About us


Wards is a local, family-owned retail clothing & cafe business. Our team is from the local community and Wards has been in Bexhill since 1928. We aspire to help make Bexhill a thriving & interesting town, providing visitors & local people with excellent service & products, maintaining a real choice in local shopping.

The original J&B Wards business specialised in men's clothing and schoolwear.  In recent years women's clothing has become an important part of the business and we are now well known for a wide ranging and ever-changing selection of gifts. 

In 1985, a tea room/coffee shop was added on the first floor. Today, Wards Kitchen makes, bakes and serves hot lunches every day as well as its famous scones, rock cakes, cheese biscuits, cakes and other products such as quiches and meat pies, all made on the premises. We also have a busy food cart downstairs on the ground floor, offering takeaway. We are continuing to expand the range of foods we offer.

Our staff are friendly & dedicated to giving you the best service possible, and to make your visit to our shop or cafe a pleasure.

We are happy to do special ordering for our customers and we also provide an alteration service for clothing.

We offer a range of delivery modes including telephone orders. For our web-shop orders, we offer click & collect, postal or local delivery if within a 5 mile radius of our stores. 

In February, 2020, we opened a sister company, Wards Clothing Company Eastbourne, at 20 Cornfield Road, BN21 4QE. At this location (see picture below), we offer many of the men's and women's brands that we carry in our Bexhill store. We look forward to serving the Eastbourne community with quality apparel and accessories.

We continue to invest in modernisation of the business, through improvements to the physical fabric of our stores, and increasing our online services, fit for the next generation of shopping.