People Shape Place: Everyday Culture and the Commons
On Friday 17th April I, along with a small group of people, attended Hosting the Commons, a day exploring Hastings Commons and its pioneering work, led by Jess Steele, who has been developing the project since 2014.
The day began in Alley Gardens, a tucked-away space behind 12 Claremont between the sandstone cliffs. It is the kind of place easily missed unless you are curious enough to explore the many hidden alleyways of Hastings. Jess asked us to pause and take in the space. The rock face rises behind the buildings, some cut directly into it, while archways offer shelter with tables where we sat during lunch. When we stood there, it was warm and sunny and felt quiet, held slightly apart from everything else.
Participation alone is not enough if the conditions of ownership, power and decision-making remain unchanged.
For many years this alleyway had become a neglected and forgotten space — somewhere overlooked, under-cared-for and often perceived as unsafe. But the revitalisation of the space shifts something. When people return to a place, spend time in it and care for it, the space begins to give something back. It can become more welcoming and revitalised, encouraging new interactions between people, nature and the space itself. In turn, the space begins to feel safer through people’s presence, care and everyday use. This is not only about financial value, but social value: the reciprocal relationship between people and place. The soft sandstone of this area bears marks shaped by generations of activity, continually remade through how a place is inhabited, used and cared for. The alleyway seemed to reflect a wider idea around the commons: that places are continually made and remade through use.
This felt significant because it reflected something wider in what Hastings Commons is attempting to do with buildings across the town. The work is not only about saving or restoring neglected spaces, but about asking what conditions allow places to become useful, meaningful and shared again. That feels closely connected to everyday culture. Culture does not appear because an organisation programmes it into a building. It emerges when people have the permission, confidence and connection to use places, shape them, remember them and make them part of their lives. In that sense, Hastings Commons offers a way of thinking about the relationship between space and culture. It points towards the conditions everyday culture may need: places that are not only accessible, but held in ways that allow people to gather, act, contribute and belong.
During the day we moved between several Hastings Commons sites, each operating slightly differently but connected through shared ideas around stewardship, participation and long-term community use. We began at 12 Claremont, where the ground floor is home to Project Art Works — an organisation working with neurodivergent artists and makers — while the upper floor houses Amici Art, a community-focused arts organisation. The layering of uses within the building felt significant: creative practice, care, participation and social infrastructure existing alongside one another rather than separated into distinct categories.
When we left the Observer Building and stepped onto Cambridge Road, Jess pointed down Bassey Steps towards the area once known as the America Ground and shared a well-known Hastings story in which changes to the shoreline created land that sat outside clear systems of ownership. From the early nineteenth century, people built homes, workshops and livelihoods there, forming a self-organised community that existed for several decades. When bailiffs were sent in to apprehend suspected felons, the occupiers rioted and chased them back over Priory Bridge; in defiance, they raised the American flag as a symbol of independence. The land was eventually claimed by the Crown, eviction notices were served in 1834, and many residents were displaced. The America Ground was not valuable because someone legally owned it. It became meaningful because people lived there, worked there and collectively shaped it through everyday use. The conflict emerged when formal ownership and speculative value reasserted themselves over the lives already embedded within the space. This history feels closely connected to the idea of the commons and to Community Land Trusts more broadly: not ownership as extraction or investment, but stewardship rooted in long-term use, participation and collective benefit. It raises a quieter question underneath everything else: what does it actually mean for land or space to be shared — and who gets to decide that?
The idea of the commons is historic, rooted in collective relationships to land, survival and shared responsibility. Land Trusts such as Hastings Commons exist within very different contemporary systems and therefore have to work within contradiction. Discussions throughout the day touched repeatedly on ownership, risk, debt and power — questions about who ultimately holds control, and how systems designed around extraction might instead be repurposed towards collective benefit.
