Queens Arcade, Hastings

Queens Arcade in Hastings is a prime example of a natural beauty with so much potential sadly neglected and really not living up to its possibilities.

There’s barely a handful of businesses operating in the arcade (February 2025), with lots of empty units, and yet take a look at the gold lettering above the shop awning in most of the units, and you can see how not so long ago this was a thriving, workaday, food-based arcade: butcher, fruit shop, fishmonger, sweet shop (still there, at least), along with other practical businesses, cards, estate agent, ‘coiffure.’

Now, the highlight is probably the Thai restaurant and the sweet shop, with the other draw – the hand-made chocolate shop – about to move out to find better footfall. Such a shame in such a pretty vintage arcade.

At some point, money was invested to put up various posters with pictures and information on the inventor of television, John Logie Baird, who started out in a room upstairs in the arcade, and even burnt his hands during one experiment as he endeavoured to transmit signals and messages across wires in his studio here. With the centenary of that incident happening just about now, there is so much potential for really making a thing of this history linked to the arcade.

But it needs a bit of a creative mind – and a few more tenants in the shops – to make such an initiative worthwhile.

One entrance to the arcade is beautifully signposted, with the arcade name in gold lettering and a gold crown standing above you as you enter. It is a narrow arcade but quite tall, giving it almost a cathedral-like feel, if it weren’t for the kink in the footway giving it a twist in direction.

I like Queens Arcade in Hastings, but boy it could do with some inspiration from others that are doing better: the owner should take a trip to Derby, or Newport, or Inverness, for ideas on how to make an arcade in a medium-sized town work…

My pick of the arcade’s past

Queen’s Arcade opened in 1882, with a focus on practical shops rather than trying to be a luxury-goods arcade along the lines of Burlington in London. So, although the signage above the shops today is a lot more recent (probably dating from the restoration after a fire in 1990) some of the trades operating out of those shops probably reflect well what was in the arcade when it first opened: butcher, fishmonger, barber, etc.

Queen’s Arcade’s greatest claim to a place in history is that the inventor of television, John Logie Baird used a room up above No 8 in the arcade to carry out experiments that would eventually lead to his success in transmitting images through television. In 1924 he used old tea chests, bits of cardboard and spare parts from his bicycle to put together the equipment he needed. He famously singed his fingers in an electric fire in the course of his trials, but of course came good in the end, and the arcade makes much of the event, with plaques and newspaper clippings on the walls of the arcade still today, 100 years on.

James Paine, the florist, started business in the arcade in 1918, and was still going in the 1990s, reopening to much fanfare after the 1990 blaze which almost destroyed the arcade.

Sources for the above stories all from www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk, and specifically: 1) Hastings and St Leonards Observer, 8 March 1990, National World Publishing Ltd; 2) Hastings and St Leonards Observer, 2 November 1990, National World Publishing Ltd.