Had a stab of nostalgia when I saw Marine Court featured on Atlas Obscura. I was brought up in East Ascent, a row of poky little houses (see right edge of the illustration), in the shadow of this Art Deco titan dominating the seafront of St Leonards-on-Sea.

The AO article (but not the Wikipedia one) conjectures it was built as a luxury hotel and only converted to flats once built, which would go a long way to explain many features of the place for me. When I knew it (in the 50s), there was a cool nightclub in the semicircular part, with an illuminated hopscotch pattern on the floor (hardly a fashionable leisure activity for today’s young people)!

I knew a family who lived there, and was a regular visitor to their flat. I thought it cramped for the rental they paid, and the lifts (elevators) were slow, small and apt to break down. Still, it was the dernier cri when it was built in the 1930s. In WWII, as I learned from a local, there was an anti-aircraft battery on the roof. St Leonards was on the “invasion coast” and civilian residents were evacuated inland. I’m surprised the building survived the war (though it did get hit).

Marine Court ought to be up with the cream of rental accommodation in England. But it has seen better days, and none of its owners ever made it profitable. Hastings & St Leonards (to give the combined township its correct moniker) was never that fashionable, lagging behind nearby Eastbourne. Perhaps it was because real people lived there.

To me (biased, of course, as a former resident) Hastings was the most interesting town on the South-East Coast, surpassing even Brighton (“London-by-the-Sea”). Like a former pope said of Rome, you could see it all in a week, but you could live your whole life there without ever getting to know it properly. There are a lot of points of comparison with Whitby, where I now live. The similarity in feel of the two towns (both Viking enclaves) was much of Whitby’s appeal to me, when I needed to pick somewhere to settle down when I came back to England.