List of places of worship in Rother
83 active churches and chapels, one mosque and one Buddhist centre serve the mostly rural area, and a further 50 former places of worship still stand but are no longer in religious use.
The district's main urban centres—the Victorian seaside resort of Bexhill-on-Sea and the ancient inland towns of Battle and Rye—have many churches, some of considerable age.
Roman Catholicism is less well established than in neighbouring West Sussex, but Protestant Nonconformist denominations have been prominent for centuries.
The boroughs of Tunbridge Wells and Ashford and the district of Folkestone and Hythe in the neighbouring county of Kent form Rother's northern and eastern border.
[4][5] Many more churches were built in the Saxon era, but most were either superseded by larger Norman buildings between the 11th and 13th centuries—as at Sedlescombe[6] and Whatlington[5]—or substantially added to, as at Icklesham.
[7] Many places also gained their first church during this period, and the size and opulence of some (such as Ticehurst[8] and Salehurst)[9] reflect the area's iron-industry wealth at the time.
(Wholesale restoration of churches in the then-fashionable Gothic Revival style was a common and much criticised practice during the Victorian era.
)[19] In the 20th century, Anglican churches continued to be provided as residential development spread along the English Channel coast east of Hastings.
Building styles varied: at Winchelsea Beach, old-fashioned brick, timber and tile-hanging were used in 1962;[20] at Fairlight Cove, a square wooden box-like structure, intended to be both temporary and portable, has stood since 1970;[21] in Camber, the 1956 replacement for a bombed-out chapel of ease is in an old-fashioned early-20th-century style;[22][23] and at Cliff End on Pett Level an unusual building was purchased and reused.
The Admiralty installed a Lifesaving Rocket Apparatus Station on the beach; in 1935 it was converted into the tiny St Nicholas' Church.
[24] After the English Reformation, Roman Catholic worship was illegal in England for nearly 250 years until 1791,[25] and it grew slowly thereafter in comparison to West Sussex, where many large estates were owned by gentry who secretly kept the faith over many generations.
[33] John Wesley himself was a frequent visitor to the area, and the church he founded at Rye in 1789 was the administrative base of a vast Circuit covering much of Sussex and Kent.
[35][36] The Methodist Statistical Returns published in 1947[note 1] recorded the existence of two chapels of Wesleyan origin in Northiam and one each at Battle, Beckley, Bexhill, Broad Oak, Burwash Weald, Catsfield, Crowhurst, Dallington, Etchingham, Hurst Green, Iden, Little Common, Mountfield, Peasmarsh, Robertsbridge, Rye, Staplecross, Ticehurst, Udimore, Wadhurst and Whatlington in addition to the Winchelsea chapel.
[38] Almost all of these buildings still stand, but only the chapels at Broad Oak, Little Common, Pett and Rye remain in religious use by Methodists, along with the two at Bexhill and a newly built church centre at Battle which opened in 2014.
Other religions named in the census had much lower proportions of followers than in England overall—the corresponding national percentages were 5.02% for Islam, 1.52% for Hinduism, 0.79% for Sikhism, 0.49% for Judaism and 0.45% for Buddhists.
