Building the Royal Sovereign Light Tower, Seaford Bay, 1971.

There was a major construction project at Seaford Bay in 1971 - the Royal Sovereign Light Tower was built on the beach near Tidemills. The new tower was built to replace the ninety-six year old light vessel that marked the dangerous Royal Sovereign rocks off Bexhill.

The new tower was built in two sections designed to be floated on rafts from the construction site into their final position at sea. The two sections would be put together on the site when they arrived. The construction plan went well but when the day came for the flotation - it didn't work. There had been some miscalculation and the rafts, even with the help of the incoming tide, could not shift the great concrete structure that would be the base of the tower. The builders had to return to the drawing board. Their re-thinking led to masses of polystyrene sheets being delivered to the site. These were used to support the rafts and so gain sufficient floating power to launch the light tower. It worked, to the delight of many on-lookers, and the assembling of the new lighthouse went ahead.

One resident of Newhaven (a member of the Gardening Club) remembers watching all this going on, and he told me that when it was all over, lots of large pieces of polystyrene were left floating around on the sea in Seaford Bay and the local children had a wonderful time using them as swimming floats.

In 1994 the Royal Sovereign Light Tower became automatic and solar powered. Banks of solar panels power a set of lanterns whose light is visible for 12 miles. Since the Tower is unstaffed there is also a complicated system involving electronic trip messages to Harwich when any of the lightbulbs fail.

This is not the only occasion when large crowds gathered to watch engineering works near Seaford. On September 19th 1850, people came on excursion trains from London as well as from nearby to watch the blasting of part of the cliff at Seaford Head. The idea was that the chalk and flint that would fall would form a protective breakwater for the town. Mining engineers carefully placed seven tons of gunpowder in the cliff face. The plan worked in that the blast dislodged 200,000 tons of chalk, but the sea washed most of it away within two decades. In 1881 the sea wall was built to achieve the same purpose.