All of the Carlisle Parade seafront is actually a sort-of bridge connecting White Rock to Harold Place. Beneath it is one of the first underground car parks built in Britain, constructed in 1930-31 by the borough engineer Sidney Little (King Concrete) as part of his massive rebuild of most of the Hastings and St Leonards seafront. Until then, what is now a road-on-top-of-a-car-park was open beach.
Carlisle Parade itself was built in the 1850s on what had been part of the America Ground, the 8½ acres of Hastings town centre which in the early 19th century was an open piece of beach, apparently beyond the borough boundary and with no obvious owner, which was gradually occupied by a thousand or more people (many of them squatters) who lived and worked there - until they were all evicted by the government in 1835.
But in the first three decades of the 19th century, the Ground - despite being ‘out-of-town’ - played a key role in the expansion of Hastings during a crucial period in its 1,200 year history. The Ground was a combined industrial and housing estate providing many services to the town’s developers, plus much housing for the many workers that were needed. The Ground’s seeming freedom from local authority control also created something of a radical libertarian atmosphere, and one of the names the Ground acquired was ‘America’, after the newly-independent former British colony.
However, the Ground’s apparent almost-uncontrolled sovereignty prompted central government - the probable legal owner of the Ground - to take control of it in 1828. All the settlers were given seven years notice to quit, and by 1835 all the land between what are now Claremont and Harold Place had become an open space awaiting a new future.
But severe storms in the early 1830s made the whole area liable to flood, so in 1836/7 the Government built a stone sea-defence wall along the high-tide mark. This wall helped the acres behind it become dry solid building ground by the late 1830s, but the government decided not to sell or lease it immediately because at the same time the two separate towns of Hastings and St Leonards were beginning to merge. Development was taking place along the seafront between the two towns, while also in the late 1830s new turnpike roads were constructed that created better transport links, especially with London. So the government decided to wait and see what happened next.
Then in 1846 the first railway service came to the Hastings area. This was the line from London Victoria via Lewes, which initially stopped at a temporary station at Bulverhythe, prompting the construction of lines from Charing Cross and Ashford over the next five years. The three different services met at Hastings Station, turning the Priory Valley into a new town centre.
By the late 1840s the government could see that the old America Ground was becoming a valuable development site in the new heart of Hastings, not least because it was so close to the station, so in 1849 they gave retired wholesale opium dealer Patrick Robertson a 99-year lease on it. He set about creating a high-class shopping and residential area, with the new Robertson Street destined to become a Hastings version of Regent Street.
Building work started on 24 June 1850, when the first stone of the western block of Carlisle Parade was laid. The parade was built immediately behind the 1836/7 sea defence wall, with the wall being the frontage of the pavement. That wall still exists today, the last surviving physical remnant of the America Ground – everything else has been demolished. That 188-year old wall is now inside King Concrete’s 1930/1 underground car park, forming its inland side. Much of it still looks as it did a century or more ago.
Carlisle Parade was laid out in 1850 by Patrick Robertson as a cul-de-sac, terminating at Harold Place, which was several feet lower. Until Mr Little rebuilt the seafront, through traffic going along the coast had to proceed through the town centre, via Castle Street and Robertson Street, past the Memorial clock-tower. Mr Little, an inspired genius, decided to create not only a high-quality coast road (the A259) and underground car park, but also better sea defences that have saved the town centre from the flooding that was happening with increasing frequency.
This was all part of the ‘Front Line improvement Scheme’ drawn up by Mr Little in the late 1920s to reclaim land from the sea in order to build a new seafront. The first section was between Marine Parade and White Rock. This £111,300 section included the pioneering underground car park, 846 feet long by 60 feet wide, backed by sunken gardens in Robertson Terrace. The key thing was the new raised sea wall to protect against the flooding of the town centre by the sea. Work started in late March 1930 and was finished in December 1931, with a ceremonial opening by the Minister of Health.
The full history of the America Ground is in my book The America Ground, Hastings, published in 2021 by The History Press.