The Punch and Judy tradition

Punch and Judy arrived on Brighton Beach during the great 19th-century seaside boom and quickly became part of the town’s visual identity. The glove-puppet act that Samuel Pepys first recorded in his diary in 1662 had, by the 1840s, settled into the striped booth familiar from Brighton’s early tourist prints. Local collections hold mid-Victorian puppets explicitly labelled as part of a ‘Brighton Beach’ tradition, and by the Edwardian years a Punch and Judy booth pitched on the shingle with Palace Pier behind it was one of the resort’s standard postcard subjects.

Brighton’s own performers helped weld Mr Punch to the shoreline. A Punch and Judy was once performed by royal command for Queen Victoria at the Royal Pavilion. The West Pier and the promenade around it became the recognised pitch: oral histories, home movies and postcards consistently show a little theatre set up between the West Pier and the bandstand, children in the front row and parents watching from deckchairs. Well into the 20th century a Punch and Judy booth was as dependable a seafront sight as donkeys, kiosks or deckchairs.

Glyn Edwards (see this YouTube recording) became the modern custodian. First captivated by a show under the West Pier in the 1940s, he began performing his own Brighton show in the late 1950s and spent more than half a century working the front. His ‘Original World Famous Brighton Punch and Judy’ effectively made Brighton one of the tradition’s national centres; for decades his striped booth was a summer constant between the piers and later outside the West Pier Centre. Edwards gradually stepped back in the 2010s, giving only occasional performances for heritage events before retiring fully. He died in 2022.

Beginning in 1974, Mike Stone (often known as ‘Sergeant Stone’) operated a classic booth on the beach for around 25-30 seasons - see  My Brighton and Hove). Although he overlapped with Edwards, their roles were different: Edwards was considered the tradition’s public champion, museum/heritage presence, national advocate, long-term ‘brand’ figure. Stone, however, was the day-to-day beach showman, delivering regular summer performances to holiday crowds throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Today the active public-facing Brighton Punch and Judy presence is carried by newer performers, notably Professor Dill, who presents traditional shows under the Brighton Punch and Judy name and keeps the craft visible on the seafront during events and summer bookings. Alongside him, the Brighton Fishing Museum maintains a permanent Punch and Judy display in the old fishing quarter, while the West Pier Trust continues to use Mr Punch as a lively ambassador for seafront heritage through exhibitions and occasional performances. The shows themselves are brisker and a shade gentler than their Victorian forebears, but the essentials - the swazzled voice, slapstick, crocodile and baby - still float out over the shingle.

See also: Brighton Toy and Model Museum; The Guardian; Mary Evans Picture Library; The Regency Society (b&w pic); West Pier Trust; Wikipedia.

Ghost fishing gear

A large mass of ghost fishing gear - i.e. any fishing equipment that has been lost, abandoned, or deliberately discarded at sea and continues to fish on its own! - was removed from Brighton beach Monday after washing ashore overnight. A member of the public alerted the council’s Seafront Office, prompting a rapid coordinated clean-up by staff and volunteers from the Brighton & Hove Seafront Team, Leave No Trace Brighton and the Anglers National Line Recycling Scheme (ANLRS).

The net was a dense tangle of green rope and floats, described by Leave No Trace Brighton as one of the most damaging forms of slow-degrading marine debris. Lost gear of this kind can take centuries to break down, continuing to catch wildlife, abrade seabed habitats, and fragment into microplastics. The team on site - including Abi from the Seafront Office, Coral from Leave No Trace Brighton, and Steve from ANLRS - estimated the haul at roughly 200 kg of plastic.

Once secured, the net was cut, lifted clear of the shingle, and transported off the beach for processing and recycling. Brighton has developed a recognised system for disposing of fishing line and netting since installing dedicated deposit points along the seafront, and the recovered gear will now enter that recycling stream rather than be consigned to landfill.

Removing ghost gear on land is considered critical: once the tide reclaims heavy netting, it can be lost for months or years, drifting through marine habitats and continuing to entangle animals. Yesterday’s operation prevented that cycle from beginning again. 

