Eastbourne’s Fishing Community: The Willicks and Their Heritage

Sea Houses: the village by the shore

In the 18th century, the town we know today did not exist. In its place stood four small settlements that made their living from sheep farming and the sea: East Bourne (today’s Old Town, around the bourne stream that gave the town its name), South Bourne near the present town hall, Meads beneath the Downs — and a fishing settlement known simply as Sea Houses, huddled on the shore to the east of where the pier now stands.

Sea Houses was the beating heart of Eastbourne’s fishing life: a cluster of cottages and net-drying grounds where the boats were drawn up on the shingle. As the Victorian resort rose around it, the little hamlet was gradually swept away, and today nothing of it remains — one of the town’s most complete disappearances, told in our guide to Lost Eastbourne. But the community it housed proved far more durable than its buildings.

The Willicks and their Bourners

Eastbourne’s fishermen were known by a name all of their own: the Willicks, or Willickers. It was said in the 19th century that they were of strong and resolute stock, their bloodlines a mixture of Spanish, Norman French and Saxon — a close-knit seafaring people whose skills had been handed down through generations of hardship, bravery and tragedy on the water.

They put to sea in sturdy sailing luggers known as Bourners, chasing the great shoals of herring, sprat and mackerel as they migrated with the seasons. Alongside the fleets of Hastings and Brighton, the Eastbourne men would follow the mackerel far down the English Channel — to Devon, Cornwall, and sometimes the waters off southern Ireland — while other voyages took them north as far as Scarborough. A fishing trip could mean being away from home for months at a stretch.

“Never east of the pier”

That saying captured a real divide. As the resort took shape, the pier became both a physical and a social boundary. To the west lay the elegant villas and terraces built for fashionable visitors, all sea views and refined promenading. To the east lived the fishermen, shopkeepers, craftsmen and domestic staff whose labour kept the whole resort running.

It was a world of hard, dangerous work, played out on the same beaches where holidaymakers took their gentle dips. The fishing community’s fortunes were tightly bound to the shifting shingle of the eastern shore — the wild expanse of the Crumbles — and to the constant danger of the sea, a danger that also gave rise to the town’s proud lifeboat tradition.

The fleet today

What makes Eastbourne’s fishing story so unusual is that it never ended. While many old fishing communities have vanished entirely, Eastbourne still has a genuine working fleet. As of 2019, around 38 mostly small, family-owned boats — most of them under ten metres long — were operating out of the town, landing well over £3 million worth of seafood in a single year.

The catch has changed with the times. Where once it was all herring and mackerel, today the mainstay is the humble whelk, which in recent years has made up close to three-quarters of the fleet’s total landings by weight, much of it destined for export. It is a modern, tightly regulated business — but one still run by families whose roots on this shore run back generations, and whose boats now work from the marina at Sovereign Harbour.

The long fight for a fishing quay

Survival has not been easy. When the marina at Sovereign Harbour was built in the early 1990s, the fishermen were promised a proper fishing quay of their own in return for their support of the scheme — a promise that went unhonoured for decades. Squeezed like so many small British fleets, Eastbourne’s fishers eventually decided to fight for their future themselves.

In the 2010s they formed a Community Interest Company, built up a fighting fund, and — working with the New Economics Foundation — secured major grant funding to create a dedicated Fishermen’s Quay at Sovereign Harbour, with cold storage, a processing unit and a place to sell their catch direct to the public. Construction of the long-awaited quay finally began around 2020, even as the pandemic battered the seafood trade. After a thirty-year wait, Eastbourne’s fishing community was, at last, securing a permanent home.

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