St Matthew's Church, Silverhill

St Matthew's Church is an Anglican church in the Silverhill suburb of Hastings, a town and borough in the English county of East Sussex. The present building, a large brick structure of 1884 by ecclesiastical architect John Loughborough Pearson, replaced a much smaller church founded in 1860 when Silverhill began to grow from an agricultural area with scattered cottages into a suburb of the increasingly fashionable seaside resort of Hastings. Although a planned tower was never built, the "imposing" church dominates its steeply sloping site; and although its architect—a leading Gothic Revivalist—considered it one of his lesser works, it has been described as "outstanding" and "architecturally inventive". English Heritage has listed the building at Grade II* for its architectural and historical importance.HistoryAs early as 928, when it was first described in writing, Hastings was an important town. Its position on the English Channel coast at the bottom of a narrow valley gave it strategic advantages, and it was a successful fishing port and the chief Cinque Port. The seven medieval churches it supported by the late 13th century had declined to two—All Saints and St Clement's—by 1801, but by then the town was about to enter its most rapid period of growth, which saw it expand well beyond the confines of the Bourne valley. Daytrippers, holidaymakers and permanent residents were attracted by better transport links (especially from London) and the prestige of royal patronage (conferred by visits by various members of the British Royal Family), and London builder and speculator James Burton conceived and laid out a whole new town, St Leonards-on-Sea, immediately west of Hastings in the 1820s to create an upper-class rival to the old resort.