“Someone in the corridor drops what sounds like a bowling ball at 11:14 PM, and nobody reacts, which tells you everything about the floorboards.”

The train from London Bridge takes an hour and forty minutes, and somewhere around Tunbridge Wells the commuter energy drains out of the carriage and something looser replaces it. By Battle, you're the only one not asleep. Hastings Priory Street station spills you onto a road that climbs gently toward the seafront, past charity shops with genuinely interesting window displays and a kebab place called Bodrum that seems to be doing serious business for a Tuesday. The White Rock Hotel sits right on the seafront road, across from the promenade, in a white Victorian terrace that looks like it was once very grand and now mostly remembers being very grand. You can smell the sea before you see it. A seagull the size of a terrier watches you drag your bag up the steps.

Hastings is a town that resists easy categorisation. It's not quite Brighton — too rough around the edges, too uninterested in impressing you. It's not quite Margate — there's no Turner Contemporary anchoring a regeneration narrative. It's just Hastings: fishing boats on the Stade, the steepest funicular railway in Britain grinding up the East Hill, and an Old Town where the pubs have flagstone floors and nobody's installed a cocktail menu yet. The Stag Inn on All Saints Street pours a decent pint of Harvey's and doesn't care if your shoes are sandy.

A room that does its job, barely

Check-in is quick and friendly, which counts for something. The lobby has a slightly tired elegance — patterned carpet, dark wood, the kind of decor that peaked in 1997 and has been coasting since. The room itself is clean and basic. A double bed, white linen, a wardrobe that sticks slightly when you open it. The bathroom works. The shower has decent pressure. There's a kettle with two sachets of instant coffee and a biscuit you'll eat out of boredom at 10 PM. It is, in the most honest possible assessment, a room. It does what a room does.

What it doesn't do is keep secrets. The corridor outside carries sound like a cathedral nave. Footsteps, conversations, someone's phone alarm at seven in the morning — the floorboards transmit everything. You learn the schedule of the couple next door. They argue gently about breakfast timing. He wants to go at eight. She wants to sleep in. She wins. The walls aren't much better. If you're a light sleeper, bring earplugs. If you're a heavy sleeper, you'll be fine. If you're somewhere in between, you'll lie there composing a mental letter to the hotel's maintenance team about the concept of soundproofing.

No sea view unless you pay more, which is fair — the building faces the water but not every room can. Mine looked onto a side street, which was actually quieter than the seafront would have been, so perhaps the trade-off works in your favour. I could see a laundrette and a cat sitting on a windowsill across the road. The cat seemed unbothered by everything. I envied the cat.

“Hastings doesn't perform for visitors. It just carries on being Hastings, and you're welcome to watch.”

But here's the thing: breakfast saves it. Not in a polite, continental-spread way. In a proper, hot, full English way. Eggs done right, good sausages, toast that arrives warm, and a dining room with tall windows looking out at the sea. The coffee is real — not pod, not instant, actual brewed coffee — and they refill it without you asking. I sat there for forty-five minutes reading a copy of the Hastings Observer someone had left behind and learned that the town's miniature railway is under threat from council funding cuts. The scrambled eggs were worth the price of admission alone.

The hotel's location is its strongest card. Turn left out the front door and you're on the promenade in thirty seconds. Walk east for fifteen minutes and you hit the Old Town and the Stade, where the net shops — tall black wooden shuts used for drying fishing nets since the 1600s — still stand in a row like something from a Tim Burton sketch. The Jerwood Gallery is five minutes beyond that, and Rock-a-Nore Road has a fish and chip shop called Maggie's that does haddock so fresh it practically apologises for being dead.

Walking out into the salt air

Leaving in the morning, the seafront looks different than it did arriving. The light is flatter, greyer, more honest. A man in hi-vis is pressure-washing the pavement outside the pier. Two women in wetsuits walk toward the water carrying bodyboards, laughing about something. The town doesn't care that you're leaving. It was here before you arrived and it'll be here after, doing its thing — slightly worn, slightly wonderful, stubbornly itself. The 1066 bus to Eastbourne stops at the corner if you want to keep going down the coast. It runs every twenty minutes.

A standard double at the White Rock runs around 161 US$ per night, breakfast included. For that, you get a clean bed, thin walls, a memorable breakfast, and the entire English Channel outside the front door. It's not a place you'd cross the country for. But if Hastings is the plan — and Hastings should be the plan at least once — it's a reasonable place to sleep between the fish and chips and the funicular.