Hastings has been a fishing town since the Saxons, and the boats have always launched from the Stade - a stretch of shingle below the East Cliff at the eastern end of the Old Town. Through the medieval period the fishery was prosperous; by the 19th century, when seaside tourism began transforming Hastings into a Victorian holiday resort, the fishing community was a stubborn enclave at one end of a town that was reinventing itself for visitors. Their tall black net huts (the unique three-storey wooden structures that still stand on the Stade today) became picturesque to the new arrivals. The men themselves were less picturesque to look at - sunburnt, calloused, gnarled by salt - and harder to draw into the polite town's churches. By the 1840s only two of Hastings' seven medieval parish churches still stood: All Saints, and St Clement's. The town was growing fast, and the rectors of both churches recognised that a population working seven days a week on the beach needed a church that came to them.

Tom Tanner, a missionary, was based at Rock-a-Nore to begin building relationships with the fishing community. Gant's small stone church was built in early 1854 and given the name St Nicholas - the patron of sailors - though it was never officially consecrated; technically it remained a mission chapel rather than a full church, designated as a "chapel of ease" to All Saints. The fishing community was initially hostile to this earnest piece of Anglican outreach. The chapel actually closed in the 1870s for lack of attendance. Then the church appointed the Reverend Charles Dawes, a chaplain who somehow had the right temperament for the work. He listened. He sat in the boats. He spoke the way fishermen spoke. By the 1880s the chapel - which could hold about 290 - was full at every service, and the fishing families had taken it as their own.

The chapel served the fishing community for nearly a century. The Second World War took a toll: Hastings was a coastal target for German bombing, and the building suffered some damage. The military requisitioned it for war use, and after 1945 it stood empty and decaying. In 1956 a local preservation society - the Old Hastings Preservation Society - took the building on a lease from the council and opened it as a museum dedicated to the local fishing industry. The choice of contents reflected what the community itself wanted to preserve. At the centre of the space they put the painted lugger Enterprise, a beach-launched Hastings fishing vessel from the early 20th century, hauled in through a wall opening enlarged for the purpose. She fills the nave like a stranded whale, her tarred timbers and red sails dominating the interior, and a generation of Hastings children has grown up clambering aboard her where their grandparents once sat in pews.

The building is small and architecturally modest - pale Kentish ragstone walls in a simple Gothic Revival style, with a steeply pitched roof and lancet windows. The interior is one large undivided space: there is no chancel arch or screen separating nave from chancel, so the whole becomes a single room of about 290 seats' capacity. William Gant, a relatively obscure architect who had moved to Hastings in 1852 after working with Sir William Tite in London, designed largely houses and estates; St Nicholas Church was an outlier in his portfolio and the building most people remember him by. English Heritage listed the museum Grade II in 1985, recognising it as nationally important - one of 521 Grade II listed buildings in the borough of Hastings.

The most remarkable thing about the museum is that it is not a record of a lost industry. The Hastings fishing fleet still works from the Stade. It is now Europe's largest beach-launched fishing fleet, a community of small boats that put to sea without the benefit of a harbour, dragged up and down the shingle every working day by powerful tractors. The boats today catch sole, plaice, herring, mackerel and shellfish; the catch is sold from the wooden net huts and the small fish market beside them. The museum sits at the centre of this living industry, attracting around 140,000 visitors a year and connecting them - through the painted hull of the Enterprise, through the photographs and ship models and lifeboat records on the walls - to the boats actually launching twenty metres away. St Nicholas Church found its congregation eventually. They are still there.