Although I did not witness this personally, Facebook and Instagram video stills capture the scale of the recovery - a sprawling, buoy-studded mass on the shingle - and the effort required to deal with it quickly. It marks another example of the growing collaboration between council teams, volunteer groups and national schemes to keep Brighton’s coastline clear of harmful debris. This is far from an isolated incident - some four years ago, Brighton and Hove News reported on divers, off the Brighton coast, recovering 400 lb of ghost fishing gear. 

See also Leave No Trace.

The Seaford Chalk Formation

Found on the beach: a lump of wave-worn chalk cracked open to reveal the dark, honeycombed core of a Cretaceous burrow network. The white outer shell is soft Upper Cretaceous chalk, the familiar coccolith-rich limestone that forms the cliffs east of Brighton. Inside lies its harder counterpart, flint, formed when silica gel precipitated around voids in the ancient seabed. Over time the chalk eroded faster than the flint, leaving the interior exposed like a miniature cavern.

The tubes and chambers belong to Thalassinoides, the dominant burrow system of the Seaford Chalk Formation. Created by small crustaceans on a warm Cretaceous sea floor some 85 million years ago, Thalassinoides form semi-ordered meshes of uniform cylindrical tunnels. In life these burrows aerated the soft carbonate mud; in death they provided ready-made moulds for the silica that later hardened into flint. The network here is unusually clear: a continuous dark core threaded with branching passages, visible from several angles where the chalk shell has been scoured away.

Nothing in the piece is modern. The perforations are not the work of piddocks or contemporary worms but the preserved architecture of Cretaceous seabed life, frozen in flint and released again by the waves. What looks at first like an odd skull-shaped pebble is in fact a three-dimensional cross-section through an ancient ecosystem - a Brighton Beach fossil in miniature, shaped by crustaceans, lithification and the long slow abrasion of the Channel.

Sources: The British Geological Survey; Wikipedia; Earthwise

Dying days for roundabout

These are the last days for Brighton’s very own - and rather puny - aquarium roundabout. In early January the city will begin dismantling the small circular traffic island that has shaped movement between Old Steine, Madeira Drive, Marine Parade and Grand Junction Road for more than a century. Indeed, the junction’s roots go back to the 1870s, when Brighton first turned this stretch of shoreline into a grand engineered gateway - now its removal marks the latest phase of the remodelling of Valley Gardens.

The roundabout exists because the Brighton Aquarium, designed by Eugenius Birch, required a new lower promenade, widened sea wall and reconfigured approach roads during construction in 1869-1872. Where the upper Old Steine route dropped to meet the new lower seafront road, a broad, open junction formed at the foot of Marine Parade. At first it was little more than a multi-arm meeting of roads beside the sunken aquarium building and the Chain Pier site, but it quickly became a busy node for cabs, omnibuses and, later, electric trams terminating at the Old Steine stops.

By the 1920s and 1930s rising motor traffic demanded a more formal layout. Photographs from around 1940 already show a functioning roundabout with a central island and circulating flow in front of the Royal Albion Hotel and the aquarium façade, making it one of Brighton’s earliest purpose-built gyratories. After the war it grew into a critical traffic device: the A23 arrived directly into it from London, the A259 wrapped around it along the seafront, and a further arm fed Madeira Drive. Through the 1960s and 1970s engineers widened the circle, added splitter islands, marked lanes, and eventually installed pedestrian crossings and a left-turn bypass, giving the junction the busy, vehicle-dominated form familiar for decades.

By the early 21st century it was handling buses, taxis, cyclists, heavy pedestrian flows to the Palace Pier and large volumes of seafront traffic - a complex, sometimes congested environment often cited as difficult for pedestrians and cyclists (myself included). Its future became tied to the Valley Gardens project, approved in principle in 2013 and written into the 2016 City Plan as a key site needing safer, clearer links between the Royal Pavilion, Old Steine and the beach. Phase 1 and 2 reshaped the roads north of the Steine; Phase 3, underway since late 2024, advances to the seafront itself.

