The rich internal fittings include a complete scheme of stained glass by Goodhart-Rendel's favoured designer Joseph Ledger and a 16th-century painting by Ortolano Ferrarese.

It was built on a sloping, well-wooded seafront location just to the west of the ancient port of Hastings,[2][3] and immediately became a fashionable resort and residential area—rivalling its larger neighbour by the mid-19th century.

Charles Lyndhurst Vaughan, son of Lady St John, worked hard to advance its influence, and the church became so popular that it was often full.

[9] The iron building, known locally as "The Round Church", was severely damaged by a storm in October 1866 which destroyed the roof.

Vaughan ensured that it was soon rebuilt, this time in brick: construction finished in July 1867 and a procession from Christ Church to the new building preceded its opening on 6 August 1867.

[12][16] During the 1870s, worship took on a strongly High church, Anglo-Catholic character: Reservation of the Sacrament was kept from 1874, and the Tenebrae was celebrated in the same year.

[17] The church was again rebuilt, this time to the designs of Arthur Blomfield, a prolific and "distinguished"[10] ecclesiastical architect who favoured the Gothic Revival style.

His design, a free interpretation of the Gothic Revival style in red brick and "with rich ornament and many mannered details",[24] was executed between 1950 and 1954.

[12] The original spire, damaged by the bombing of 1943, could not be restored and was removed; the top of the tower was altered and a "cap" added instead.

[26] Arthur Blomfield's church of 1881 was built in his preferred Early English Gothic Revival style, mostly in red brick with some Bath Stone dressings.

[6][27] The arcade-flanked nave had five and a half bays—an arrangement also seen[15] at Blomfield's St John the Evangelist's Church in Preston Village, Brighton—a clerestory and a queen post ceiling.

[25] The nave still has five and a half bays, but Goodhart-Rendel extended the chancel[15] and inserted transverse arches which were likened by Nairn and Pevsner to a "strange bridge" crossing it.

[24] The damaged spire on the tower was replaced with a low cap,[15][22] but the pointed-arched louvres with their decorative mouldings and the castellated parapet at the top (bell) stage remain.

[1] The body of the church is "powerfully massed"[1] and "fortress-like", emphasised by its prominent brick buttresses to the aisles.

The interior walls are mostly of stone coated with plaster and render, and the panelled chancel ceiling is painted.

[12] Fittings include a 19th-century square-bowled font on a carved marble base, a lectern of the same era, chandeliers and an octagonal pulpit.