The Heart of Old Town

A welcoming home with 400 years of history

Could you use this site to sell your Hastings home? We can provide site design and hosting, copywriting, photography and plan drawing. Please contact us for costs and details.

Now sold for more than the asking price. Please contact us if you would like to know how we achieved this. 

Formerly For Sale in All Saints Street, Hastings, £600,000

This house, built as a home and workshop for an artisan and his family and apprentices, dates from around 1620. The timber frame dwelling was  ‘Georgianised’ in line with changing fashions but retains most of the original features. We are offering it for sale privately, having found that the ways of traditional estate agency in the current property market suit neither us nor the quirks of an historic property like this!

All Saints Street is one of the two principal streets of Hastings Old Town, created after the disastrous floods of the C13th. Number 126/7 is located next to the supposed house of the mother of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Many think it is the best place for a home in Old Town.

Our house was built in the early C17th and its timber frame is ‘good for another 400 years’ (according to a structural engineer who inspected recently). It has been modified over time in line with Georgian taste, subdivided in the C18th (hence two front doors) and then reunited as a family home, with minimal loss of the original features. The house has not been romantically TudorBethan-ised as so many others in the street. It is also unusual (for Old Town) in having a good West-facing garden (about 40ft x 20ft), a downstairs WC, shower/wet room (en-suite with the master bedroom) as well as a family bathroom.

There is much to appeal to a lover of old houses but this is foremost a very comfortable and easily-maintained home, at the heart of vibrant Old Hastings yet set sufficiently back from the seafront to minimise noise and the smell of frying fish! We use the Second Floor as a double studio, which makes the house an ideal ‘work from home’ venue.

Keen to view or have a question? Please send us a message.

Selling Price, Tenure and Availability

We are now using Strike as our agents, to take advantage of Zoopla and RightMove listings but we invite you to contact us with any queries. The house is Freehold (with no flying freehold issues) and in full-time occupancy by the owners. On conclusion of a sale agreement we would require a month or so before exchange of contracts, to secure a new home. No ‘modern auctions’ no ‘best and final offer’ ultimatum!

We do not insist, in order to arrange a viewing, that you are in position to progress toward exchange of contracts but we do ask for an indication of your readiness to proceed.

Principal Features

Fine oak frame structure with minimal alterations

‘Jettied’ facade with overhanging upper floors

Peg-tiled roof

40ft x 20ft Garden

Gas central heating by radiators

Ground Floor

Entrance Lobby, 11’0″ x 5’9″ (3.35m x 1.75m) with cupboard for washing machine 

Heavily-beamed Sitting Room, 14’4″ x 12’4″ (4.37m x 3.75m) screened from the front door 

Inglenook fireplace with efficient wood stove

Generous Dining Room, 12’0″ x 11’1″ (3.66m x 3.38m)

Galley Kitchen, fully fitted with bespoke cupboards

WC

First Floor

Master Bedroom, 13’5″ x 9’7″ (3.35m x 2.92m) with Wet Room shower

Two further Bedrooms, 9’2″ x 8’1″ (2.82m x 2.46m) and 12’7″ x 8’2″ (3.23m x 2.49m)

Family Bathroom

Second Floor

Full-width Studio or Bedroom 4, 17’10” x 12’8″ (5.44m x 3.25m)

The History of the House

Life in the Street

The old town is the location for regular fabulous events such as Jack in the Green, the Bonfire Parade, and many more associated with the historic fishing beach at the bottom on the road. Hastings Old Town has become one of the prime seaside escapes of media folk, and celeb spotting at our many restaurants and 17 pubs is easy for those who are so inclined! I almost forgot Hastings Contemporary, an art gallery of international repute, which is also within a stroll.

Floor Plans

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The Joys of Traditional Oak Frames

For those unfamiliar with traditional timber-framed buildings the prospect may seem daunting. In practice there is very little to go wrong with a frame that has been in place for hundreds of years, and any issues can be sorted out remarkably easily. The oak frame of this house would have been sawn in a forest a few miles inland (away from salty gales) and was massively over-engineered. The heartwood of the English oak just gets stronger over the years and virtually totally resistant to rot and worm. As in all but the highest status houses of this age some beams show evidence of worm and removal of the edges of beams that had a small area of sapwood. There is little to worry about now!

Framed buildings move to some extent with temperature and humidity. External finishes such as lime plaster and tile-hanging are able to move with the frame, so cracks are very rare.  In our experience modern brick structures are far less forgiving.

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A bit of history

Vernacular timber-framed houses changed little over several centuries but we can date this one by the covered jetty beam-ends (so later than the Southern bay of Shovells, next door) and because of the staggered butt-purlins of the roof, which indicate early C17th. At this time a central brick chimney stack had become the norm and served the main chamber (both workroom and living quarters and the kitchen (now dining room). The plot would then have extended to the Bourne stream and have been used as a smallholding to produce vegetables and the odd animal for the household, which would almost certainly have included apprentices, both ‘trade’ and ‘domestic’. The main front window has an original frame with later Georgian large panes. It was once an oriel, before subsequent brick-facing of the street level. The deep cill inside shows signs of decades of scrubbing and, as the windows slid sideways, we surmise that it was the shop counter.

Sketches by a local artist indicate that the North bay originally had an oriel to the first floor with a gable over. As seen elsewhere in Old Town, these features were removed as the Georgian fashion for plain fronts and larger windows was adopted by those who could afford the alterations. By the C18th space in town was at a premium and a row of tiny dwellings occupied much of the land and even a ‘poor school’ for boys by the stream. It may have been at this time that the house was divided into three. At the 1861 census there were 21 people living here – three extended families plus lodgers!

By the 1950s much of Old Town was in a sorry state. The construction of the Bourne road over the old stream was an occasion for wholesale ‘slum clearance’. Fortunately No. 126/7 escaped the axe and was bought by a man who was persuaded to keep the Georgian elements. Other buildings were less fortunate and were festooned with bits of timber from the demolitions and even complete house fronts in a pastiche of their Tudor and Stuart origins.

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