The Great Storm of 1987: When Hurricane Winds Hit Eastbourne

The storm no one saw coming

Out over the Bay of Biscay, a deep area of low pressure was rapidly intensifying into something extraordinary. On the evening of 15 October, BBC weatherman Michael Fish delivered what would become the most famous forecast in British history, reassuring a viewer that no hurricane was on the way. Hours later, hurricane-force winds slammed into southern England.

It was the worst storm to strike the region since the great gale of 1703, nearly three centuries earlier. Because it arrived in the small hours — the fiercest winds raging between roughly midnight and dawn — most people slept through the start of it, waking to find their world transformed. Had the storm hit during the day, the death toll, which reached at least 18 in England and 22 across England and France, would almost certainly have been far higher.

The night Eastbourne’s lighthouse maxed out

As the storm swept in off the Channel, the Sussex coast took the first and heaviest blows — and one Eastbourne landmark recorded the storm’s ferocity better than almost anywhere in Britain. Out at sea, the Royal Sovereign lighthouse off Eastbourne logged the highest sustained wind speed measured anywhere in the United Kingdom that night: an average of 86 miles per hour.

More dramatically still, the lighthouse’s own instruments were driven to their absolute limit. Its anemometer pinned at 110 miles per hour — the very maximum it was built to record — meaning the true gusts screaming past the tower may well have been stronger than the equipment could measure. Across the wider region, the Met Office recorded gusts of 100mph sustained for three or four consecutive hours, with the strongest single UK gust — 115mph — logged at Shoreham further along the coast.

Dawn over a broken town

When Eastbourne woke on the morning of 16 October, it faced a scene of devastation. Trees lay uprooted across roads and gardens, church spires had been toppled, roofs stripped of tiles and buildings damaged by falling masonry. Roads were blocked, and thousands of homes across the region were left without power — some for days. The local Herald photographer Terry Connolly spent the aftermath documenting the wreckage, and his images remain a vivid record of how badly the town was hit.

Eastbourne’s experience was part of a national catastrophe. Across southern England some 15 million trees were brought down in a single night — many falling onto roads, railways and power lines and bringing the region to a standstill. It was a scale of destruction that even the oldest residents could not remember, and one that no living person had ever witnessed.

The Downs laid flat

The storm’s most lasting mark was written across the landscape. The wooded hills and combes of the South Downs behind Eastbourne — and along the Sussex Heritage Coast that runs from the town to the white cliffs — were devastated. In places, entire tracts of woodland were pressed flat as if they were fields of flattened corn, the trees toppling slowly as their roots gave way.

Iconic Downs landmarks were lost or maimed. The famous hilltop beech clump of Chanctonbury Ring, a beloved silhouette on the western Downs, lost most of its trees, and beech woods across the region were shattered. For anyone who walked the woods and forests around Eastbourne, the landscape that emerged from that night was, in places, unrecognisable.

A green recovery

Yet the story did not end in ruin. In the years that followed, foresters and ecologists came to see an unexpected silver lining. The gaps torn in the tree canopy let sunlight flood down to the woodland floor for the first time in generations, and species that had long been shaded out — bluebells among them — burst back into life. Much of the fallen timber was cleared, but nature quietly set about healing itself.

Nearly four decades on, the effects of that night can still be traced in the woods of the South Downs — in oddly open glades, in the shapes of the trees that survived, and in the memories of everyone who lived through it. For a town that proudly calls itself the sunniest in Britain, the Great Storm of 1987 remains the wildest night Eastbourne has ever known.

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