Writing about Amanda Huron’s book Carving Out the Commons, Alexis Zanghi argues that commoning is not a utopian escape from capitalism, but “a pragmatic practice in the face of crisis.” Commons do not sit outside systems of property, finance and inequality — they exist in tension with them. They are shaped by contradictions: dependent on labour that is often invisible or undervalued, vulnerable to exclusion, and always at risk of being reabsorbed back into market structures. Carving Out the Commons describes the collective governance of the commons as a “third way” between the market and the state. In the context of housing insecurity, privatisation and shrinking civic infrastructure, Hastings Commons raises questions about whether forms of collective stewardship such as this might also be necessary for sustaining everyday cultural life — creating conditions where people are not simply consumers of place, but participants in shaping and caring for it.
Buildings Are Not Enough
Hastings Commons is clearly doing something significant. Across the town, buildings that had fallen into disuse have been brought back into circulation — restored carefully and held with intentions around affordability, access and long-term community benefit. There is a visible attempt to work differently: removing buildings from speculative markets and creating spaces that can support shared use.
The Observer Building, where Hastings Commons offices now sit alongside workspaces, public areas and the rooftop Observatory Bar, reveals both the ambition and complexity of the project — not simply preserving buildings, but attempting to create interconnected social and civic infrastructure across the town. Walking through these buildings, you can see the care. The attention to detail. The retention of older structures rather than their erasure. But the alleyway lingered as a kind of counterpoint throughout the day. Because buildings alone are not enough.
The commons is not produced through ownership structures alone. It emerges through relationships, participation, memory and repeated acts of use. Spaces do not become meaningful simply because they are renovated. They become meaningful through use — through the ways people inhabit them, shape them, return to them, create memories within them and begin to recognise themselves inside them.
One moment during the day particularly highlighted how the physical qualities of a space shape behaviour. When everyone entered an unfinished room, people almost instinctively lowered their voices. Conversation became quieter without anyone consciously deciding to do so. It was a small moment, but it revealed how much atmosphere, behaviour and belonging are shaped by space. If a room can make us lower our voices without thinking, then spaces can also quietly signal who belongs, who feels comfortable, and who feels able to take part.
And that raises further questions: if spaces are intended to be shared, how do people recognise that they are for them? Jess spoke openly about some of the challenges, including communication and visibility. And this matters, because spaces can remain open in principle whilst still feeling inaccessible in practice. There can still be an assumption that people will step forward if they want to be involved — as members, commoners, organisers or users of the space. But stepping forward can be difficult. It often depends on confidence, time, existing relationships, and already having some sense that the space is for you. In that sense, participation can still move through existing networks, even within projects deeply committed to doing things differently.
However, glimpses of something more responsive appeared later in the day during our visit to Eagle House, home to a Camarados Public Living Room — a free shared space shaped through what people themselves want or need from it. Whilst sitting together over cake, Jess described how a group of older residents had mentioned wanting somewhere to dance, and how something had since been organised in response. It is a small example, but an important one. It shows how spaces can evolve through use rather than remaining fixed. But it also leaves further questions about how often these conversations happen, how visible those routes in are, and who gets to shape what happens next.
There was also recognition throughout the day that this kind of work is inherently difficult. Uncertainty, disagreement and friction are not problems to eliminate, but realities to work within. Someone described it as “learning to surf” — not fixing outcomes in advance, but adapting as conditions shift. Perhaps this is why commons matter culturally as much as economically or politically. Not because they offer perfect alternatives, but because they create conditions where people can participate in shaping the places they inhabit through everyday acts of care, participation, memory and exchange.
Organisations such as Fun Palaces begin from the belief that culture already exists within people’s everyday lives. Hastings Commons similarly suggests that places only become meaningful through participation — through people gathering, making, sharing, responding and taking responsibility together.
In that sense, everyday culture may itself depend on commons-like conditions to exist. Not simply access. Not simply participation. But through shared responsibility, stewardship and the redistribution of cultural agency. Commons are not finished structures but ongoing practices of collective life.