The adopted design replaces the roundabout with a signal-controlled crossroads using linked ‘smart’ lights, wider pavements, continuous cycle tracks and a more legible pedestrian route to the pier. January 2026 was chosen as the quietest time of year, with overnight closures planned for roughly two weeks while the circular island and the approaches are physically removed. On site, preparatory works and signage now cover the old cobbled verge - the first visible steps in dismantling a junction that has stood since the early motor age and which has, over 150 years, evolved from a Victorian civil-engineering by-product into Brighton’s primary seafront gateway.

Sources include My Brighton and Hove.

A home for fishermen

Some 160 years go today - on 7 December 1865 - a home for fisherman on Brighton Beach was opened. The late 1850s had seen behaviour around the fishing boats become a local scandal - contemporary accounts talk about ‘quarrelling, swearing and drunkenness’ among the men in the beer-shops by the shore. A small group of philanthropists, thus, notably Montague Gore and Captain Hall, proposed a ‘Home’ where fishermen could gather warm and dry, away from the pubs.

In 1859 they took their idea to the mayor, Dr Cordy Burrows, who called a public meeting. As a result, one of the brick arches built into the cliff ‘under the parade at the bottom of Ship Street’ was rented and fitted up as the Fishermen’s Home: floored, white-washed, with a glazed entrance, heating, tables and benches, coloured prints and charts on the walls, newspapers, periodicals and a small lending library. It could hold about eighty men. Smoking was allowed, but drink and cards were banned; hot coffee was provided free to members.

To keep the men interested, the committee laid on talks and entertainments. The most important of these were Edward Jesse’s ‘Lectures on Natural History’, delivered in the Home and later published; a Victorian reviewer notes that the room was packed ‘to overflowing’ and credits Jesse’s talks with helping to shift the fishermen’s habits from the ale-house to the Home. John Ackerson Erredge’s History of Brighthelmston also notes that Jesse ‘took an active part in the establishment of the Fishermen’s Home’, and that a bust of him was later placed in the Pavilion in recognition.

The Brighton History Timeline for the 1860s includes an entry for 7 December 1865 - ‘The Fishermen’s Home on the beach is formally opened’. It is most likely this was one of the Kings Road seafront arches immediately west of the Palace Pier, at the foot of Ship Street - the same run of arches that now form the Brighton Fishing Quarter and include the Brighton Fishing Museum at 201 Kings Road Arches. Modern descriptions of the museum place it ‘within the seafront arches between the Palace Pier and the i360, at the bottom of Ship Street,’ which matches exactly the Victorian description of the Fishermen’s Home’s original arch.

Sources: Brighton Gazette 6 October 1859, Brighton Examiner 12 October 1859, Brighton Gazette 7 December 1865

John Ackerson Erredge, The History of Brighthelmston, or Brighton as I View it and Others Knew it 

Lectures on Natural History; Delivered at the ‘Fisherman’s Home’ Brighton

Image (which is dated to the 1860s but does not show the home) courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove

The famous Brighton novel

Brighton has inspired scores of writers, but none has left a deeper mark on the seafront than Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The novel, which has been published in hundreds of editions (see Good Reads), portrays the beach, the pier and the summer crowds as a stage of glittering daylight and hidden menace, a version of the city so sharply drawn that anyone crossing the shingle can still feel its shadow.

Graham Greene, born in Berkhamsted in 1904, spent long stretches of his early career as a journalist and later as a roving novelist and reviewer. His first known stay in Brighton came during the mid-1930s, when he took rooms near the front while researching a short story; he returned repeatedly while working on Brighton Rock in 1937, walking the Palace Pier, the racecourse, the lower promenade and the warren of streets behind the seafront. (The photograph of him below was taken in 1939 not long after Brighton Rock was published for the first time in 1938.)

Although the town appears in several of his other works, it is Brighton Rock that locked the place into his imagination. The novel follows Pinkie Brown, a teenaged gang leader determined to cover up a murder on the seafront. He courts and marries the innocent waitress Rose to prevent her testifying, while the indomitable Ida Arnold, half sleuth and half conscience, pushes back against his fatalism. The story is set largely between the pier, the racecourse, the shabby boarding houses off the front and the bars and kiosks that once crowded the lower esplanade. Its famous opening, set just yards from the beach, establishes at once the collision of sunlit day-trippers and the violence brewing beneath. The Brighton of the book carries the familiar rhythms of the beach in season - music, heat, the gulls, the press of crowds - but all refracted through Greene’s stark moral universe of damnation, innocence, chance and fear.

