Bexhill has always been a pioneering town: the birthplace of British motor racing; the first resort to allow mixed bathing and introduce bathing huts; the town where colour television and a forerunner of the mobile phone were invented; and the venue for Bob Marley’s first UK gig.
It may have one of the highest percentages of retired people in the country, but this fascinating town does not deserve its reputation as God’s waiting room. Or Spike Milligan’s tongue-in-cheek comment that Bexhill is ‘the only cemetery above ground’.
Spike actually had great affection for the place where he did his military training during the Second World War. He immortalised it in a Goon Show sketch entitled The Phantom Batter Pudding Flinger of Bexhill, and in his autobiography: Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall.
The town is also celebrated by native Eddie Izzard, who put a replica of the coach from The Italian Job on the roof of the town’s art gallery, and donated his family’s train set to the museum.
A wonderful array of fascinating characters, and a fair few true eccentrics, have called Bexhill home, and I tell their stories here. They include: the inventor of the death ray that never was; the king of the witches who put a curse on the Bexhill Light Opera Society; and the cobbler with psychic powers.
There is also the story of the Bexhill-built racing car that Elvis drove in the movie Viva Las Vegas, and the finishing school for the daughters of prominent Nazis.
All in all, Bexhill is a place of great character and endless fascination, a haven from the modern world that I have returned to time and again over thirty years.