About
Seaford Museum is housed inside Martello Tower 74, the westernmost of the chain of squat brick forts built along the south and east coasts between 1805 and 1812 to resist a French invasion that never came. Tower 74 stands on the Esplanade at the foot of Seaford Head, and the building is as much the point of a visit as the collection inside it.
Martello towers were designed to a standard pattern of extraordinary solidity — walls several metres thick on the seaward side, a single heavy gun mounted on the roof, a magazine below and a garrison of a couple of dozen men living in a single circular chamber — and Tower 74 is unusual in being open to the public with its interior levels accessible.
The Seaford Museum and Heritage Society, founded in 1979, has filled it over four decades with an idiosyncratic and genuinely absorbing collection that runs well beyond conventional local history. Alongside displays on the town itself, visitors find reconstructed shop interiors, a substantial holding of domestic technology — early televisions, radios, gramophones, telephones, vacuum cleaners, washing machines and kitchen appliances — and cases of toys, cameras, printing equipment and wartime material.
It is the kind of collection assembled by people who could not bear to see ordinary things thrown away, and it is all the more valuable for it.
Seaford's own history gives plenty to work with. It was a limb of the Cinque Ports and a significant medieval harbour until the River Ouse shifted its mouth to Newhaven in the sixteenth century and left the town stranded, after which it declined into a notorious rotten borough returning two members of Parliament from a tiny electorate.
Later it reinvented itself as a Victorian seaside resort and a town of private schools.
The exposed shingle beach, the storms, the shipwrecks and the coastguard and Home Guard defences all feature strongly. Admission is charged and the museum opens at weekends, Wednesday afternoons and bank holidays, staffed by volunteers of the society.
Visitors should know before setting out that the tower cannot be made accessible: entry is at first-floor level by an external stair and the chambers are linked by steep, narrow flights, a limitation imposed by Napoleonic military engineering rather than by any lack of will.
Those who can manage the stairs are rewarded at the top by the gun platform, which offers the finest view in the town and makes the tower's original purpose immediately plain.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- The museum is not accessible to wheelchair users or anyone who cannot manage steep, narrow stairs. Entry is at first-floor level by an external staircase and the interior levels are connected by further stairs — this is inherent to a Napoleonic fort and cannot be altered.
- Go up to the roof. The gun platform gives the best view in Seaford and makes the tower's purpose immediately obvious.
- Allow ninety minutes rather than the hour most visitors plan. The collection is far denser than the size of the building suggests.
- Wednesday openings are afternoons only, from 2pm to 4pm; weekends and bank holidays run from 11am to 4pm.
- Contact the society in advance if you want the documentary archive. It keeps separate and much more limited hours, generally one Sunday afternoon a month.
- Walk up Seaford Head afterwards for the classic view back across Cuckmere Haven to the Seven Sisters — about fifteen minutes from the tower.
- Bring proof if claiming the concession rate, which covers over-sixties, students, registered disabled visitors and armed forces personnel.
- There is no café at the museum, but the Esplanade and the town centre a short walk away have plenty of options.
Highlights
Martello Tower 74
The building itself is the museum's largest and most important exhibit.
Tower 74 is the westernmost of the chain of squat brick forts thrown up between 1805 and 1812 against the threat of Napoleonic invasion, built to a standard design of enormous solidity with walls several metres thick facing the sea, a single heavy gun traversing on the roof, a powder magazine below and a garrison living in one circular chamber.
Very few of the surviving towers are open to the public with their internal levels accessible, and walking up through the structure gives a physical understanding of the design that no plan or photograph conveys.
The gun platform roof
The flat roof was designed to carry a heavy traversing gun able to fire in any direction across the Channel approaches, and it is now the museum's viewpoint. From it the whole strategic logic of the position becomes obvious at a glance: the open shingle beach where troops could have landed, the sweep of the bay towards Newhaven, the rising bulk of Seaford Head and the chain of neighbouring tower positions along the coast.
It also provides a welcome contrast to the crowded interior below, and on a clear day the view along the Sussex coast is exceptional.
The domestic technology collection
One of the museum's real surprises is the depth of its holdings in twentieth-century domestic technology. Early televisions, valve radios, gramophones, telephones, cameras, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, irons and kitchen equipment are displayed in quantity, tracing how quickly household life was transformed by electricity and mass manufacture.
Objects of this kind were routinely discarded rather than collected, which makes an accumulation on this scale genuinely useful.
Visitors of every generation find something they recognise, and it is consistently the part of the collection that produces the most conversation between family members.
Reconstructed shop and room interiors
The society has built a series of period settings within the tower's chambers, including shop interiors stocked with original packaging, fittings and equipment. Reconstructions of this kind succeed or fail on the density of authentic detail, and these are notably well stocked, drawing on decades of local donation.
They provide the context that isolated objects in cases cannot, showing how goods were displayed, sold and packaged before self-service retailing, and they make the collection legible to visitors who would not otherwise engage with a case of tins and bottles.
Collections
The collection is unusually broad for a town museum. Local history holdings cover Seaford's medieval role as a limb of the Cinque Ports, the loss of its harbour when the Ouse was diverted, its long decline and existence as an unreformed parliamentary borough, its Victorian reinvention as a seaside resort and centre of private schools, and its coastal defence history from the Napoleonic period to the Second World War.
Alongside this sits a large accumulation of twentieth-century material culture: domestic technology including televisions, radios, gramophones, telephones, cameras and household appliances; toys and games; printing and office equipment; shop fittings, packaging and stock used in reconstructed period interiors; and wartime and coastguard material.
The Martello tower that houses it all, built between 1805 and 1812, is itself the principal artefact. The society also maintains a separate documentary and photographic archive.
The Martello Tower
Interpretation of Tower 74 itself — its construction, garrison, armament and place in the Napoleonic coastal defence chain — presented throughout the building and on the gun platform roof.
Seaford Through Time
Local history displays and reconstructed shop and room interiors covering the lost harbour, the rotten borough, the Victorian resort, wartime Seaford and twentieth-century domestic life.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.