Bexhill-on-Sea is a seaside town and civil parish in Rother district, on the Sussex coast between Hastings and Eastbourne, with a population of 43,754 in 2021. It is not a village and never tries to look like one. There was an old settlement on the hill here, chartered by King Offa in 772, but the town below it was deliberately made: a resort laid out from the 1880s by the Earls De La Warr on inherited land, and finished half a century later by the one building people still travel for.
That building is the De La Warr Pavilion, a white Modernist hall of 1935 on the seafront. Around it are a shingle beach that turns partly to sand at low water and is a known fossil ground, a Victorian park, a small museum, and a ruined medieval manor house in the old town.
The straight-line distance from Hastings is 8.0 km, and the two are barely separated: the land between them, Glyne Gap, is low-lying ground whose most prominent feature is a retail park..
The Pavilion came out of a competition announced in the Architects’ Journal in February 1934, which drew over 230 entrants. Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff won; the engineer Felix Samuely gave it a welded steel frame, a novelty then. The Duke and Duchess of York opened it on 12 December 1935. The war put the military into it — Spike Milligan served here — and bombing next door damaged its foundations. Grade I listing came in 1986, and after restoration it reopened in 2005 as a contemporary arts centre with one of the largest galleries on the south coast.
It carries 4.4 from 4,384 Google reviews, which split between the building and the running of it. A visitor in July 2026 wrote, “I love the De La Warr Pavilion. It’s a masterpiece of a building. The Art exhibitions are always interesting, and often challenging.” A visitor in August 2026, at a concert, was less taken with the practicalities: “The bar is not great: of course always quite a queue, 2 people working at the only bar in the whole venue.”
Bexhill Beach, 4.6 from 831 Google reviews, is shingle. A visitor in August 2026 described it as “Nice beach, both shale and pebble. Also sand if you time it right with the tide out”.
Fossils are commonly found at Bexhill, and some finds have been serious: the world’s oldest known spider web, in amber and 140 million years old, turned up in the town in 2009, and in June 2011 a single vertebra from what was reported as the world’s smallest dinosaur was found at Ashdown Brickworks nearby. The wreck of the Amsterdam, an eighteenth-century Dutch East India Company ship aground between Bexhill and St Leonards, is visible at low tide.
What draws people onto the sand are dinosaur footprints, and they are not easy to find. A visitor in June 2026 wrote, “Came here to find dinosaur footprints but we didn’t mange to find them this time”, adding that they had not come prepared and could have used waterproof boots. Treat it as a search rather than an exhibit, and go when the water is out.
The name comes from the Old English byxelēah, ‘boxtree wood or clearing’; the first record of the place, as Bexelei, is Offa’s charter of 772. The bishops of Chichester held the manor from 1148, and the ruins in Manor Gardens are their later manor house, built about 1250.
Bexhill Museum holds 4.7 from 542 Google reviews, the best of the town’s attractions, and reviewers keep making the same point about its size. A visitor in July 2026 wrote, “Don’t be fooled by the small exterior. Such a mix of different items from dinosaurs to cars and train sets in-between.” One of its founders was Kate Marsden, a nurse who lived in the town in the 1910s.
Egerton Park, 4.5 from 1,949 Google reviews, is the town’s green space, with a pond and a play area, and one warning is worth carrying over: a visitor in July 2026 wrote, “Beware the larger play area is not enclosed with open water nearby.”
Reginald Sackville, 7th Earl De La Warr, decided to convert the village into a resort and named it Bexhill-on-Sea. He hired the builder John Webb to construct the first sea wall and lay out De La Warr Parade, and the Sackville Hotel followed in 1890. His son, the 8th Earl, added the Kursaal on the seafront and a bicycle track at the parade’s eastern end, and drew independent schools to the town on its healthy reputation.
Bexhill became an incorporated borough in 1902 — the first Royal Charter granted by Edward VII, and the first delivered by motorcar. To mark it, the 8th Earl staged Britain’s first motor races along De La Warr Parade in May 1902, and the town signs still read “Birthplace of British Motor Racing” beneath the name. Older layers survive in the record rather than on the ground: soldiers of the King’s German Legion were barracked here from 1804 to 1814 against a French invasion, while local people traded with the enemy regardless, the Little Common Gang being the best-known smugglers. The schools declined after the war, many former pupils retired here, and the retired population is large.
The route that belongs to this pair of towns is the Hastings and Bexhill Waterfront: Sustrans describes it as a 5 km traffic-free path beside the railway line, starting just north of Hastings Pier and rated suitable for beginners and families. The promenades between the two towns are flat. The traffic-free section ends as you come into Bexhill, where you join De La Warr Parade past the Pavilion to Egerton Park.
By train, Bexhill is on the coastal line between Ashford and Brighton; the hourly London Victoria to Hastings service calls here on its way through. The town has three stations — Bexhill, Collington and Cooden Beach.
By bus, thirteen routes serve Bexhill, including services to Hastings, Battle and Eastbourne. A PlusBus add-on bought with a rail ticket covers unlimited local buses as far as Bexhill. Hastings has no bus station; services stop outside the railway station and at Priory Meadow.
By road, Bexhill is on the A259, the coast road between Folkestone and Brighton.
The village and what is around it, at walking scale.
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Background on Bexhill-on-Sea draws on its Wikipedia article, text there being available under CC BY-SA 4.0.