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.