In world literature, Brighton Rock occupies a rare place as both a crime novel and a major novel of belief. Its Catholic undertow - Pinkie’s terror of damnation, Rose’s trust in redemption, Ida’s secular certainty - gives it a depth beyond the gangster genre. Critics routinely class it among Greene’s finest works, alongside The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter, and it remains a touchstone for how fiction can convert an ordinary English seaside town into a theatre of metaphysical conflict. For Brighton, the book is an ambivalent gift: it fixed the Palace Pier, the shingle, the boarding houses and the summer crowds into an international literary image that still shadows the real beach today. (Sources include Notre Dame Magazine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the full book can be read online at Internet Archive. Green’s own much later introduction to the novel can be read in this edition.)

Here, then, are the great novel’s opening paragraphs, so quickly drawing the reader in: ‘Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong - belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.

It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost. in Brighton. Fifty thousand people besides himself were down for the day, and for quite a while he gave himself up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics wherever his programme allowed. For he had to stick closely to a programme: from ten till eleven Queen’s Road and Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle Square, and after that he had to make his way all down the parade to the West Pier and then to the station by the Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and widely advertised sentry go.

Advertised on every Messenger poster: “Kolley Kibber in Brighton to-day.” In his pocket he had a packet of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route: those who found them would receive ten shillings from the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for whoever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and with a copy of the Messenger in his hand: “You are Mr. Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize.” This was Hale’s job to do sentry go, until a challenger released him, in every seaside town in turn: yesterday Southend, to-day Brighton, tomorrow -’

NB: ‘Sentry go’ is an old military phrase meaning a turn of sentry duty - a shift of walking a set route, keeping watch, following a fixed pattern until relieved.

Lost Mary found

Found on the beach: Lost Mary. This BM6000 Triple Berry disposable vape is a sub-brand of Elf Bar, made by Shenzhen iMiracle Technology in China. It is a high-capacity, single-use device with a lithium-ion battery and pre-filled nicotine salt e-liquid, non-refillable and not intended for disassembly or routine recycling. According to Wikipedia, Elf Bar’s vapour products are known for their fruity flavours and colourful appearance and were, by 2023, the world’s most popular disposable e-cigarettes.

These vapes have become a common form of coastal litter across the UK. Beach-clean groups consistently report rising numbers of single-use vapes on Brighton’s shoreline, where they join other modern waste such as wet wipes and bottle caps (see this Argus article from 2023). The devices leak plastic fragments, residual nicotine solution and small amounts of battery metals into the environment and must be disposed of as electrical waste, though in practice most end up in general rubbish or on the street.

Nothing about the brand name ‘Lost Mary’ has an official explanation. It was probably crafted to sound personal and provide a narrative, suggesting a figure who is ‘lost’ in a way that aligns with the escapist themes often used in vape marketing, reinforced by pastel, dreamlike packaging. Some reviewers have speculated that ‘Mary’ nods to the slang ‘Mary Jane,’ giving the brand a faint counter-cultural echo without referencing cannabis directly.

UK Vape Scene offers this review: ‘I opted for the Fizzy Cherry flavour, and once the super-quick setup was complete, I was now ready to start vaping. My initial first few puffs on the device were great - the flavour was very tasty without being overly sweet, and Lost Mary seem to have nailed the airflow. There isn't any airflow adjustability which can sometimes be a problem with other kits, but for me the default setting on the BM6000 was just how I would have set it anyway. Although the flavour was great, the one thing I didn't like too much was the nicotine hit. Being someone who uses 10mg nic salts in my usual vape, doubling my strength to 20mg was something I couldn’t get used to right away. Don’t get me wrong, the hit was smooth and wasn't very harsh but it was noticeably more intense than what I usually get from my 10mg Ultimate Nerd Salts.’

