Sussex County Cricket Club Formally Reconstituted — Brighton, 1839

Cricket in Sussex had been organised since the late eighteenth century, with the Royal Brighton Cricket Club dating from 1791. By the late 1830s the unofficial Sussex eleven, fronted by Lillywhite, was strong enough to demand a permanent organisational basis.

Through the late 1830s leading Sussex cricketers and patrons discussed a formal county club. The 1 March 1839 meeting was the result.

Sussex had a cricketing identity older than the county club itself. William Lillywhite and James Broadbridge had been playing matches under the Sussex name since the 1820s, and the Royal Brighton Cricket Club had been in existence at Brighton since 1791. The formal foundation of Sussex County Cricket Club at a meeting on 1 March 1839 brought these strands together: a constituted club with a committee, an annual subscription, a ground (the Royal Brighton ground), and a commitment to play first-class fixtures. The original membership numbered around 130. Sussex was the first county cricket club to be formally constituted in this way, and the model was copied by every subsequent county. The club's early decades, anchored on the Royal Brighton ground, produced Wisden, John Lillywhite, and the Sussex bowling tradition that ran through the rest of the nineteenth century.

Sussex CCC ran continuously from 1839 onward and was a founding member of the County Championship when it was formalised in 1890. The club has won the championship and the limited-overs competitions multiple times in modern cricket.