Observer Editorial

Seldom has the post-war generation regarded this prospect with such trepidation.

Seldom has the town been so much at the mercy of global issues.

Looking back over the past 10 years, the decade has been marked by efforts at local economic regeneration.

It seems impossible now that at the dawn of 1999 the chairman of the newly-created South East England Development Agency led a high-powered delegation to Bexhill at the start of that well-intentioned drive.

Since then, Lottery funding has pump-primed the refurbishment of the De La Warr Pavilion and the town has gained a state-of-the-art new college.

The Lottery-funded museum extension is due to open next spring, a start has been made on the town's 38m new High School and clearance has begun in preparation for the new business park at the former Sidley goods yard.

One of the great imponderables of 2009 will be the controversial Bexhill-Hastings Link Road - key to unlocking the major thrust of the regeneration initiative including the north Bexhill business park and the Worsham housing development.

Now this scheme has been referred to government by the county council, it is almost certain it will be the subject of a hard-fought public inquiry with the environmental lobby determined to save the Coombe Haven Valley from destruction.

Equally controversial, is Rother's Next Wave seafront scheme - will it boost the town's appeal as the council believes or destroy it as its opponents fear?

When the campaign for town economic regeneration was launched a decade ago its aim was to find a new future for a town which was purpose-built a century before as resort and had been left beached as the British seaside holiday tide receded.

Ten years on, and despite the Lottery cash for Pavilion and Museum, Government funding for the College and High School and the local authority investment where are we?

Like the rest of the Western world, we are mired in the worst recession since the Thirties; at the mercy of oil and gas-producing nations who can, and do, call the economic shots.

If 2008 has seen the closure of well-known and long-established local businesses like Russells Garage, it is a dismal certainty that 2009 will bring more losses.

Rother planning committee has just anguished over whether to allow a 10-bedroomed bed-and-breakfast establishment to convert four guest rooms for the proprietors' use.

Like the owners, they bowed to the inevitable. If the rooms are under-used, what is the point of refusing planning permission on a doomed point of principle?

Bexhill's New Year resolution as a community has to be 'shop local' - the use-it-or-lose-it principle was never more clearly sign-posted.

To wish our readers the customary prosperous new year would, under such circumstances, sound a hollow note.

Rather, let us all hope for a 2009 in which the community works together in harmony to play its part in digging the nation out of recession and set out once more in quest of that economic mirage, regeneration.