The land belonged to Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle - Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1754 to 1756 and again from 1757 to 1762 - and Pelham obtained an Act of Parliament in 1761 (2 Geo. 3 c. 12) allowing him to use the foreshore of his Bishopstone estate for a tide mill. Construction began in 1762. The principle of a tide mill is straightforward: dig a millpond behind sluice gates that let seawater flow in as the tide rises, close the gates at high water, and use the trapped water to turn the mill wheel as it drains back to the sea on the ebb. Pelham died in 1768 with the project still unfinished; the mill was not completed until 1788. In 1791 it was advertised for sale in the *Sussex Weekly Advertiser*: five pairs of millstones capable of producing 130 quarters (about 1.65 tonnes) of wheat per week. The location, beautiful in calm weather, was savage in storms - in 1792 a violent gale destroyed large quantities of flour and grain stored at the site.

What turned Tide Mills from a struggling mill into a working community was a Sussex businessman named William Catt, who took over the lease in 1807 after a brief partnership with his cousin Edmund. The Catt family had milling and farming interests across the Robertsbridge and Buxted area, and William had a feel for what would make a coastal mill profitable. He rebuilt the mill three storeys high and put sixteen pairs of stones inside it - capable, on a good week, of producing 1,500 sacks (190 tonnes) of flour. A storm in 1820 damaged the building and washed away part of the mill dam, but he repaired it and pressed on. By the time the 1851 census was taken, sixty men were working at the mill, and most of them lived in cottages Catt had built around the site. He built a school for their children. The school was rudimentary, but the simple fact of providing one - at a time when most rural employers provided nothing of the kind for their labourers' families - earned him a reputation among his workers. When the railway from Newhaven to Seaford opened in 1864, a siding was run in between the cottages, and flour from Tide Mills travelled by rail to Newhaven for shipment to London by sea.

William Catt died in 1853. The mill carried on for another thirty years under his sons and successors, but the economics of milling were changing. Steam mills closer to the markets, the import of cheap American wheat through the 1870s, and the increasing exposure of the coastal site to bigger storms eventually made the operation untenable. The Tide Mills mill closed in 1883 - the same year, in a different part of Sussex, that the Royal Hippodrome opened in Eastbourne. The buildings were used as bonded warehouses for almost two decades before being pulled down in 1901. The village remained. Now without an employer, it became home to people working in Newhaven and Seaford, plus a curious miscellany of other tenants: a 1904 Marconi radio station was set up nearby for ship-to-shore tests, a small Royal Naval Air Service seaplane base operated there during the First World War, and a Chailey Heritage Marine Hospital for disabled children ran an annex from one of the old buildings.

In 1936 Seaford council took action under the Housing Act 1930 to declare houses 8 to 13 of Tide Mills a 'clearance area' - bureaucratic shorthand for unfit for human habitation. The council's concerns were practical and accurate. Water came from a single standpipe shared by all six houses. There was no sewerage; general waste was thrown into the sea, and each house had an outside earth closet whose contents had to be emptied by hand and carried down to the beach. The clearance order was confirmed in early 1937; residents were required to vacate within nine months. Some did. Most negotiated, delayed, appealed. The deadline kept slipping. In 1939, with war imminent and the shingle beach east of Newhaven needed for coastal defence, the last residents were forcibly removed. The village was emptied for good. The buildings were partially demolished to clear fields of fire from Newhaven Fort and the surrounding gun emplacements. The remaining structures were used for street-fighting training - vast numbers of Canadian troops, who staged through Newhaven during the Second World War, drilled here for the kind of urban combat they would later face in Normandy and Holland.

When the war ended, the army left. The shingle returned to slow growth of sea kale and yellow horned-poppy. The mill race silted up. The cottage foundations sank into the pebbles. A small request stop called Bishopstone Beach Halt - in the village's last decade it had been the local railway station, having started life as Bishopstone Station, then Tide Mills Halt, then Bishopstone Beach Halt in 1939 before closing in 1942 - left its platform stumps on the embankment as the only obvious sign anyone had lived here. In April 2006 the Sussex Archaeological Society started a long-term project to record the whole East Beach site: the mills, the railway station, the wartime training scars, the Nurses Home, the hospital annex, the RNAS seaplane base, the later 1920s and 30s holiday huts, and the Marconi radio station. The work is ongoing. You can walk the village footpaths today - access is along the beach from Newhaven Harbour or via a single-track road from the Seaford-Newhaven roundabout - and read the place from its ruins. The novelist Lesley Thomson set her 2007 *A Kind of Vanishing* here, two girls playing hide-and-seek in 1968, one of whom is never seen again. The Tide Mills cover photograph showed the silted sluice and a sky-darkening rain coming in off the Channel. The book did not need to invent the atmosphere. It was already there.