The Wish Tower and Redoubt Fortress: Eastbourne’s Napoleonic Forts

The Napoleonic threat

In the early 1800s, Britain feared invasion. Across the Channel, Napoleon had massed a huge army and invasion fleet on the French coast, and the low, gently shelving beaches of the south-east — the stretch between Beachy Head and Hastings, and the flats of Pevensey Bay — were exactly the kind of coastline where an army might land. In October 1804 a conference was held at Rochester, attended by the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, to decide how to defend it. The answer was a bold one: a chain of mutually supporting artillery towers strung along the most vulnerable stretch of coast, backed by a handful of much larger forts. Eastbourne, then just a scatter of small settlements, was to get both.

What is a Martello tower?

Martello towers are squat, round artillery forts, built of brick and designed to a standard pattern. The name comes from a tower at Mortella Point in Corsica, which had given the Royal Navy such trouble in 1794 that the British copied its design — and misspelt “Mortella” as “Martello” in the process. Around 103 were built around Britain, including 74 along the Kent and Sussex coast between Folkestone and Seaford from 1805 to 1808.

Each tower carried a single heavy cannon on its flat roof, mounted so it could swivel a full 360 degrees. The walls were immensely thick — up to four metres — and gently sloped, or “battered”, to help deflect enemy cannon shot, with the garrison living on the first floor and stores kept below. It was a clever, formidable system. It was also never tested: the invasion never came, and within a few decades advances in heavy artillery had made the towers obsolete.

Did you know? Not one of Britain’s Martello towers ever fired a shot at a French invader — the fleet Napoleon assembled never sailed. They did, however, prove handy against smugglers.

The Wish Tower (Martello Tower No. 73)

The Wish Tower stands proudly on a grassy rise on the western seafront, between King Edward’s Parade and the promenade, just to the west of Eastbourne Pier. Built in 1805–6, it was the most westerly of the original south-coast Martello towers and carries the number 73. Slightly elliptical, brick-built and rising about ten metres over three levels, it sits within a dry moat, part of its original defensive earthwork — the glacis — still surrounding it.

It was the last of a group of six low-lying towers built to guard the coast between Langney Point and Eastbourne; remarkably, it’s the only one of that group still standing. Its curious name is generally thought to come from an old local word for the marshy ground, or “wash”, that once lay nearby. Long a favourite subject for artists — including the Victorian painter James Sant — the Wish Tower is, along with the Redoubt about a mile to the east, almost certainly the oldest surviving structure on Eastbourne’s seafront.

The Redoubt Fortress

If the Wish Tower is a single strong point, the Redoubt Fortress is a fortress proper. Standing on Royal Parade at the eastern end of the seafront, north-east of the pier, it is one of just three great circular “redoubts” built to anchor the Martello chain — the others being at Dymchurch and Harwich. These forts served as barracks and supply depots for the smaller towers, as well as being powerful strongholds in their own right.

Work began in 1805, and the scale was extraordinary: some five million bricks were shipped around the coast by barge from London to build it. The result is a circular fort around 68 metres across, built almost entirely of brick with granite dressings and set on two levels. The lower tier is a ring of 24 vaulted, bomb-proof chambers — casemates — opening onto a central circular parade ground, which housed the garrison along with stores, a cookhouse and the powder magazine. Above them ran an open gun platform with emplacements for ten heavy cannon, the whole fort ringed by a dry moat and a sloping earth bank.

Designed to hold up to 350 men, it probably never accommodated more than around 200. And in the long peace that followed, its garrison dwindled dramatically — by the 1830s it amounted to just seven gunners and a gatekeeper, with their families. In practice, the Redoubt spent far more of its life as a barracks and depot than as a fighting fort.

Did you know? The five million London bricks used to build the Redoubt were brought all the way to Eastbourne by sea, long before the railway reached the town.

What happened next

The great invasion never came. Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805 secured the seas, and Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 ended the threat for good. The towers and redoubts were left without an enemy to fight, and by 1859 a government commission concluded they were no longer an important part of Britain’s defences. Some found new life as coastguard stations in the war against smuggling, and a number were pressed back into service during the two World Wars as observation posts and gun platforms.

The Redoubt, in time, became home to a military museum, housing the collections of the Royal Sussex Regiment, the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and the Sussex Combined Services collection — including four Victoria Crosses and even a captured Afrika Korps staff car. It’s a reminder that, though built for one war that never reached these shores, the fort went on to tell the story of many others.

Visiting today

Both landmarks are easy to take in on a stroll along the seafront, though it’s worth knowing before you go that neither is currently open to look around inside. The Redoubt Fortress is closed to the public at present on structural-safety grounds, so its museum collections aren’t on display for now — but you can still walk around its imposing brick exterior at the eastern end of the front. The Wish Tower, likewise, isn’t open to visitors internally, yet it sits in the pleasant Wish Tower Gardens on the western seafront, where you can admire it up close, enjoy sweeping views over the Channel and stop at the café nearby.

Taken together, the two make a natural pair of stops on a seafront walk — the Wish Tower to the west of the pier, the Redoubt to the east — bookending the promenade with more than 200 years of history. As with any historic site, it’s worth checking locally for the latest on access, as situations can change.

Good to know: you can’t currently go inside either fort, but both are wonderful to see from the outside — and they’re free to walk up to as part of a wander along the seafront.

Wish Tower and Redoubt Fortress: FAQs