Words: Merlin Betts, Photos: @sonskaphotographystudio
Cold winter sun in the town centre, the occasional ray of light and heat caught by a winter jacket, or touching a frosty face. It’s a Saturday, and among the steady flow of shoppers, drinkers and cafe enthusiasts, people are stopping to read freshly printed copies of Hex, wet paste blurring the black ink. We’ve postered up the community noticeboard on the plywood hoardings outside the old Debenhams building, long since stripped of its O.W.E.N.S label.
The building’s once again in the care of freeholders Moxie Management Two, the company which bought it back in February 2020, and so far they’ve been unable to find an occupier to replace Owens. The big ground floor windows have been fortified against the phantom glass-smasher of Robertson Street, and Titanium Group have settled in to keep watch over the vacant property, alongside its neighbour Albany Court – also owned by Moxie – which is occupied, but seems to be struggling with fire regulations.
Mid-November last year, a few local interest groups thought that the ugly (albeit perhaps necessary) plywood hoardings could do with a bit of colour, and dubbed them the “Community Noticeboard (paid for with £400,000 of public money)”. This refers to £250,000 of Town Deal funding given to Moxie Management, and £150,000 given to the now defunct Owens. These funds were supposed to provide 35 full time equivalent jobs – often quoted in press as “100 jobs” – which, as you might have noticed, either never materialised or didn’t last long.
Half the hoardings also displayed a notice that murals would soon be going up to cover the space – part of an apparent Moxie collaboration with Love Hastings – but instead the community noticeboard was immediately torn down and, as we entered 2025, no murals had arrived to replace it.
For the launch of Hex’s first print issue, we went back and put up another polite reminder that the hoardings have been requisitioned as the town’s community noticeboard. This time, our sign has stayed, if only because (even with £400,000 to spend on the building) neither Moxie nor Titanium Group could afford a ladder: security tore down everything not placed above head height.
Management with Guts and Grit
Moxie seem like relative newcomers to Hastings. Run by sisters Sophie Hubble and Bella Landen, the company started out as Zoom Management in 2002. Zoom ran a string of nurseries in South-East London before being bought out by Bright Horizons in 2018, the same year that they made the transformation into Moxie Mangement Ltd [sic] and then finally Moxie Management Ltd. After a year of what was presumably planning and contemplation, they set up Moxie Management Two Ltd as their real estate arm, and became property developers/managers.
The company doesn’t have a website, public email or phone number, and is registered to a house next to Greenwich Park up in London. In other words, it’s not very accessible for the people of Hastings. Which makes me wonder why Hastings Borough Council (HBC) minuted, “Moxie continues to engage with the local community and businesses exploring opportunities and working with an agency to explore rental opportunities for the property spaces.” I’ve not seen any engagement going on. Sure I’m one person, but I’m also a journalist – I’m supposed to notice things. They’ve barely talked to the Observer, the obvious paper to launch press releases at. They’ve had some apparently failed interactions with Love Hastings (absent murals). So who have they been meaningfully “engaging with”?
If I seem a bit harsh on Moxie here, have a look at my colleague Lizzie Beck’s article on Owens. I was also at their press launch, and rarely have I seen a business owner who cares so little about the local community, and is so open and honest in the way they don’t care. Moxie put that business in the building.
When Owens occupied its floors, you didn’t see many local stallholders or concessions in place. I remember a national waffle chain, overpriced digital versions of games that are free in local pubs, and a few “experiences” of varying quality. For example, I ‘experienced’ a version of 1066 where the town apparently hosted an East London butcher who used a plastic halloween axe to bash his meat into submission. I don’t mind a bit of music hall, but there’s limits.
Safe to say, Graham Owen wasn’t exactly getting to grips with the town character, or talking to community vendors in need of sales space. Compare to St Andrews Mews – which has made quite similar but much better use of a shared space close to the town centre. I’m not saying it’s a model of community business organisation (because it isn’t) but you have a broader variety of shops, a better quality for a more appropriate price, and regular events whether music or arts, often free of charge. St Andrews was also another recent renovation job – albeit not on the scale of Debenhams.
