1902, a grander plan was announced to replace the chapel with a 1,000-capacity "central church", to act as the centre for Eastbourne Methodists' scheme of "aggressive evangelism" among tourists, the ever-growing permanent population and other chapels in the Eastbourne Circuit. Members of the church formed a committee in late 1902 to consider how best to proceed and to establish and look after a fund to pay for whatever work was decided on. Pevensey Road Chapel was declared structurally unsound in 1904, and more than £3,000 was available in the building fund. Another committee was formed in that year to oversee the demolition of the chapel and its replacement with a much larger church and schoolroom. Permission to knock the chapel down was granted in 1906, and on 1 April 1907 work began on the new buildings with the laying of the Sunday school foundation stone. Labour politician Arthur Henderson , himself a Methodist, addressed a public meeting at Eastbourne Town Hall to commemorate the stone-laying, and people were encouraged to contribute to the building fund by laying a shilling on the stones. Services were not disrupted during the building works: after the old chapel was demolished, churchgoers worshipped in the former Sunday school hall. By early 1908, the new Sunday school was finished, and work began on the church itself: the foundation stone was laid on 14 April 1908. Construction took five months and cost about £15,000 (£ in ), leaving a debt of £11,600: some of the building fund had been used to establish new Methodist churches in outlying parts of Eastbourne. Rev. John Scott Lidgett , the President of the Wesleyan Conference at the time, opened the new Central Methodist Church on 16 September 1908. Carlos Crisford himself designed it, and the Eastbourne building firm Miller and Selmes constructed the church. The building had a tall corner tower topped with a spire; to celebrate the opening, a group of worshippers of all ages were hauled in a box to the top of the spire, where they ate breakfast. Membership of Central Methodist Church grew from about 200 when it opened to 254 in 1917, and money continued to be raised slowly to pay the debt. The final payments were made in 1925; sources of the money included a wide variety of fundraising activities and the assistance of J. Arthur Rank, the Methodist industrialist. Other changes in the interwar