Burchill on the beach

‘The revamps, the facelifts and the attempts by a clumsy council to write the indigenous Brighton working class out of the upwardly mobile picture are real enough. But on the beach, you get the distinct feeling that Brighton will never completely pull its socks up.’ This is the Brighton treasure Julie Burchill - 66 years old today - writing about the seafront nearly two decades ago.

Born in Bristol in 1959, the daughter of a communist factory worker and a dinner lady, she left home at 17 for London to work at the New Musical Express. She quickly made a name for herself with a brash, slangy style and fierce opinions. Alongside fellow writer Tony Parsons, she helped define the paper’s punk-era voice, becoming a leading figure in a new, confrontational brand of journalism.

In the 1980s Burchill moved from music writing into broader columns and cultural commentary, writing for The Face, The Sunday Times, and The Mail on Sunday. She also spent several years as a star columnist at Cosmopolitan, where her wit and provocations reached a wide female readership. Her work was marked by controversial takes on everything from feminism to class, and she revelled in the notoriety. 

In 1991, Burchill with her husband Cosmo Landesman and Toby Young launched a short-lived magazine, Modern Review, under the slogan ‘Low culture for high brows’. Also in the early 1990s, Burchill relocated to Brighton. She became one of the city’s most talked-about residents, living out her fondness for seaside sleaze, nightlife and scandal. In 2007, she co-wrote Made in Brighton with Daniel Raven, a rollicking blend of personal memoir and city guide, paying tribute to Brighton’s gay culture, drugs scene, and enduring flair for eccentricity. The book can be previewed on Googlebooks. Here is a sample.  

‘Charlotte [Raven, fellow writer on the Modern Review] also called the old neglected seafront ‘a wonderful prompt for human narratives’ - and looking at the pristine Artists Quarter, Fishing Museum and Volleyball Court, where one’s responses are all cued up and ready to go, you could argue that prosperity has been paid for with sheer seedy character. And that this could be a chic, bustling promenade anywhere from Positano to San Francisco, as the beautiful people linger over a latte and plan a hard day’s antique shopping.

But I’m nit-picking. When it still feels like an honour to live somewhere after eleven years, how bad can it be? And it’s still so not London! Beyond the Palace Pier going east towards the Marina, the chill, slick hand of the style police has not yet crushed Brighton’s grand tradition of agreeable, ramshackle blowsiness, and you can still ride the quaint Volks Railway past the abandoned Peter Pan’s Playground and the desperately dated, utterly adorable ‘nudist beach’. Here Little Englander Modernists like me can find the rusty radiance of the resistance to the global village and the Euro-portion which is summed up in the county motto of Sussex: We Won’t Be Druv.

The revamps, the facelifts and the attempts by a clumsy council to write the indigenous Brighton working class out of the upwardly mobile picture are real enough. But on the beach, you get the distinct feeling that Brighton will never completely pull its socks up. Already the white-flight London breeders who came here to create a vast Nappy Valley - a kind of Clapham-on-Sea - are appalled by our unparalleled drug-taking [. . .] and assorted high jinks. Even between the piers, where the gentrification is most obvious and where every citizen should in theory be shopping for hand-painted objets, the vast dope cloud still rises, like a phoenix in reverse, silently and smilingly refusing to be born-again as an on-message, user-friendly unit of the ongoing British economic miracle which has seen us over the past decade come to work the longest hours in Europe - and along the way become one of its most miserable nations. But time passes so quickly in the blameless, shameless sun, on the eternal beach, where the going out and coming in of the ocean makes the only real sense. A working day can be lost forever in the blink of an eye, in forty winks, in a couple of cans of Stella and a cheeky spliff. And a good thing too.

[. . .]

Now I am one of those maddeningly jammy dodgers. I’ve been here in Brighton for twelve years, and the weird thing is that in the best possible way it still doesn’t feel like home. Instead it feels like I somehow got out of going home - time and time and time again - and that I escaped from the life that had been mapped out for me in the landlocked limbo of London; the slo-mo, stressed-out, wound-down fatalism of growing up and growing old. Now that’s lucky, if you like.’

The top photo is accredited to Dan Chung in a 2014 Guardian article. More on Burchill can be found at Wikipedia,