Bexhill goes back a very long way. The first record of it is in a charter granted by King Offa of Mercia in 772, and the name comes from the Old English for a clearing among box trees. The old village grew up around its church on the hill, and the ruins of the medieval manor house, built around 1250 on the instructions of St Richard, Bishop of Chichester, can still be seen at the Manor Gardens in Bexhill Old Town. The modern seaside town, though, is largely the work of one family: the Earls De La Warr, who owned the manor for generations.
It was Reginald Sackville, the 7th Earl De La Warr, who set out to turn the rural village into an exclusive resort in the late nineteenth century, building the first sea wall and laying out De La Warr Parade along the front. His son later added the Kursaal pavilion and a cycle track to draw visitors in. The family name is best known now for the De La Warr Pavilion, the striking modernist building on the seafront that still pulls in visitors for its architecture and its arts programme. That heritage of doing things with a bit of style is part of the town’s character, and worth living up to online.
Bexhill is well connected for its size. It sits on the A259 coast road, which runs between Folkestone and Brighton, and a new link road opened in 2016 at a cost of around a hundred million pounds, easing some of the long-standing traffic pressure in the area. The town has three railway stations, Bexhill, Collington and Cooden Beach, on the East Coastway line, with regular trains to Brighton, London Victoria and Ashford. That makes it realistic for a Bexhill business to serve customers well beyond the immediate town.
The town has drawn its share of well-known names, which says something about its appeal. John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor of television, lived in a house by the station towards the end of his life. Spike Milligan was stationed in Bexhill during the Second World War, and much of the first volume of his war memoirs is set here. None of that sells a website on its own, but it is the kind of specific, true local detail that tells a customer a business genuinely belongs to the place rather than parachuting in from a city.
Bexhill built its modern reputation partly on health. In its resort years the town was promoted as a healthy place to live, which drew a string of independent schools, and that genteel, settled character still shapes the customer base today. New housing is coming too, with a large development at Barnhorn Green set to grow the western side of the town. For a trade or a service, that combination of an established, careful population and a steady trickle of newcomers is worth understanding, because the newcomers in particular research everything online before they commit, and first impressions on a screen count for a great deal here.
The railway shaped the modern town as much as the sea did. The first line reached Bexhill in 1846, arriving at a small country halt roughly where a supermarket car park sits today, and a second branch line later ran in from the north to a terminus at Bexhill West, open between 1902 and 1964. That growth turned a village on a hill into a resort with three stations, a seafront parade and a settled, comfortable population, the sort of place people move to and stay. The chef and broadcaster Fanny Cradock was among them, living over in Cooden Drive. For a business, that mix of good connections and a loyal local following is a real asset, and a website that reflects the town rather than a template helps you make the most of it.
For a local firm, that specificity is what sells. Naming the real places, the seafront, the Old Town, Sidley, Little Common, Cooden, tells a customer you belong here, and it is exactly the kind of content Google favours over copy that could sit on any agency’s site for any town. We write your site so it sounds like Bexhill, because it is about Bexhill, and set your Google Business Profile up to match so you appear when people nearby search for what you do.
Also covering: Cooden, Sidley, Little Common, St Leonards-on-Sea, Hastings, Pevensey and the surrounding villages.
