AGM

29 June, 2009

Manor Barn

A town of two halves.

It should be little surprise that Bexhill was originally a settlement on a hill. the ‘on-Sea’ bit, or New Town, is very recent indeed. The Old Town, for more than a century the only town!

This coastal vantage point, which is reliably supplied with water from wells that never run dry, has probably been inhabited since the late stone age. Bexhill was given a charter in 772 by King Offa of Mercia, and elements of our church can be dated to Saxon times. The town was important to the bishops of Chicheter (original Selsey) as it represented the Eastern end of their see. Something of a power struggle existed for a couple of centuries between Bexhill and Battle once Will the Conquerer built his abbey on the site of the 1066 battle and the Sackville-Wests eventually gained control of the Manor House and
its estates.

In 1798 and again in 1804 the town was expanded dramatically when the King’s Hanoverian Legions were based just west of the town. They remained until the year before Waterloo and the barracks complex has left a permanent mark on the shape of Bexhill. The seventh Earl was responsible for the development of Bexhill-on-Sea, a resort to rival Eastbourne that became a possibility after the arrival of the railway in 1846. For most of it’s existence the Manor House (or Court House), in the grounds of which Little Manor was built, was not the home of the Sackvilles. In 1891, however, the 8th Earl, Viscount Cantelupe and his new bride Muriel Brassey, daughter of Hastings railway millionaire, moved into the refurbished Manor House and brought a new social life to the town.

Although the family had already left the Manor House, the 9th Earl had socialist leanings and sponsored the ‘people’s palace’ that was the De La Warr Pavilion, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff. This first public ‘modernist’ building in Britain, cemented the focus of the town to the seafront, relegating the Old Town, which still had the East-West coastal traffic running straight down High Street, to relative obscurity. The unoccupied Manor House was allowed to decay and was eventually demolished in 1968 to allow road widening. A bypass of the Old Town was built in 1980, removing many of the remains of the barracks but double-yellow lines remained along High Street and the thriving shopping street lost its shops, forge and saddler one by one. These days one needs to search for much of the history of Bexhill, but the old town remains a characterful haven of quiet.