8. Prosperity for places
Overview
East Sussex is a diverse county, and strategy to 2050 will need to recognise local distinctiveness and character as contributors to the county-wide picture, ensuring that all places in East Sussex are able to thrive, and that the county’s environmental assets are protected and enhanced.
Key areas for intervention involve making the most of the county’s creative, cultural and environmental opportunities and building the business, skills and transport links between them; ensuring a long-term focus on Hastings and Bexhill to ensure that this significant urban area can reach its full potential (and help drive the economy of the county as a whole); and making targeted investments in connectivity, consistent with the strategy’s decarbonisation and sustainability objectives.
Context, opportunities and challenges
As the spatial sketch of East Sussex demonstrated in Chapter 2, the county is diverse. In big picture terms, this is most obvious in the differentiation between the rural ‘core’, most of which is within either the National Park or the National Landscape, and the more urban coast. But there is substantial further complexity, in terms of local economic strengths and characteristics and the relevance of connections beyond the county. Consequently, the strategy to 2050 needs to take a locally distinctive approach, in the context (from a land use and infrastructure perspective) of the six Local Plans at district and National Park level.
Long-term investment in infrastructure will also need to be in the context of the sustainability principles outlined in the Strategic Framework. Consistent with this, the draft East Sussex Local Transport Plan 4 parallels this strategy in adopting a 2050 horizon (source: East Sussex County Council, 2023, Local Transport Plan 4). It includes a strengthened emphasis on supporting sustainable economic growth, the need to decarbonise transport (recognising that transport accounts for some 35% of the county’s greenhouse gas emissions), as well as a greater focus on inclusion across the transport system, especially in the context of the county’s ageing population.
Priorities looking ahead
Looking to 2050, there is a need to:
1. Capitalise on, while protecting and enhancing, East Sussex’s environmental assets and designated landscapes
East Sussex is unusual in the extent to which the county is covered by environmental designations. Recent decades have seen significant progress in expanding and strengthening these, notably in the process for the creation of the South Downs National Park. As the need to mitigate the consequences of climate change become ever more important, the need to increase and enhance these protections will grow.
In that context, getting the balance right is important and challenging. East Sussex’s natural environment is a major store of economic value: people are attracted to the county as a place to live and work because of the quality of the coast and countryside, it is fundamental to the visitor economy offer, and the county also has an important land-based sector (including in emerging specialisms such as viticulture) that are dependent on its resilience. And in East Sussex, the National Park and the National Landscape incorporate relatively large populations and business bases (the South Downs National Park is, for example, the most populated of all national parks in England) and coexist in close proximity with larger urban areas. The point is that the economic value of East Sussex’s environmental assets is highly dependent on their protection, and this is embedded within the long-term economic strategy.
Evidence box
- Sussex Modern
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Sussex Modern was established in 2017 as an independent business consortium focused on bringing visitors and investment to the county.
Described as the ‘wine tourism development agency for Sussex’, it promotes the opportunities associated with the intersection of viticulture, food and drink and a dynamic cultural offer. It explicitly seeks to “tell a story of Sussex that is about more than sleepy villages, coastal retirement towns and historic ruins… celebrat[ing] and promot[ing] Sussex as home to a vibrant, youthful culture for audiences with metropolitan tastes for world-class art and high-quality wine – all within breathtaking landscapes”.
The concept highlights the potential of East Sussex’s key environmental and cultural strengths to appeal to new audiences and evolve in response to changing demand while protecting its core assets.
2. Ensure a balance between county-wide priorities and local differentiation
Local pride is an important asset, and as we have seen earlier in this strategy, there are emerging concentrations of economic activity which are locally rooted, and the county’s diversity and polycentricity also gives rise to local distinctiveness. Local distinctiveness and pride also need to be continually reinvented and reinforced as demand changes and the roles of (for example) town centres evolve.
Looking forward to 2050, it will be important to recognise and capitalise on this. But equally, there are important shared issues relevant to the county as a whole: the need to improve transport connectivity for instance, which impacts East Sussex systemically and the need to strengthen digital and sustainable transport connections across the rural parts of the county; the interconnections between different elements of the cultural and visitor economy; and the operation of the labour market, which is ‘bigger than local’ and extends beyond the county itself. In a county which is relatively small compared with its South East neighbours and where no single centre dominates, it will be important to recognise the connections and commonalities, as well as the local differentiation.
3. Enable all parts of East Sussex to thrive
Linked with this, it follows that if East Sussex is going to be economically and sustainably successful, all parts of it need to be doing well: the county is not big enough to allow significant variances in outcome without these impacting on the resilience and prosperity of the whole.
Currently, East Sussex faces a challenge in this regard, given the relative underperformance of Hastings, one of its two larger urban economies: ultimately, the ability of the larger towns to generate economic activity to support the county as a whole will be important for more sustainable travel and land-use patterns over the longer term. Tackling this underperformance will also involve action on a variety of fronts, in the educational and community sphere as well as in physical regeneration and business growth.
