Black Mirror

Imagine a world where blocking someone doesn’t just remove them from your digital life - it makes them cease to exist in real life. Picture this: someone you no longer wish to see or hear, completely invisible, not just offline but out of your reality. This eerie concept mirrors something strange in the history of Hastings.

For over 200 years, The Royal Swan Hotel was the place to be in Hastings. The Duke of Wellington lived across the street. Yet – bafflingly - there’s only one known painting of the hotel from this golden age. And it’s terrible, likely copied from a photo and painted after the hotel was demolished.

Here’s where it gets weirder: Hastings was a haven for artists and photographers so the absence of paintings of the town’s grandest building is puzzling. J.M.W. Turner visited. The Pre-Raphaelites lived nearby. Yet, not a single one of them ever captured The Swan. Not in a sketch, not in a photo. Nothing.

Francis Frith, a famous Victorian photographer, spent an entire month at The Swan in 1850. He took dozens of photos of the town, but not a single shot of the hotel where he was staying. William Henry Brooke, a local painter, created over a hundred watercolours of Hastings buildings - but completely ignored The Swan.

In the 19th century, celebrating coaching inns was in vogue - With the rise of railways, these inns were quickly going out of business. They appeared on everything - paintings, mugs, jigsaw puzzles and candleholders. Every major inn was painted, photographed or modelled many times, except The Swan.

It doesn’t seem possible. It’s like finding paintings of every British Prime Minister - except Winston Churchill. What happened to it? Could someone have collected every bit of memorabilia and hidden it away? Is there a treasure trove of paintings stashed somewhere in a private collection, never to be seen?

I’ve spent two years hunting for clues - digging through archives, scouring collections - but until yesterday, I found nothing new other than some lost plans of the building. That was until I stumbled upon two worn photographs on an auction site. They show a coaching inn called The Swan. But is it the same one that stood in Hastings? It certainly looks right.

Is this The Royal Swan Hotel?

In the first photo, the courtyard slopes just as it would have in Hastings, and there’s a coach turning right, exactly where the coach house of the Hastings Swan used to be. The second photograph would be the first to show the inside of the building (complete with a model swan on the dining table). But the mystery isn’t solved yet. There’s a lot more research to do - more questions to answer.

If you’re intrigued by this story and want to see where it goes, I’d love your support in helping fund more research. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to keep up with the latest discoveries. The more eyes on this, the closer we’ll get to uncovering the truth behind The Swan Hotel.