East Beach photos

Characterised in the neighbourhood plan by its ‘large, unique houses with sea views and an open aspect’, East Beach Road is a residential area located in the northern part of East Selsey, and runs from the northwest corner of East Beach Pond, round East Beach car park, and then parallel to the sea wall, completed in 1956, up to Park Copse. The longest section, after Drift Road, is unadopted, a narrow muddy track until it widens out after Park Lane. Some of the houses are tiny old wooden chalets and railway carriage houses. Indeed, in the 1920s entrepreneur Tommy Berg moved decommissioned railway carriages to East Beach for holiday lets, and these have been converted into beach front holiday cottages. When the sea wall was built, most were moved back, resulting in the gardens between the road and the sea wall that we see today up to Park Lane, the exception being Seabank, the former office of Berg’s Park Estate. In in recent years there has been a trend to replace older houses in the middle section of the road with large timber and glass buildings with sea-facing balconies, a number of which are rented out to holidaymakers, but many of the houses in the northernmost section retain some of their original features. The archive includes many intriguing images of this changing road, but how much of it will be above water by 2050 remains to be seen.