Areas for intervention
Building on these priorities, there are three key areas for intervention:
1. Making the most of the county’s cultural, creative and environmental opportunities – and the links between them
East Sussex is distinctive in the range of its local cultural destinations (Towner Eastbourne, Hastings Contemporary, the De La Warr Pavilion, Glyndebourne, the diverse programme of festivals and events, and so on). What is interesting about the ‘offer’ is that these institutions are not purely local in scope: they are substantially outward-facing and linked with wider national and international networks. They are also closely associated with a wider sense of place, especially associations with the coast (and the long history of the South Coast’s creative attraction) and the landscape, including the National Park and National Landscape. Beyond these famous creative institutions, there is also emerging creative innovation at local level (for example, the Creative Newhaven consortium) which will also benefit from being part of the wider county-wide scene.
There is work underway via the launch of Experience Sussex to build connections between sustainable food and drink and the cultural and creative offer, linked with the development of a higher value visitor economy. This builds on the work of existing Destination Management Organisations (DMO) in the county including 1066 Country, Explore Wealden, Visit Lewes, and Visit Eastbourne.
The nexus of creativity, environmental quality, economic opportunity and wellbeing more broadly is also important in the attractiveness of East Sussex as a place to live – especially in attracting a younger demographic. Joining up and growing this creative offer demands both a county-wide approach and local distinctiveness and ought to be a key pillar of economic activity.
2. A long-term focus on Hastings and Bexhill
It is important that all places in East Sussex flourish. But as observed above, there are currently significant disparities, which are most apparent in the relative under-performance of Hastings (and by extension the wider Hastings-Bexhill urban area). The reasons for this are complex and are not easy to fix: they include relatively poor connectivity by road and rail, long-standing concentrations of deprivation linked with some distinctive housing market pressures, environmental constraints especially linked with flood risk, and a relatively small private sector employment base. These challenges are long-standing, many of them are shared with other coastal towns, and they are compounded by the more generic challenges of changes in the retail market, which impact town centres everywhere, but affect those with the weakest local markets the most.
There has been significant investment over several years to address some of these challenges. Much of this has successfully borne fruit – for example, the success of institutions like Hastings Contemporary and the growth of the local creative scene, and recent investment in the Coombe Valley Way. However, much public investment has been stop-start, perhaps not sufficient in scale to fully address the breadth of the challenge, and with insufficient mechanisms to relate opportunities for growth to community benefit. Nevertheless, Hastings has some very distinctive assets: it is an attractive and inherently interesting place to live and there is evidence of high residential demand (albeit that this creates challenges of its own). It also has substantial urban scale – with the potential to act as a driver for the east of the county, and the recent Town Investment Plan has started to bring together key opportunities (source: Hastings Borough Council, 2023, Town Investment Plan).
Over the long term, the renewal of Hastings and Bexhill as a key anchor and driver of growth ought to be a focus of county-wide strategy. That means recognising that while there are no silver bullets (specific government initiatives will always be time and project-limited and will never be sufficient on their own), a joined-up approach over the long term, with the capacity to experiment and to think about bold ideas will be important. Enabling East Sussex’s largest urban area to perform effectively should, over time, make a county-wide difference to the productivity, pay and concentrated disadvantage issues highlighted earlier in Chapter 3.
3. Targeted investment in connectivity to support economic potential
Consistent with the principles set out in the Strategic Framework, investment in East Sussex’s transport connectivity must contribute to the net zero imperative and minimise the impact on the county’s core environmental assets.
However, connectivity across much of the county is not as good as it needs to be. Rail services are, compared with other parts of the South East, relatively slow, local public transport links are often less frequent (especially in rural East Sussex), and there are some disruptive bottlenecks on the road network, especially on the A27.
These challenges are recognised within the East Sussex draft Local Transport Plan 4 2024-50, which, from an economic growth perspective, emphasises improvements on the East Coastway line between Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings, bus enhancements, especially in the coastal towns, active travel connectivity and targeted highway improvements where they can also deliver bus and active travel measures. Linked with the focus on strengthening the performance of Hastings and Bexhill, the ‘market-driven’ growth of Eastbourne as an emerging tech hub as well as a major service centre, and the regional significance of Brighton, strengthened connectivity along the coast is likely to be especially important.
Successful delivery of transport infrastructure will require a combination of partnership collaboration, national regulatory and policy activity and funding supported by local policies and schemes that combine to achieve the shared ambition and vision.
Future growth will also depend on continuous improvements in digital connectivity. Supply has improved greatly over the past decade, as a result of public investment and the market. But as demand accelerates and new technologies emerge, it will be important for East Sussex to remain competitive – including in rural and ‘harder to reach’ parts of the county.