall into our town centre.

New mixed-use homes, commercial and leisure facilities

Our town centre will be diversified, renewed and revitalised by bringing mixed-use facilities, new homes, commercial, leisure and Electric Vehicle charging facilities into our current aged infrastructure. It will build on our High Street Heritage Action Zone, running through to the seafront establishing a wide arc of creative and cultural enterprise development. These projects will ensure the town centre is less divorced from the seafront, residential areas, or our parks, and will kick start the creation of a ’15 min city’ for Hastings town centre and immediate residential areas. 

New jobs and the creation of two new regional ‘green’ skills bases

Supporting and interweaving with this is the creation of two new regional skills bases. These will be focused on the green economy and land-based skills, employment and self-enterprise.

Plumpton College is to set up a new pilot skills hub in Hastings town centre introducing skills and training courses. East Sussex College Group will create a Green Technology Centre of Excellence on the East Sussex College Ore Campus providing 20 new training and learning programmes.

Our projects will create jobs; provide room to grow within the town centre and other employment sites through the development of flexible workspaces and more industrial units to support our existing and growing enterprises. Our focus on developing specialised skills for supporting the green revolution includes skills needed for retrofitting and reducing carbon emissions from ageing housing, installing green technologies in homes; and repairing and maintaining electric vehicles. 

Our ambition is for Hastings to become a centre of skills excellence for these future jobs so that our local workforce can help us meet our net-zero carbon target. The skills sector we will develop will have local, regional and international significance and provide new training and work opportunities for all our residents, especially our young people.

We are excited and hopeful about what this diverse range of projects can bring to the future of our town, its communities and the wider region.

The submission of the Town Investment Plan is the first major step of the six-year programme for Hastings Town Deal that the board has unanimously recommended for investment. If approved by the government, the individual projects will need to develop detailed business cases over the next year for final approval before beginning construction.