If you’re still wondering where the Town Deal’s £400,000 went, Moxie told the council in September last year, “the majority of the £400,000 funding from the Towns Fund programme remains within the fabric of the building and has contributed to the future usage of the property including various building works, a DDA compliant lift connecting floors, facilities and improvements to ventilation and air conditioning systems.” They also confirmed that they want to stay in town and make the building work.
But wasn’t that money meant for jobs? And I can’t help but recall, rather than providing “100 jobs”, Owens left a number of contractors unpaid when they departed – isn’t that more local people out of pocket?
And if you’re wondering why this was allowed, why nothing is apparently being done to recover the money, well, in many ways it wasn’t our money in the first place – it’s our taxes, but it was sent from a Tory-dominated Westminster basically as a business stimulation bundle. The Towns Fund was created with a lot of bureaucratic guidelines, set just to stop underfunded local authorities from spending on their taxpayers’ priorities. There was never any intention of getting the money back should the receiving businesses misbehave or fail. Town Boards can be awarded less in future funding stages if their spending is reviewed and considered negligent or wasteful, but the businesses that wasted the money face no consequences.
Whose Town are We Talking About Here?
To my mind, the town centre is a shared space, a communal as well as a commercial zone – something we all have ownership over. It’s part of the town’s identity, and functionally it’s the place we go to buy things, hang out, relax.
The businesses that work there are only there to provide goods and services for us – the residents, the visitors, the customers. In return we provide footfall and income. It’s pretty simple, right? But what that simple interaction means is that neither side can function without the other, and so, the centre is shared. It’s not the businesses’ town centre, it’s not the council’s, it’s Hastings’ town centre.
And the Debenhams building is one of the more iconic parts of that centre. It’s also just a huge space that we might as well put to good use. In a cost of living crisis and a housing crisis, surely we can think of something decent to do with it?
Which is where our community noticeboard comes in. Moxie have never offered us the opportunity to decide what should happen with the building. Sure they occasionally talk to HBC, sure they talk to the Town Deal Board to get £400,000 public funding, and maybe they have inconclusive discussions with Love Hastings, but they don’t talk to us, don’t make themselves available to us, don’t have any interest in us as long as (a few years down the line) they haven’t lost any of their accrued millions.
Strange behaviour coming from two sisters who made their wealth in nurseries, right? Or maybe not, I mean we’ve seen what damage privatised education has done to our local schools via University of Brighton Academies Trust. Running a profitable school and being a decent person are clearly two separate things.
So the community noticeboard is an invitation to Moxie, to the Town Deal Board, and most importantly to the people of Hastings passing through town, to enter into a bit of conversation about what should happen with their building.
Thus far that invitation has been swatted aside – not just by security. They took their orders from Moxie – a company that seems to have very few employees – and Moxie said “rip it down”. It could’ve been one of the sisters herself giving the order. But the invitation will keep being offered, by more and more residents of this town, until it’s finally accepted. Because it isn’t just their building. It’s our building.
As the £400,000 of Town Deal Funding put into this building causes such great animation, please can we talk about the £4m for Hastings Commons, the £1m also for Hastings Commons and The Who digital exhibition at St Andrews Market that received a £200,000 digital Hastings grant (1 month event – not advertised anywhere)
Hey Stephen, we can absolutely talk about Hastings Commons. And I know Sea Space / Sea Change are a much bigger waste of public money that have somehow cowered from the limelight of public consciousness or accountability.
Owens was on my mind as a blatant and careless stab in the heart that Hastings just seemed to take, like “oh, another one, thanks”.
Whereas Hastings Commons has, I think, done a lot more with its money. Rock House, the Observer Building, Eagle House and the building with the Mini Common Room down on Claremont, also some of the nice things that have happened in Gotham Alley – all that is Hastings Commons. You can’t say they took the money and ran. You can only say you might like to see more for your money, or that it should’ve been shared out better among community groups. But compared to most (maybe all) other development efforts in the town centre, they’re actually a success story.
I didn’t realise the Who show received so much money. I remember a colleague at HIP writing about it, but otherwise you’re right – there didn’t seem to be much info about it around town given the money spent. If any of that money went into the building/gallery though, I’ve been there since and it’s an excellent space, and very old, so perhaps not a complete waste to have it restored – if that’s what happened.