South Street Free Church

South Street Free Church is a church in the centre of Eastbourne, the seaside resort town in East Sussex. Originally Congregational, it is now aligned to the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion — the small group of Evangelical churches founded by Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, during the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival — and its "characterful" and "quirky" Arts and Crafts building of 1903, by the local architect Henry Ward, is listed at Grade II by Historic England.

The congregation began as an offshoot. A Congregational church had been built on Pevensey Road near Eastbourne town centre in 1862, and in 1897 some of its members left to found a new church, initially based on Saffrons Road in the former St Peter's Church — an Anglican chapel of ease to St Saviour's, built of red brick and tile in 1878 to the design of Henry Currey, superseded by a new building in the Meads area in 1894, and afterwards acquired by Eastbourne Council and renamed Grove Hall. The council rented the premises to the new congregation, which elected the Reverend George Thompson as its first pastor.

Seeking a permanent home, the congregation commissioned Henry Ward in 1903 to design a church on South Street, close to their Saffrons Road premises, on land previously occupied by a blacksmith's forge. Reverend Thompson laid the foundation stone on 6 May 1903 — recording the names of Ward and the builders, Padgham and Hutchinson of St Leonards-on-Sea — and the congregation moved in during 1904, initially under the name New Congregational Church, registering for marriages under that name on 22 December 1904.

Henry Ward had moved from London to Hastings in the 1870s, becoming Hastings Borough Surveyor in 1881 and designing many religious and secular buildings across Hastings, St Leonards, Bexhill and Eastbourne — among them Sedlescombe United Reformed Church (1879), Robertson Street United Reformed Church in Hastings (1884), St John's Congregational Church in Bexhill (1897) and St Stephen's Anglican church there (1898). For South Street he designed in a "heavy" Arts and Crafts style with Gothic Revival elements — "Free Gothic", aligned to no particular historic era. The building is of red brick with stone dressings and horizontal bands, its windows in stone surrounds with mullions and transoms. The "quirky", "busy" façade has a "characterful asymmetry" of five bays of unequal width and height: from the west, a narrow bay of domestic character with a small gable and paired arched windows; a short tower with louvres and a recessed spire; the main entrance bay with a wide gable and windows in a large semicircular arched recess; a short turret with a polygonal stone upper stage; and a low gabled section echoing the western bay. In the narrow street, hemmed by tall buildings, the little tower acts as a landmark without dominating its surroundings. Inside, the five-bay nave carries arcades supporting a gallery around three sides — the western section altered — with original gallery fronts banded with quatrefoil decoration, original pews and other fittings, segmental-arched clerestory windows, an apse at the east end, and a timber roof on arch-braced trusses. The original organ and pulpit have been replaced. The church was listed Grade II on 8 May 2009.

The church's denominational story changed in 1914, when — as the Reverend J. Westbury Jones became minister after a pastorless period following Thompson's retirement in 1907 — the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion took responsibility for the church. The Connexion's founder, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, born in 1707, embraced Methodist ideas before moving, under the influence of George Whitefield's preaching, toward more Calvinistic doctrines, formally founding her Connexion in 1783; the denomination was, and remains, Evangelical and "rigidly Calvinistic". In 1918 the Reverend Frederick Hastings became minister, serving Eastbourne until his death at the remarkable age of ninety-eight in 1937. The chapel closed during the Second World War and the building deteriorated structurally, but the fabric was repaired, and under a succession of postwar ministers membership grew again; the most recent pastor, David Batchelor, was appointed in October 2010 after graduating from Oak Hill Theological College.

As of 2022 South Street Free Church was one of only twenty-two churches in England belonging to the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion — and Sussex is the denomination's hotbed, with other Connexion chapels at Bells Yew Green, Bolney, Copthorne, Hailsham, Shoreham-by-Sea, Turners Hill and Ote Hall Chapel at Wivelsfield. The church keeps a full life: morning and evening services every Sunday, two of them each month including Holy Communion; prayer meetings every Tuesday evening; monthly services at four care homes around the town; a weekly youth group; a lunch club for elderly people; and a public discussion group — the blacksmith's-forge chapel of 1903 still glowing at the heart of Eastbourne, one of the last lamps of the Countess's eighteenth-century revival.