Soldiers brought the denomination to the area in 1803, when an isolated collection of clifftop villages stood where the 19th-century resort town of Eastbourne developed.

Until the early 19th century, the area now covered by the town of Eastbourne was mostly farmland punctuated by four small and entirely independent villages linked by a single track.

Bourne (later known as Old Town) stood inland from the English Channel coast and was based around the 12th-century parish church of St Mary the Virgin; Southbourne was a linear settlement on the road from Bourne to the sea; Sea Houses, further along this route, developed from the 14th century as a fishing village; and Meads stood on much higher land to the west, where the sheer cliffs around Beachy Head rose from the coastline.

[5] Prince Edward visited Sea Houses in 1780, but unlike nearby Brighton this royal patronage failed to encourage tourism and residential growth—most likely because all the surrounding land was owned by two rich families (the Davies-Gilberts and the Dukes of Devonshire), who sought to control development.

A row of houses was built facing the sea in about 1790,[5] and the area soon assumed strategic importance in the defence of the south coast against Napoleonic invaders.

[5] Soldiers from the 11th Hussars (known by that time as the 11th Regiment of Light Dragoons) reached Eastbourne in July 1803,[5][7] and a newspaper report of 5 October 1803 noted that "everything here is on the alert to receive the enemy: the whole of the 11th Light Dragoons have been ordered from their different outposts, and are stationed at Hastings, Bexhill and Southbourne [... and] the Sussex and Gloucester Militias [... made] entrenchments at Sea Houses".

Their services had interested the local civilian population, though, and with the help of shopowner Henry Beck the Society and community continued to thrive after the soldiers' withdrawal.

[1][18] In the chapel's early years, locals and the remaining soldiers were joined by increasing numbers of wealthy visitors who were attracted to the growing town of Eastbourne by its new reputation as a high-class resort;[17] £8.10s.- (£762 in 2023)[1] had to be spent on extensions soon after it opened.

By 1860, the seafront area east of Sea Houses, with its new promenade, was the new focal point of Eastbourne, where increasing numbers of visitors and newly arrived residents congregated.

[23] Pevensey Road had just been laid out across the fields of a farm whose land was owned by the Duke of Devonshire and leased to tenant farmers.

[22][24] Eastbourne's Methodists acquired a 80-by-80-foot (24 m × 24 m) plot in 1863, and building work started almost immediately: Sir Francis Lycett, an important figure in 19th-century Methodism, placed the foundation stone on 11 November 1863.

[26] Congregations grew slowly—not helped by a scarlet fever epidemic which killed many people in 1864 and frightened many visitors away from the town—but the Methodist community was fully established in the town by this time and began to expand its reach.

[33] Permission to knock the chapel down was granted in 1906, and on 1 April 1907 work began on the new buildings with the laying of the Sunday school foundation stone.

[31] Labour politician Arthur Henderson mp, himself a Methodist, addressed a public meeting at Eastbourne Town Hall to commemorate the stone-laying, and people were encouraged to contribute to the building fund by laying a shilling on the stones.

[31] Construction took five months and cost about £15,000 (£1,978,000 in 2025),[1] leaving a debt of £11,600: some of the building fund had been used to establish new Methodist churches in outlying parts of Eastbourne.

John Scott Lidgett ch, the President of the Wesleyan Conference at the time, opened the new Central Methodist Church on 16 September 1908.

The final payments were made in 1925; sources of the money included a wide variety of fundraising activities and the assistance of J. Arthur Rank, the Methodist industrialist.

Its large space and central position made it a natural "reception centre", and thousands of evacuees from London passed through on their way to their temporary host families.

[39][40] Many churches in Eastbourne were damaged (or in some cases destroyed) by bombs from late 1940 onwards,[41] but Central Methodist Church survived unscathed—although on one occasion an unexploded bomb landed nearby, threatening its destruction—and although the building was temporarily closed (because its central location made it vulnerable), services continued in the crypt, which also served as a makeshift shelter.

The highest recorded figure (excluding summer visitors, who always boosted attendances significantly) was 486 in 1967,[39] by which time youth clubs, women's groups and a choir had been established.

[39][42] Meanwhile, the Society of the People Called Methodists, founded in 1803 at Sea Houses, continued its unbroken history by meeting regularly at the church.

[47] Ceylon Place Baptist Church, a brick and Bath stone Early English Gothic Revival building, was built on the road of that name in 1885 to replace a tin tabernacle erected in 1871.

[55] Central Methodist Church is an elaborate Decorated Gothic Revival building of grey stone rubble laid in courses with some ashlar.

[25][44] Nikolaus Pevsner wrote that its appearance was "entirely churchy"—resembling an Anglican place of worship much more than typical Nonconformist chapels of the era (of which Eastbourne has several examples).

[44][57] The church hall is a two-storey Decorated Gothic building of stone, with gables, cast ironwork and lancet windows with tracery.

Greenfield Methodist Church, an Early English-style red-brick building, has served Eastbourne's Old Town area since 1898,[58] although worshippers had met for ten years prior to that above a shop.

[59][61] Another church, St Aidan's, was opened nearby in 1913, and the congregations merged and worshipped in that building after the Methodist Union of 1932 brought together the denomination's different subgroups.