Hastings

Where to base yourself in Hastings depends mostly on how much walking you want to do and how much quiet you want at night. Hastings Old Town has the largest concentration of small, independent B&Bs and guest houses, many in listed Georgian or Victorian townhouses on streets too narrow for through traffic, which means peace after dark but a five-to-ten-minute walk to a car park if you're driving. St Leonards-on-Sea, immediately along the seafront to the west, has a similar scale of accommodation with a slightly younger, more design-conscious feel, reflecting the area's recent wave of independent shops and restaurants, and puts you closer to the Warrior Square and Marina areas.

The central seafront around White Rock and the pier is the practical choice for anyone without a car or travelling with mobility considerations, with level access to the promenade, the main shops, the theatre and the train station all within easy reach, and a wider spread of mid-sized hotels able to take larger groups or families. For something quieter and more spacious, a handful of hotels sit just outside the town proper, in the wooded country between Hastings and Battle, generally with grounds, spas or pools that the in-town options can't offer, at the cost of needing a car for evenings out.

Prices follow a predictable pattern: the small Old Town and St Leonards B&Bs are often the best value and the most memorable stays, the seafront hotels sit in the middle, and the out-of-town properties with leisure facilities command the highest rates, particularly at weekends. Booking ahead matters more in July and August and around the October Bonfire weekend, when the town's relatively small stock of rooms fills quickly; outside those windows, Hastings rarely feels oversubscribed.

Hastings rewards a couple of days of unhurried wandering as much as any single big-ticket attraction. The highlights worth building a visit around include:

• Hastings Old Town — a warren of narrow lanes, courtyards and passages (locally called twittens) lined with antique dealers, junk shops and some of the town's oldest pubs, largely untouched by chain retail.
• The Stade and the net shops — the tall, black-tarred wooden huts on the beach, built from the 1800s to store fishing nets and gear, remain in daily use and are a genuinely unique piece of vernacular architecture.
• Hastings Castle — the ruined clifftop fortress built shortly after 1066 on West Hill, with a small exhibition on the Norman Conquest and sweeping views over the Old Town and Channel.
• East Hill Cliff Railway — England's steepest funicular railway, hauling visitors up to Hastings Country Park in under a minute, avoiding a stiff climb on foot.
• Hastings Country Park and Fairlight Glen — several miles of clifftop and wooded glen walking east of the town, with dramatic views towards Fairlight and a long smuggling history.
• Hastings Contemporary — a striking black-clad gallery on the seafront showing modern and contemporary art, including a permanent collection of work connected to the town.
• Hastings Pier — rebuilt after a 2010 fire and award-winning for its stripped-back, community-owned redesign, now hosting events, markets and a bar rather than traditional amusements.
• Alexandra Park — a large Victorian park inland from the centre with a lake, mature woodland and formal gardens, a good counterpoint to a day on the shingle.

Seafood is the obvious starting point, given the boats hauled up on the beach a few steps from most of the town's fish restaurants and stalls; expect the catch of the day rather than a fixed menu, and it is worth timing a visit around what has actually come in that morning. Rock-a-Nore, the road running along the Stade, is the natural hub for this, with fish and chip shops sitting alongside small independent seafood restaurants using the same boats' catches.

Beyond fish, the town's food scene has grown considerably more varied over the past decade, particularly in St Leonards-on-Sea, where a wave of small, chef-led restaurants, natural wine bars and specialty coffee roasters has opened alongside the area's longer-standing cafés. George Street in the Old Town is worth a slow walk for independent bakeries, delis and pubs, several with strong local ale selections from Sussex breweries. Hastings also has a lively market and festival calendar, including a seafront food and drink festival in summer and regular farmers' and vintage markets in the Old Town, both good ways to try a cross-section of what the wider area produces.

Hastings' immediate coastline is mostly cliff and shingle beach rather than campsite country, so the area's tents, tourers and static caravans cluster just outside town, on the gentler ground towards Fairlight and inland around Sedlescombe and Battle. The clifftop sites east of the Old Town make the most of the setting, with sea views and direct access to the Hastings Country Park walking trails, while the sites further inland trade the coastal view for more shelter and a quieter, greener outlook across the Weald.

The terrain around Hastings is a mix of exposed clifftop and sheltered wooded valley, so weather can vary considerably over a short distance: expect a breeze on any pitch facing the Channel, and rather more shelter once you're a few miles inland towards Battle. Wild camping is not legally permitted anywhere in England without landowner consent, and this applies as much to the Country Park cliffs and the Weald woodland around Hastings as anywhere else, so a licensed site is the only realistic option here rather than a grey area worth chancing.

Late spring through early autumn is the sensible camping season, with May and June generally offering the best balance of settled weather, lower midge and crowd levels than the summer peak, and the Country Park at its greenest for walking. July and August bring the warmest sea swimming and the busiest sites, particularly around school holidays, while sites tend to close or run reduced service from late October through to Easter, reflecting the coast's exposure to Channel storms over winter.