This is not so much a guide as a pilgrimage. My family wondered why I dragged them screaming and protesting twenty miles out of our way to visit Hastings Museum.
The town is more famous for Harold's last stand, William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The latter took place a few miles down the coast at, appropriately enough, Battle.
But I wanted to take a look at a hundred year old church panel that was restored through the donations of many small amounts by hundreds of people who had all been touched in the same way by the artist whose work was almost lost to future generations.
Ask any socialist that you know, what books influenced them and amongst their list will be The Ragged Trousered Philantropists by Robert Tressel.
It is set in Mugsborough, a thinly veiled reference to Hastings which was the author's home town and is about a group of painters and their struggles to maintain their families in turn of the century England. It is a book about the class struggle but this is not a book review.
As in the book, Tressel (real name Robert Noonan) although an artisan and trained signwriter was only given one worthwhile piece of work in his life; a commission to paint a mural 40' by 20' to cover the whole chancel of St Andrews Church in Hastings.
He completed it in 1905 and died of tuberculosis five years later, just long enough to see his book completed.
St Andrews was demolished in 1970 and the mural whitewashed to prevent vandalism. Only one panel was saved and that was rescued by Mrs Irene Wright, a housewife from London who discovered it amongst other fragments in a cardboard box. She had read Tressel's book as a young girl and it made her realise why she was a socialist.
On being told that it would cost over £1500 to restore the panel she organised an appeal fund to which various Labour Parties and Unions contributed; but the main donations came in small amounts of £1 and £5 from ordinary people like herself whose lives had been touched by one novel. At the end of the appeal she had raised £2208 and agreed with Hastings Museum that it should have a permanent place there as an exhibit and as a tribute to one of the town's famous citizens.
Which is where I made my way. I ignored all the other exhibits, including one to John Logie Baird, founder of television and another famous resident of Hastings. It was worth the visit.
The panel is only 5' square and is painted in a Moorish style. It depicts the Bible open at Psalm 119. The words are written in illuminated gold-leaf: 'Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path'. The Bible rests upon Tudor roses.
It is a fitting tribute to a local artist; a man that has influenced more people than all the world's politicians put together.