Living the High Life - Looking back at The Eversfield Hotel

This week, in his nostalgia series, Ion Castro looks at The Eversfield Hotel
This photograph of an unknown holidaymaker was found in an album dated 1934, when Bottle Alley was new  notice how low the beach is and how little shingle there is, over the next 80 years this will build up against the new groynes to the level we see today, The Eversfield Hotel can be seen in the centreThis photograph of an unknown holidaymaker was found in an album dated 1934, when Bottle Alley was new  notice how low the beach is and how little shingle there is, over the next 80 years this will build up against the new groynes to the level we see today, The Eversfield Hotel can be seen in the centre
This photograph of an unknown holidaymaker was found in an album dated 1934, when Bottle Alley was new notice how low the beach is and how little shingle there is, over the next 80 years this will build up against the new groynes to the level we see today, The Eversfield Hotel can be seen in the centre

We have seen that Eversfield Place joins Hastings to St.Leonards extending from Hastings Pier westward to Warrior Square and this fine terrace of mixed architecture was lucky enough to escape the ravages of the air raids of the second war so that unsympathetic infill, a feature of post-war rebuilding, has been avoided and images 150 years apart show little outward change of appearance but what had actually happened, over a century ago, and in response to the rising numbers of visitors to the coast, was that almost every building had become a boarding house, lodging house or hotel to cater for the complete spectrum of visitors.In fact some adjacent buildings had amalgamated to form larger accommodation units and one of the largest of these was the Eversfield Hotel formed in the mid 1880’s from an existing landmark building, number 21 and then incorporated the three houses to the west of it, 18, 19 and 20 to form a high class Hotel. Another large, quality, hotel in Eversfield place also dates from around this time was The Alexandra, named after the then Princess of Wales who had also opened Alexandra Park in 1882 and had it named in her honour. On the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, as consort of King Edward VII she became Queen Alexandra, great-grandmother to the present Queen.All illustrations throughout this series are from Ion Castro’s own collection and he can make available copies of many of the historic images used in this series. There’s more local history on Ion’s website, www.historichastings.co.uk

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