Expert guide to Hastings

This canny coastal town and its seaside sibling St Leonards have battled to hold onto their character in the face of invasions by Normans and Londoners alike

The thirty-something owner of the Hastings Sweet Shop puffs a cloud of fragrant smoke into the air above the sherbet lemons and liquorice bootlaces, removes his pipe from his mouth and, before I can speak, says crisply: 'Yes, it's legal.' It is, too. It's also very Hastings. Or very St Leonards. Or very both, for that matter, because the two towns on the south-east coast share more than just a few miles of seafront. They have an attitude: a little arsey, a little crusty, self-reliant, instinctively anti-authoritarian.

Both were bombed in the war, saw their holidaymakers defect to Spain in the 1970s and later endured a double whammy of needy incomers - London overflow from one direction and cross-Channel migrants from the other - and a slumping local economy.

So they are more than able, now the good times are back, to absorb the waves of new arrivals. Entrepreneurs, city escapees, artists and musicians come for studio space, beach life, a chilled lifestyle and somewhere to bring up their kids.

For visitors, it's a perfect storm. Here are the folky pubs and The Stade, the ancient landing place where fishing boats surf onto shore like seals, coming to rest on twin bilges instead of flippers. Here are the plastic buckets and spades, the candyfloss, the World Championship Crazy Golf course, the cliff lifts and tiny steam train.

But here too are set designers, metal sculptors and muralists, the DFLs (Down From London) with stellar careers past or current, who have opened home ware emporium , clothes shops and art spaces. Here is the Jerwood Gallery, settling down after a tricky start, with its low-key architecture and 20th-century British art.

Here is a conference centre in a converted Regency church jammed into the cliffs, and Hastings Pier, burned down in 2010 but now owned by 3,080 community shareholders and soon to rise again. And here is an agony of B&Bs, so charming and quirky that it is quite awful having to choose between them, and a hectic schedule of festivals from the ancient to the bonkers.

There is still real poverty here, but that seems to make everyone fight that bit harder. The community spirit is alive and kicking, but never entirely conventional.