One scene in Magpie takes place in the Pump House, a popular pub in Hastings Old Town. During my late teens and early twenties, I spent many evenings meeting up with friends in the Pump House. It was only when I began my research for this story that I looked at its history in depth. Anyone standing on George Street, taking in the half-timbered frontage, might guess the pub dated back to Tudor times, but they would be wrong. It seems many of the timbers came from nearby properties made derelict by Second World War bombings. However, the name may well have its origins in the far distant past. Some say the pub sits on the site of a freshwater pump that is some four hundred years old, a pump that provided this part of Hastings with quality water, filtered by the local sandstone.

^{Photo credit: Helman Zozmann licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.}