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.