The colourful façade of Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery
(Picture: View Pictures/Universal Images G)Most seaside-bound Londoners who want to stay within striking distance of the capital consider somewhere like arty Margate or boutiquey Broadstairs.
Roberta and Chris Hodder looked at homes in both of these coastal hotspots before taking a more left-field choice — the old school holiday resort town of Eastbourne, East Sussex.
Roberta, 47, Chris, 43, and their daughters Charlotte, 10, and Giulietta, five, had been renting a three-bedroom house in Forest Hill from friends who had moved to Paris, and were paying £1,500 a month in rent. They were aware that at some point their friends would return or sell the house.
“We were thinking about buying as our next step,” said Chris, a lobbyist. “Roberta was not overly keen on moving out of Forest Hill, but since we are both self-employed, we also knew our chances of buying somewhere there were slim.”
The compromise was a move to the coast, and they started looking around Margate and Broadstairs but found the market too competitive and prices too high, as buyers flooded in during the pandemic.
Eventually they simply put their requirements — a seaside home with three bedrooms and a garden, and close to an airport for Chris’s job — into the property portals and a perfect home popped up in Eastbourne.
In February they paid £380,000 for the house (similar homes in Forest Hill cost £600,000-plus, says Chris) and the family and their Yorkshire terrier, Fifi, headed to the South Coast.
Eastbourne has long had a reputation for its population of retirees and its kiss-me-quick tourist spots, but Chris feels that is changing with spaces like The Towner, a contemporary art gallery and arts centre designed by American architect Rick Mather.
Meanwhile the Little Chelsea area is changing into Eastbourne’s answer to Crouch End, full of record shops, cafes, delis, boutiques and antiques shops. Trains to Victoria take around an hour and a half.
Since moving, Chris and Roberta, a child minder, have found there is plenty to do in the day with the girls, but a little less for themselves in the evening. “Eastbourne is a little bit lacking in nightlife,” said Chris.
