[2] Nearby towns include Crawley and Horley to the west, Tunbridge Wells to the east and Redhill and Reigate to the northwest.

In 1853 the warden of Sackville College, John Mason Neale, wrote the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas".

The adjacent St Swithun's Church stands on the highest ground in the town and was rebuilt in the eighteenth century (the tower dating from 1789) to a perpendicular design by James Wyatt.

On the outskirts of the town is Standen, a country house belonging to the National Trust, containing one of the best collections of Arts and Crafts movement furnishings and fabrics.

During the Second World War, the Queen Victoria Hospital developed a specialist burns unit led by Sir Archibald McIndoe.

It became world-famous for pioneering treatment of RAF and allied aircrew who were badly burned or crushed, and required reconstructive plastic surgery.

In 1941 patients of McIndoe who had undergone experimental reconstructive plastic surgery formed the Guinea Pig Club, which then became a support network for the aircrew and their family members.

On the afternoon of Friday 9 July 1943, a Luftwaffe bomber became separated from its squadron, followed the main railway line and circled the town twice, then dropped eight bombs.

Two bombs, one with a delayed-action fuse, fell on the Whitehall Theatre, a cinema on the London Road, where 184 people at the matinée show were watching a Hopalong Cassidy film before the main feature.

[8] In the winter of 2010, Claque Theatre produced the East Grinstead Community Play, which focussed on the bombing of the town in 1943, the work of Archibald McIndoe and his team at the hospital, and the Guinea Pig Club and its members.

The stone ring around the statue is for visitors to sit and reflect and in doing so become part of the story representing "The town that did not stare".

[17][18] Near the entrance to the church, three stones mark the supposed ashes of Anne Tree, Thomas Dunngate and John Forman who were burned as martyrs on 18 July 1556 because they would not renounce the Protestant faith.

[20] St Luke's Church, in Holtye Avenue on the Stone Quarry estate, was built in 1954 to serve the northeast of the town.

It was established by adherents of the Oxford Movement, and services still follow a more Anglo-Catholic style than East Grinstead's other Anglican churches.

[27] Opus Dei has a conference centre at Wickenden Manor near the town,[28] and Rosicrucians also have a presence in nearby Greenwood Gate.

[31] The United Kingdom (and former world) headquarters of the Church of Scientology is at Saint Hill Manor on the southwestern edge of East Grinstead.

Scientology's founder L. Ron Hubbard bought the Georgian mansion and its 24 hectares (59 acres) of grounds from the Maharaja of Jaipur in 1959 and lived in the town until 1967.

Thornfield Properties had submitted plans to the council for the start of an ambitious development of the Queens Walk and West Street area.

In the late 1970s, the town's inner relief road was built along a section of one of the closed railway lines and is officially named "Beeching Way".

[34] Much of rest of the trackbed of the disused Three Bridges to Groombridge line now forms the route of the Worth Way and Forest Way, linear Country Parks allowing access to the Wealden countryside.

For just over one mile (1.6 km), from just to the north of the Town Centre to Felbridge village in Surrey, the two routes use the same stretch of single carriageway road.

Private secondary education is provided by several day and boarding schools in the surrounding areas straddling Kent and Sussex.

[45] It is home to the East Grinstead Music & Arts Festival, which exists to encourage and promote dancing, singing and speech and drama in Sussex and neighbouring counties.

It sought to examine and explain the convergence of such a wide variety of religious organisations in the East Grinstead area.

The documentary, produced by Zed Productions and directed by Ian Sellar, reached no definite conclusion: explanations ranged from the local presence of ley lines to the more prosaic idea that religious leaders had settled there because they liked the views.

[52] In 2017 The Economist published an article titled The Joy of Sects asking why Scientologists, Mormons, Opus Dei and others have settled around East Grinstead.

It reported views that included ley lines, proximity to London, and to the experience of the Second World War when "Archibald McIndoe, a plastic surgeon, treated desperately disfigured servicemen at the local Queen Victoria Hospital.

East Grinstead is the home of Harry Witherspoon, one of the lead characters in a musical comedy by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens called Lucky Stiff.