East Sussex Vacations

East Sussex, in the South East of England is an incredibly popular place to take a vacation. A wide variety of vacations can be taken ranging from walking vacations in the South Downs to seaside vacations. East Sussex really does offer an amazing range of vacation opportunities.

A great many tourists enjoy relaxing at the seaside and the southern part of the county of East Sussex features a long stretch of coast, along which there are towns such as Hove, Bexhill-on-Sea, Hastings, Eastbourne and Brighton.

The most popular seaside resort in East Sussex is Brighton & Hove, the largest British seaside settlement. Before the eighteenth century Brighton was little more than an unimportant fishing village but around 1750 a nearby doctor started to recommend that his patients should bathe in, and drink, seawater for their health, declaring that Brighton’s seawater was the best. A few decades later, in seventeen eighty, Georgian terraces where being built and the tourism industry in Brighton had  begun.

Tourism was further boosted by a visit by the Prince Regent (later King George IV) in 1783 and again, in 1841, with the arrival of the railway (bringing forth numerous day-trippers from places as far away as London). Nowadays the city gets roughly eight million tourists a year and at times it appears that you can hardly move for Brighton hotels and tourists.

Another popular East Sussex seaside town is Eastbourne. Situated at the eastern end of the South Downs, it is one of Great Britain’s most sunny towns. The town’s main industry is tourism and it has the expected pier as well as many other visitor attractions such as numerous parks & gardens, four theatres, museums and a beach (of shingle rather than sand), as well as interesting features such as the bandstand. Happily it is pretty easy to find cheap bed and breakfast accommodation, at the least somewhat less expensive than many bed and breakfasts in Brighton.

Besides the two popular seaside resorts introduced above, East Sussex also has the less well known, but extremely beautiful, seaside towns of Bexhill-on-Sea, Hastings and Rye, and also countless towns of interest further inland such as the former market towns of Hailsham, Uckfield and Heathfield. A further interesting town in the county of East Sussex definitely worth visiting is  Crowborough (situated in the middle of the Ashdown Forest), plus Battle and the county town of Lewes as well as many others.