Hastings was one of several southern seaside towns transformed by the bank holiday arrivals of Mods and Rockers during the mid-1960s, its seafront becoming an unlikely stage for a cultural drama.
Hastings had been a seaside destination for working-class Londoners since the Victorian era, its shingle beach and fish-and-chip shops offering affordable recreation within a manageable distance of the capital. By the early 1960s it was receiving a different kind of visitor on bank holidays — young people on motorcycles and scooters, in leather and in parkas, arriving in numbers large enough to transform the atmosphere of the whole town for a weekend.
The seafront at Hastings had a particular geography that suited the informal gathering of the rocker scene. The road along the front was accessible, the pier and amusement arcades provided gathering points, and the cafés — open long hours during the summer season — could absorb considerable numbers of young people who had money to spend on tea and something hot. The local population's response to the arrivals ranged from pragmatic accommodation to genuine alarm, depending on which weekend was in question and how the newspapers had covered the previous one.
What actually happened at Hastings on most bank holidays was considerably less dramatic than reported. Young people arrived, gathered in groups, watched each other, occasionally confronted each other, and mostly ate chips and listened to music and waited for something to happen. The something that happened was usually modest — a few incidents, some local colour, a photograph that would appear in Monday's paper framing the whole scene as near-apocalyptic. The gap between experience and reportage was enormous.
The towns of the English coast that received these visitations were unwilling participants in a cultural drama they hadn't chosen and couldn't control. But their inadvertent role — as the stage on which the youth tribes of the 1960s displayed themselves — gave them a place in the history of British popular culture that their pier and their fish-and-chips could never have secured alone. Hastings, Margate, Brighton, Clacton: an accidental chain of venues for one of the century's defining shows.
