The Brighton Reduction

Here is the 17th of 24 stained glass window designs on the Palace Pier which AI and I are using as inspiration for some of these BrightonBeach365 daily posts - see Stained Glass Window 1 for background. One might see this image as an abstract landscape scene made of coloured shapes. Below are layered blue and turquoise forms suggesting water. Above are green and brown rounded shapes that resemble hills or fields. Higher up, soft beige and light green tones appear like distant rolling hills. At the top, pink and lavender shapes resemble clouds or a sky tinged with soft light.

A limerick starter

A hillside of blobs blue and green,

With clouds that look oddly obscene,

The mountains all bend,

Where no rivers descend,

A landscape both lumpy and clean.

The Brighton Reduction (with apologies to J.G. Ballard)

The last tourists arrived on a Friday afternoon, their coaches idling on the front while drivers smoked in the lee of the Palace Pier. They spilled onto the shingle in the usual choreography - sunhats, selfie-sticks, chips in cardboard trays - but something in their gait betrayed a hesitation. The sea no longer looked like sea. From the shoreline outwards it unrolled in flat turquoise planes, one after another, each without sound, as if a giant had pressed the surf beneath a sheet of glass. The air was heavy, a silence broken only by the cries of gulls that circled higher than normal, as though afraid to descend.

By the West Pier’s wreckage, a group of students sketched the horizon. They told each other that the Downs had shifted shape in the night. The ridges beyond Hollinbury now resembled swollen mounds of green enamel, smooth and depthless. The fields appeared as luminous discs of beige, stacked in tiers like a diagram of the earth’s crust. Clouds passed overhead in soft slabs of pink and violet, no longer responsive to wind but drifting according to some private geometry.

No authority acknowledged the transformation. The council issued bulletins about water quality and lifeguard patrols, as if the flattened surf were nothing more than a minor anomaly. The Argus ran a front-page photograph under the headline Another Record Summer Expected. Yet anyone who lingered on the beach knew the world had begun to surrender detail. Pebbles lost their speckles, reduced to uniform ellipses. Beach huts faded into primary blocks. Even the i360 seemed less a tower than a single unbroken line drawn against the sky.

A retired teacher named Meredith returned every morning with her binoculars. She had once catalogued the wildflowers along the promenade, recording the subtle shift of colour and petal. Now the planters yielded only solid discs of green. ‘It’s not erosion,’ she told anyone who would listen. ‘It’s design. The place is redesigning itself.’ Few paid attention; the visitors still wanted their ice creams and their photographs.

One evening, as the sun lowered into the sea, a strange glow filled the beach. The light had no source - it seemed to seep from the flat horizons themselves. Couples packing away towels paused, their shadows no longer falling behind them but spreading in perfect circles around their feet. A boy kicked at the surf and watched his leg pass through a turquoise panel that closed again without a ripple. When he pulled his foot back the skin was unnaturally smooth, like polished stone.

The following week, coaches stopped coming. The esplanade emptied except for a few solitary figures staring across the new landscape, waiting for some sign of reversal. But the sea continued to harden into pure planes, the hills into abstract domes, the sky into coloured strata. Brighton Beach had shed the clutter of its past - the piers, the bathers, the trivial architecture of pleasure - and revealed its true intention. It was becoming a diagram, a place stripped to its elements, ready for an order that was utterly indifferent to memory, or to man.