In memory of the Palace Theatre

One hundred and thirty years ago - on 4 December 1896 - a violent winter storm tore through Brighton and shattered the already-condemned Royal Suspension Chain Pier, its timbers battering the under-construction Palace Pier and scattering wreckage along the seafront. The loss cleared the last obstacles to completing the new pleasure pier - and with it the Palace Pier Theatre, the end-of-the-pier playhouse that would dominate Brighton’s skyline and seaside entertainment for much of the 20th century.

The Brighton Marine Palace and Pier Company had begun work in 1891, but money and engineering problems meant the pier opened in stages. A 1,760-foot promenade deck with oriental domes and minarets welcomed its first visitors on 20 May 1899. The ‘marine palace’ proper - a large pier-head pavilion with a 1,500-seat hall ringed by dining, smoking and reading rooms - was finished in early 1901, and opened on 3 April with a concert by the Pavilion Orchestra and the town’s Sacred Harmonic Society for some 1,500 guests.

Initially more concert hall than playhouse, the pavilion was remodelled in 1910-1911 as a full theatre and café. Its Moorish exterior - arcades, minarets, a great domed roof - remained, but inside it gained raked seating, a deep stage and improved backstage areas. With around 1,300-1,500 seats looking out over a proscenium arch set above the sea, the reworked Palace Pier Theatre specialised in variety and music-hall attractions. Brighton quickly became a key date on the national circuits: both Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin honed early routines here before leaving for America.

From the start the pier-head building was used inventively. Alongside orchestral series and choral festivals, it was showing moving pictures by 1907. Film impresario James J. Russell secured exclusive rights in November 1909 to screen certain Kinemacolor films in Brighton, making the pier one of the town’s earliest regular cinema venues. Programmes mixed films with live variety long before that became common elsewhere, with audiences stepping straight from the promenade into songs, sketches and coloured films while the Channel rolled beneath the piles.

Between the wars the theatre settled into the classic end-of-the-pier pattern: long summer seasons, touring plays and one-week engagements testing new work. It became an important pre-London try-out house, with productions such as ‘Dr Syn’ (1926), ‘Dr Angelus’ and ‘Cosh Boy’ running here before wider tours or West End success. Legitimate drama and variety sat side by side, feeding promenade crowds into matinees and two-house nights.

The theatre closed during the Second World War, reopening in 1946 to resume summer shows. The post-war years are often remembered as its heyday. Performers’ memoirs list comedian Tommy Trinder, Elsie and Doris Waters, Dick Emery, Gertie Gitana and Gracie Fields among those appearing in pier revues or nostalgic ‘Music Hall at the Palace’ bills. Variety and panto regulars such as Bob and Alf Pearson and Nat Jackley featured in a 1973 ‘Music Hall at the Palace’ programme - one of the last surviving records of its casting. For performers like Margery Manners, the Palace Pier stage remained a prestigious stop alongside venues such as the Palladium and Liverpool’s Royal Court.

By the 1950s and 1960s the theatre followed a steady rhythm: brisk summer variety, winter and spring runs of plays and thrillers, and occasional cinema or special events. Local exhibitors, including Myles Byrne - later associated with the Brighton Film Theatre - helped run it as part of a wider circuit of cinemas and live venues. For audiences the setting was as memorable as the bill: walking out along the boards, buying a programme in the sea breeze, then stepping through Moorish arches into a plush, enclosed auditorium with the tide surging below.

The end was abrupt. In 1973 a storm tore a 70-ton barge from its moorings at the landing stage; driven by waves, it smashed into the pier-head and ripped away deck and ironwork around the theatre. Badly damaged, the building never reopened. Brighton theatre historians date its working life as 1901-1940 and 1946-1973, with the 1973 storm effectively closing it for good. When the pier was sold to the Noble Organisation in 1984, permission to remove the derelict theatre was granted on the understanding that a new one would be built. Instead, in 1986 the old auditorium was demolished and replaced by a tubular-steel geodesic ‘Pleasure Dome’ of amusement machines, the pier-head beyond filled with rides and rollercoasters - a clear shift from live performance to fairground operations.

