This recollection is based on an article that appeared in Observer, the quarterly journal of the Eastbourne Society, in 2010 supplemented by information gleaned from local newspaper reports. The author of the Observer piece, Nicholas Howell, had been an art student at Eversley Court for four years in the 1970s and returned as a lecturer in 1999.

It is ten years since Eversley Court in St Anne’s Road was demolished to make way for a development of flats with the same name built by Berkeley Homes. Eversley Court was built in 1895 and started life as an Edwardian family home before being extended in 1902 to house Ascham School. The latter was one of a number of preparatory schools established in Eastbourne in the last two decades of the nineteenth century; Ascham was a boarding school and at Eversley Court had masters’ bedrooms and dormitories for the 50 boarders on the first floor.
The building was set on a four-acre site on one of the highest points in the town being situated near to South Lynn, the former boys’ school, on the north and the reservoir on the west. The building was entered through a brick and tiled porch into a large reception hall with a fine oak staircase. At the half landing there was a magnificent stained-glass window. Opening on to a balcony. Leading off the reception hall were three large rooms, two of which had arched inglenook fireplaces and deep bay windows with seats overlooking the wooded and lawned grounds.

In 1919 Eversley Court became home to the Eastbourne Municipal Secondary School, later to be renamed as Eastbourne Grammar School, and during the 1920s it was vastly extended to include a new wing housing additional classrooms and a theatre with a proscenium arch.

The Grammar School relocated to a new building in King’s Drive in 1962 and Eversley Court then became the Eastbourne School of Art. The art school had previously occupied temporary premises in Upperton Road following the bombing in 1941 of the Technical Institute (an early home of the Municipal Secondary School) on the site of the Library in Grove Road. It was late renamed as Eastbourne College of Art and Design and subsequently subsumed within Eastbourne College of Arts and Technology (ECAT).

By 1998, following a Government inspection which criticised the Eversley Court site, a decision was made to relocate the art college to the main ECAT campus at Cross Levels Way. Despite a bitter protest campaign by college staff and the local community, the fate of Eversley Court was sealed: planning permission was narrowly passed by the full Town Council for the construction of apartments on the site and for a new building on the ECAT campus. The latter was smaller, had less studio space and had fewer attractive facilities than Eversley Court; added to this, it was thought by some that the old site had been sold below its potential value.

Although Eversley Court was demolished in 2000, not all was lost as the stained-glass window from the landing was saved and incorporated into the new college building; the installation was overseen by Douglas Clowes, the former site architect. In addition, the design of the new flats retained something of the feel of the old building: the carved brick frieze from the porch of Eversley Court was salvaged and incorporated into two porches in the new development while the lodge house was refurbished and the gate posts were retained.