Gibsons Hastings Promenade 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle | Seaside Nostalgia Sustainable Jigsaw Puzzle for Adults Teen | Premium 100% Recycled Board | Great Gift | Gibsons Games

It’s a jigsaw, the pieces fit together and they’re all here. So, job done.But it’s titled “Hastings Promenade”, which is why I bought it. The bits of Hastings prom they show are apparently built up from various images found online and cropped/edited to fit the left-hand side of the picture. There is a beach and sea to the right, but past the Castle, looking eastward, there should be an outcrop of land - no beach. The joins are covered up by a wooden boardwalk, which doesn’t exist. The gallopers and Austin car ride are from a photo of Carters Steam Fair, but they reversed the image to make it fit. The “C” is back to front on the rounding boards of the gallopers, and you can see “John Carter and Sons” written in mirror image on the Austin Car ride. We did have a Ferris wheel in Hastings, but this one (and the drop-tower ride) is from a photograph of Ocean Park on Santa Monica Pier, California. You can see a section of the roller coaster track still in place behind the car ride. The rest of the elements are pasted from other picture sources - gulls, people, stalls. The whole thing was composed, then “apply filter to make it look like a painting”. It’s a fun jigsaw, but the obvious changes in style between the different elements is kind of jarring, and seeing the backwards text where they didn’t bother to cover it up was disappointing to say the least.Ironically, if they had taken a single picture from the same point and just clicked “convert to painting”, this would’ve been a lovely jigsaw.

I have done a fair few jigsaws and recently I have noticed sometimes the same character in different jigsaws. For example on Brighton Front, where a biker was chatting to a young girl, where in another jigsaw they were together in a car. And likewise Norwich Market there was a young woman with long plaited hair and was again seen in Hastings Front. I think this is lovely as it makes these characters almost real.