The programme cover above is taken from Palace Pier by Albert Bullock and Peter Medcalf; and the two other images are from  Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. Sources and more pictures: Arthur Lloyd, Brighton Pier, Wikipedia.

Guest: Brighton Beach, Adelaide, South Australia

At dawn, the concrete jetty at Brighton Beach reaches into the Gulf St Vincent, its pylons mirrored in a sheet of receding tide. Each February hundreds of swimmers dive from this same beach in the Brighton Jetty Classic, racing in a loop around the structure that replaced the storm-wrecked timber jetty of 1886. Children fish from the railings, paddle-boarders idle offshore, and in the mornings the Esplanade cafés fill with runners cooling down over flat whites. Brighton, thirteen kilometres south of Adelaide’s centre, has long balanced small-town charm with metropolitan reach. (NB: this is the last of BrightonBeach365’s 12 guest beaches.)

Before settlement this was Kaurna Country, known as Witu-wattingga - ‘in the midst of peppermint gums’. European settlers arrived in the 1840s, opening a post office in 1849 and a town hall twenty years later. The first jetty drew excursionists from Adelaide, and by the 1920s Brighton had become a tram-linked suburb. The dunes were reshaped for recreation, hotels multiplied, and the surf lifesaving club emerged from local swimmers’ patrols. In 1934 the Brighton Swimming Club joined with the St Vincent’s Life Saving Club to form what is now the Brighton Surf Life Saving Club, still patrolling the sands.

Each Jan/Feb, the shoreline becomes more than a place for sea and sun - it becomes a gallery. The Brighton Jetty Sculptures exhibition, launched in 2008, now displays more than 200 works along the foreshore and beneath marquees in the reserve. The sculptures range from large steel forms to delicate ceramics, their sales supporting both artists and the surf club. The event has become South Australia’s largest outdoor art show, drawing thousands of visitors to wander between beach and artwork, the Gulf providing a shifting blue backdrop.

Today the suburb’s wide beach is prized for its safety and its sunsets. The Esplanade has evolved from seaside cottages to modern apartments, and Brighton Road is undergoing a $30 million upgrade to ease the coastal traffic. Offshore, though, the environment has been unpredictable. A massive algal bloom in 2025 brought marine die-offs to Brighton and neighbouring beaches, prompting a state-funded clean-up and a $100 million resilience plan, including dining-cash-back vouchers to help coastal businesses recover. Yet the beach remains lively: dog-walkers at dawn, cafés spilling onto Jetty Road, the open-water race each summer. Behind the dunes, replanting schemes restore native grasses and peppermint gums to stabilise the sand.

Brighton has weathered storms before - the loss of its first jetty, years of erosion, suburban sprawl - and each time it rebuilds. Its concrete jetty, the sculptures on the shore, and the steady patrols of the surf club all speak to the same coastal endurance. On calm evenings, as the tide laps at the pylons and the last swimmers wade ashore, Brighton Beach still feels exactly what its founders imagined: a resilient stretch of sea-edge community on the southern fringe of Adelaide.

Other sources: Wikipedia, As We Travelled, City of Holdfast Bay.

Out and Along and Over

Here is the 22nd 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 Thi image shows three people riding in a small, bright red-trimmed speedboat skimming over rough stylised blue and green waves. The boat’s wooden decking is sharply angled, two passengers sit at the back, with a helmsman at the front. The sea curves beneath them in bold, flowing bands, and above them a wide expanse of blue sky is broken by big, rounded white clouds. Off to the left, a red sail or distant vessel adds a point of contrast on the horizon.

Limerick

A day-tripping trio left shore

In a boat that was really quite poor;

When it smacked through a swell

They all yelled, ‘Bloody hell!’

‘That’s an oath,’ they added, ‘not a port we’d aim for.’

