For centuries, the Sussex coast has been a bustling thoroughfare. Fishing boats served the people, trading ships connected ports like Rye, Winchelsea, Hastings and Newhaven to France and the wider world. Not to mention the centuries of attacks or threats of attack by Romans, the Vikings, the French, the French again, the Spanish and the Germans.
Before lighthouses, sailors navigated by way of familiar landmarks by day. At night, a simple light on the shore was sometimes enough to guide the sailors safely into shore. But as maritime traffic increased, so too did the need for something more reliable. By the late 17th century, repeated shipwrecks around the treacherous waters of Beachy Head had prompted calls for a lighthouse, while the Industrial Revolution brought still more vessels along the Sussex coast, carrying coal and goods between rapidly expanding ports and towns.
The lighthouses that followed were built first and foremost to save lives. But those that remain have become something more. Standing where land meets sea, they are custodians of that delicate boundary and compelling landmarks in their own right – each one a bookmark in a different chapter of Sussex history. From Belle Tout high on the cliffs to the red-and-white stripes of Beachy Head below, they tell stories of shipwreck and engineering, trade and war, changing technology and a coastline that never quite stands still.
Belle Tout Lighthouse
Perched high on the chalk cliffs at Beachy Head, Belle Tout is not so much a former lighthouse as a Sussex survivor. It has guided ships, been shot at, abandoned, turned into a tea room and a private home, starred on the big screen and, when the crumbling cliff edge came rather too close for comfort, been picked up and moved.
Its story began with a very real problem. The waters around Beachy Head were notoriously dangerous and, after centuries of shipwrecks, calls for a lighthouse gathered momentum. Among those championing the cause was the wonderfully named John ‘Mad Jack’ Fuller, the eccentric Sussex MP and philanthropist who had witnessed the wreck of the Thames off Beachy Head and helped fund a solution.
A temporary wooden lighthouse proved the idea could work and the permanent Belle Tout followed, built from Aberdeen granite and local limestone. Its light first shone in 1834, with the light was said to be visible some 22 miles out to sea.
There was, however, one fairly significant problem: they had built it in the wrong place. Its lofty position meant its light could be obscured by sea mist and low cloud and it was decommissioned in 1902 and replaced by Beachy Head Lighthouse.
But that wasn’t the end of its story. Belle Tout became variously a tea room and private home, before suffering considerable damage during WWII when Canadian troops stationed nearby used the building during gunnery practice. It was subsequently restored and, in the 1980s, found another lease of life on screen. The BBC bought it for the filming of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, while it also appeared in the 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights.
Its greatest drama, however, came in 1999. Coastal erosion had left the 850-tonne lighthouse perilously close to the cliff edge. Rather than lose it to the sea, engineers moved the entire building 17 metres inland – an extraordinary feat that made national news.
Today, Grade II-listed Belle Tout has reinvented itself yet again, this time as a small hotel. Nearly two centuries after its light first shone across the Channel, you can actually sleep inside one of Sussex’s most distinctive landmarks with the lantern room providing suitably spectacular 360-degree views.
Beachy Head Lighthouse
If Belle Tout is the lighthouse on the cliffs, Beachy Head is the one beneath them with the unmistakable red-and-white striped tower standing out at sea against an immense wall of white chalk. With the decommissioning and abandonment of Belle Tout, Trinity House embarked on the project of building a new one.
Trinity House is the charity responsible for lighthouses and other aids to navigation around England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, helping to keep mariners safe at sea.
Between 1900 and 1902, some 3,660 tonnes of Cornish granite were used to construct the 33-metre-high tower, around 165 metres out from the foot of the cliffs. A temporary cableway was rigged from the clifftop to an offshore platform to carry both workers and stone down to the construction site.
When Beachy Head Lighthouse finally came into operation on 2 October 1902, it was something of an engineering milestone: the last wave-washed masonry lighthouse to be built by Trinity House.
Life for its keepers was fairly rugged. Three men staffed the lighthouse for much of the 20th century, maintaining a light that could once be seen some 26 nautical miles out to sea. Electricity did not arrive until 1975; before then there were paraffin lamps for lighting and a solid-fuel range for cooking.
Perhaps the most alarming job involved the fog signal. In poor visibility, explosive charges were attached to arms outside the lighthouse, winched into position and remotely detonated from inside the lantern. The resulting warning sounded every five minutes. Remarkably, the system remained in use until 1976.
The lighthouse was automated in 1983 and today its light is solar powered and remotely monitored by Trinity House.
In 2011, Trinity House announced that it could no longer justify the cost of maintaining the red-and-white stripes and planned to allow the tower to return to its natural granite grey. A public campaign thought otherwise, raising the money needed to repaint it.
Royal Sovereign Lighthouse
Some seven miles offshore from Eastbourne, the extraordinary Royal Sovereign Lighthouse once marked the dangerous Royal Sovereign Shoal. Built on Newhaven beach and installed at sea in 1970, its lighthouse tower stood above a huge platform supported on a single concrete pillar. It replaced a lightship that had marked the shoal since 1875 and remained in service until 2022. Now dismantled because of its deteriorating condition, its light tower has been donated to a community project in Bexhill-on-Sea.
Rye Harbour Lighthouse
At Rye Harbour, a succession of lights has long guided vessels through the notoriously shifting channel of the River Rother. Navigation lights were first erected on the east pier in 1864, with an ingenious system of coloured lights indicating the depth of water. Later came a concrete lighthouse tower, eventually replaced in 1971 by modern navigation lights. Today, a quick-flashing green light continues to mark the east pier at the river mouth.
Newhaven Lighthouse
Further west along the Sussex coast, Newhaven has its own distinctive harbour light. Standing at the end of the long breakwater, the little red-and-white lighthouse dates from 1891 and can look particularly dramatic when Channel storms send waves crashing over the harbour wall. It is not Newhaven’s first lighthouse – a succession of lights has guided vessels around the town’s piers and into its busy harbour over the years.
Shoreham Lighthouse
Built in 1846, Shoreham’s handsome limestone lighthouse stands beside Brighton Road near Kingston Beach and Shoreham Lifeboat Station. Its unpainted 46-foot tower, topped by a black lantern, marks the entrance to Shoreham Harbour and the mouth of the River Adur. Still operational, it works in tandem with a second light on the Shoreham Port Authority watchtower, while red and green lights mark the harbour’s two breakwaters.
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