STEM Workshops in Hastings & Bexhill

Hastings hosted a defining experiment in modern technology. John Logie Baird moved to the town in 1923 and, in a workshop above a shop in Queen's Arcade, built his first television apparatus from a hatbox, darning needles and bicycle lamp lenses. By February 1924 he had transmitted moving silhouette images there, two years before his celebrated London demonstration, and a plaque marks the spot. Along the coast, Bexhill staged Britain's first motor races on De La Warr Parade in May 1902, and its 1935 De La Warr Pavilion was among the first buildings in Britain to use a welded steel frame, engineered by Felix Samuely.

John Logie Baird is the headline name, but Hastings has medical pioneers too. Sophia Jex-Blake, born in the town in 1840, led the Edinburgh Seven, the first women to matriculate at a British university, and later founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1886. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman on the UK Medical Register, made her final home at Rock House off Exmouth Place, living in Hastings from 1879 until her death in 1910. Two pioneers who opened medicine to women, and the man who gave the world television, all have their stories rooted in one small stretch of Sussex coast.

Today's Hastings is more of an engineering town than many visitors realise. General Dynamics UK has built avionics here since 1974, and its Mission Systems teams manufacture and test electronics for aircraft including the Eurofighter Typhoon and Wildcat helicopter. In St Leonards, Photek employs more than 60 people making image intensifiers and photon detectors for space science, with its technology flying on India's AstroSat observatory, launched in 2015, and ESA's SMILE mission, launched in May 2026. In the town centre, Hastings Commons has restored the 1924 Observer Building into coworking and office space as part of its wider regeneration of the town, and also runs the OBX creative technology hub.

Local routes into STEM are stronger than the area's reputation sometimes suggests. East Sussex College's Hastings campuses offer A Levels, vocational courses and T Levels. Bexhill College, rated Outstanding by Ofsted, offers engineering courses with hands-on workshop facilities. Employers recruit locally too: General Dynamics runs apprenticeship schemes at its Hastings site for school leavers, and Photek offers specialist engineering careers in St Leonards. Hastings was also a DfE Opportunity Area from 2017 to 2022, bringing targeted investment into literacy, maths and broadening young people's horizons.