Beachy Head Lighthouse

Interesting facts

It was the last wave-washed masonry lighthouse that Trinity House ever built, completed just as the age of granite rock towers came to an end.

Its original fog signal was explosive: keepers hung small charges on a jib outside the gallery and fired them electrically every five minutes in fog.

The explosive fog signal stayed in use until 1976, making Beachy Head one of the very last British lighthouses to rely on detonations.

Electricity did not reach the tower until 1975; before that, the keepers cooked on a solid-fuel range and lit their rooms with paraffin lamps.

The original first-order revolving lens gave two white flashes every 20 seconds and could be seen about 26 nautical miles out to sea.

When LED lanterns were mounted on the gallery in 2011, the old glass optic was left in place inside the lantern room, no longer in use.

In 1999 a fall of chalk from the cliff severed the electric cable to the lighthouse, and the lamp and fog signal were upgraded during the repair.

The 2011 public campaign raised £27,000, and abseilers applied five coats of paint to the lantern and three to each red band.

When the Royal Sovereign light tower offshore was due for demolition in 2018, Beachy Head's light was strengthened with more solar panels to cover the gap.

The lighthouse appears in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, in the scene where the car drives off the cliff and flies for the first time.

Why it is worth it

Few lighthouses are seen the way this one is: from above. Beachy Head Lighthouse stands in the sea at the foot of the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain, a sheer white wall some 162 metres tall, and most people meet it by walking to the cliff edge and looking down. From there the tower is a small red-and-white column set against the blue-green shallows. The contrast of scale — a 33-metre granite tower dwarfed by the headland behind it — is the whole picture.

It was built between 1900 and 1902 under Sir Thomas Matthews, engineer-in-chief of Trinity House, and first shone on 2 October 1902, about 165 metres out from the base of the cliff. The builders ran a temporary aerial cableway from the clifftop down to an iron platform in the sea, and some 3,660 tons of Cornish granite went into the tower. It replaced Belle Tout, the older lighthouse on the heights to the west, whose lamp, set so high, too often disappeared into sea mist and low cloud; Belle Tout still stands on the downs and is part of the same view.

The famous band was not always red: the tower was first painted black and changed colour in 1951. Three keepers lived out on the rock for more than eighty years until the light was automated in 1983. When Trinity House announced in 2011 that it could no longer afford to keep the stripes painted, a public appeal raised the money to repaint them — a measure of how much the tower had become part of the Sussex coast's identity. The best views are from the clifftop path a little west of the summit, where the Seven Sisters roll away towards Birling Gap.

Getting there

Beachy Head lies about 5 km southwest of Eastbourne, whose railway station is the nearest; from the town the seasonal 13X Coaster bus stops at Beachy Head itself, and the year-round 12/12X runs the coast road nearby. The nearest major airport is London Gatwick (LGW), about 55 km away in a straight line. Eastbourne Borough Council runs pay-and-display car parks on the headland, and the South Downs Way passes along the clifftop towards Belle Tout and Birling Gap.

Beachy Head Lighthouse

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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