History & Heritage
The history and heritage of Eastbourne: landmarks, famous people, wartime stories, and the town’s past.
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Combe Hill: Eastbourne’s 5,000-Year-Old Neolithic Enclosure
High on the Downs above Willingdon lies one of Eastbourne’s oldest and most mysterious monuments — a Neolithic causewayed enclosure built more than 5,000 years ago. Discover the story of Combe Hill, its ancient banks and ditches, the finds unearthed here, and why archaeologists still puzzle over what it was for.
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Shinewater: Eastbourne’s Remarkable Bronze Age Settlement
Beneath a quiet park in Langney lies one of the most important Bronze Age discoveries in Britain: a vast waterlogged timber platform and trackway, hidden for 3,000 years and found by accident in 1995. Here’s the remarkable story of Shinewater.
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Wilmington Priory: The Long Man’s Medieval Neighbour
Wilmington Priory near Eastbourne — a medieval Benedictine “alien” priory below the Long Man, with a thousand years of history and a link to William the Conqueror’s own family. Its Norman origins, suppression by Henry V, 360 years passing by marriage from the Sackvilles to the Dukes of Devonshire, the 1,600-year-old churchyard yew, and how…
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The Litlington White Horse: Cut in a Single Night
The Litlington White Horse near Eastbourne — one of only two chalk hill figures left in Sussex, prancing above the Cuckmere Valley. How the current horse was cut secretly in a single moonlit night in 1924, the faded original of 1838, its wartime camouflage, the folklore of lost giants and crosses, and where to get…
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The Bloomsbury Group in Sussex: Woolf, Bell & Charleston
The Bloomsbury Group in Sussex — how Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes and their circle made the Downs near Eastbourne their country home. The painted rooms of Charleston Farmhouse, Virginia Woolf’s writing lodge at Monk’s House, the wartime murals of Berwick Church, and how to visit this legendary corner of literary and…
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The Long Man of Wilmington: The Giant Who Keeps His Secret
The Long Man of Wilmington — the 235-foot chalk giant on Windover Hill, six miles from Eastbourne, and one of Britain’s greatest archaeological riddles. Why nobody knows his age (prehistoric, or a Tudor creation?), who he might represent, why he’s made of breeze blocks not chalk, and how to visit one of the Downs’ most…
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Lost Eastbourne: The Town’s Vanished Buildings
Lost Eastbourne — the buildings the town no longer has. The royal Round House windmill by the pier, the vanished hamlets of Sea Houses and Holywell, the country’s grandest salt-water baths, the exotic Indian Pavilion, the church demolished the year it was listed, and everything the wartime bombs took — plus why so much of…
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How Sea Air Built Eastbourne: The Victorian Health Resort
How health built Eastbourne — the story of the Victorian health resort, from the royal children sent for sea air in 1780 to All Saints, Britain’s first purpose-built seaside convalescent hospital, raised in Gothic splendour by an Anglican sisterhood in 1869. Wartime wounded, King George V’s convalescence, a Prime Minister’s father — and the legacy…
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The Royal Hippodrome: Eastbourne’s Oldest Theatre
The story of the Royal Hippodrome, Eastbourne’s oldest theatre — opened in 1883 to a design by C. J. Phipps, architect of London’s Savoy. Houdini, Chaplin and Marie Lloyd in the music hall years, wartime bomb damage, Bruce Forsyth’s Palladium call, demolition threats, and the community rescue that saw local owners buy the theatre outright…
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The Most Historic Places to Visit in Eastbourne
The most historic places to visit in Eastbourne — from the spring where the town began and its 12th-century church to Napoleonic fortresses, the Victorian pier and seafront, a Prime Minister’s hidden mansion and the castle where 1066 began. A complete guide with links to the full story of every site, plus a suggested historic…