Out and Along and Over (loosely inspired by the rhythms of James Joyce)

They shot out from the shingle as if the whole beach had given them a shove. A jerk, a cough of the engine, and then the little red prow lifting, nosing, finding its run along the bright-slap water. Tom felt it under him, the shudder and lift, the hard rattle in his knees, and he thought, yes, this is it now, this is the going, the real going, and not the standing and watching and saying one day, one day. Behind him the pier stretched its legs into the sea, iron and timber, rattling with music and gulls and the clank of rides starting up, and all along the shore the people like shells scattered, small and safe and stayed.

His father had both hands on the wheel, knuckles yellow, grinning into the wind that peeled his cheeks back, and every now and then he’d glance to the side, to the left where the open ran out to France, to everything else, and to the right where Brighton curled round on itself with its terraces and hotels and its white-faced houses pretending not to look at the water. The boy watched his father’s eyes and thought of how they looked at the kitchen table, grey then, and how they looked now, lit from below by the jump of the waves and the fat high sun.

‘Hold on there, Tommy boy,’ he shouted, and the sound was whipped away, cut to bits by the speed and the salt. Tom laughed but the laugh stayed in his chest, a rising bubble, and he dug his fingers into the warm rail, feeling every bolt, every scar where the paint had run or been scraped back by someone else’s summer.

Beside him Mum sat forward, one hand on the side, one hand in the air pointing at nothing in particular - a buoy, a line of foam, a flash of glass in the west where the drowned pier lay flat as a drawing on the water. Her hair flew back and slapped her face and she pushed it away and laughed, a proper laugh, not the small kitchen laugh, and in her eyes he saw the beach as it had been before him, before Dad, Brighton before Brighton, a strip of stones and a strip of sea and the old idea of going, always going, out and along and over.

And the boat ran on, skimming the chopped blue, throwing its own white script behind it, a long curling sentence on the water that said: we were here, we passed, we were going, we went.

The Fortune of War

Tucked into the Kings Road Arches between the piers, the Fortune of War has traded in some form on the beach since the 1870s, when Louis Pagani ran a refreshment bar on the lower esplanade, serving beer straight onto the shingle. By 1882 it was firmly established as a licensed beer house in one of the new arches, part of the council’s effort to let out the lower promenade to traders who could serve Brighton’s booming excursion crowds. Early accounts describe a simple open-fronted bar with drinkers spilling across the pebbles.

The pub’s nautical identity came later. The present upturned-boat interior - the curved ribs, heavy timber and rope rails - emerged gradually through twentieth-century refits. By the post-war years the ‘ship’s-hull bar’ was already a Brighton curiosity, sitting amid fishermen’s craft, deckchair concessions and the daily bustle of the working beach. In the 1950s and 1960s it became part of a busy strip of seafront music bars remembered for accordions, drums and early rock and roll played almost on the tide line.

The pub survived later waves of nightclub competition by trading on its eccentricity and location. By the 1990s it was often described as the last true beach-side pub in Brighton, a below-deck refuge outlasting themed neighbours along Kings Road. Ownership had by then settled with the company now known as Laine Pub Company, the major local operator whose Brighton portfolio also includes several of the city’s best-known venues. Day-to-day management has been handled on site, most notably by Laurence Hill, who by 2015 had run the pub for more than six years and publicly aligned it with the local Living Wage campaign.

In 2014 the Fortune of War was forced to close temporarily after structural issues in the arches above prompted emergency engineering works to the road and promenade. It reopened with renewed emphasis on DJs, live music and seasonal outdoor service, strengthening its long-standing claim to being Brighton’s oldest beach-level pub. Its ‘beer garden’ remains the central stretch of shingle, animated from midday to late night through the summer.

As for the name Fortune of War, this comes from an old seafaring and military phrase capturing the sheer luck that governed life on campaign or at sea, a fatalistic acceptance that storms, battles, wrecks, or windfalls could change a man’s prospects overnight. Pubs with the name clustered in port towns and garrison districts from the 18th century onwards, and Brighton’s own beach-level version long traded on that heritage, its arches and terraces nodding to the hazards and hopes bound up with Channel fishing, merchant crews, and the town’s maritime identity.

Sources: Camra, The Guardian, My Brighton and Hove, Living Wage (source of the portrait above), Restaurants Brighton, and Wikipedia.