Eastbourne, as we know it today, is a Victorian creation which would not have existed without the railway. In 1801, with a population of 1,668, it consisted of four distinct settlements comprising the parent village, about a mile inland, clustered around the Norman parish church and the Lamb Inn and known today as Old Town; the eighteenth-century development of Southbourne with its New Inn, halfway to the sea, centred on the present-day South Street; a cluster of dwellings on the shore itself known as Sea Houses, some of which provided lodgings for visitors; and finally the tiny hamlet of Meads near the foot of Beachy Head.
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