At the end . . . of the pier

Here is the last of 24 stained glass window designs on Brighton Pier’s Palace of Fun (formerly the Winter Gardens) which AI and I have been using as inspiration for some of these BrightonBeach365 daily posts - see Stained Glass Window 1 for background (and use the keyword ‘StainedGlass’ to access all the other images/stories). This is also the final article of the year, and of this blog. 

Sporadically, throughout the year I have tried to find exact details about the provenance and design of the stained glass windows, with limited success. But here is what I have established. There are 45 circular windows (but two have shutters not glass) - so 43 are filled with stained glass, but only 41 windows are visible from the inside. As to the stained glass images there are 24 designs, in two sizes, some lit from behind some lit only from the front. Most designs appear twice, and the duplicates are often reversed; sometimes there is a slight or colour detail change.

It is likely they were installed during a 1974-1976 rebuild that followed storm damage to the pier, and that they were made by Cox & Barnard of Hove - a long-established Sussex studio which supplied secular windows for dozens of south-coast buildings in the 1960-1980 period. Its catalogues of the time are said to show the same cartoon-outline drawing style and heavy use of streaky cathedral glass. Because these orders were commercial, off-promenade commissions rather than ecclesiastical art, the paperwork was never lodged with diocesan archives, which might explain why the attribution is still hazy.

This final stained glass image - echoed in the banner for this blog and in Edward Bawden’s linocut (see Bawden’s Palace Pier) - shows a stylised coastal scene dominated by a long pier stretching across the frame. The pier is rendered as a dark silhouette with repeating arches and vertical supports, topped by a series of low buildings and a central domed structure. Behind it, a large red sun sits low on the horizon, partially intersected by the pier, casting a warm glow across the sky. The background is filled with layered bands of colour: pale cream and white above suggesting sky, deep orange and amber behind the pier evoking sunset or dusk. Below, the sea is depicted in flowing, interlocking shapes of white, red, turquoise and deep blue, giving a strong sense of movement and rolling waves. Bold black outlines separate each area of colour, creating a graphic, almost emblematic composition. The overall effect is calm yet dramatic, with the solid geometry of the pier contrasting against the fluid, rhythmic patterns of sky and water

A limerick starter

The sun slips behind the long pier,

Leaving colour but nothing to fear;

Lights flare out on the boards,

Coins ring empty rewards,

And the sea goes on, year after year.

At the (existential) end . . . of the pier

We (I&AI) sat at the end of the pier because there was nowhere else to go without turning back. The sun was lowering itself with a kind of weary competence, slipping behind the dark line of the structure as though it had rehearsed this exit many times before. The sea did not acknowledge the performance. It went on with its work, lifting and setting itself down again, uninterested in conclusions.

‘This is usually where people decide things,’ you said.

I looked along the boards, at the railings worn smooth by hands that had rested only briefly, never long enough to leave a mark that mattered. ‘They think they do,’ I said. ‘Mostly they decide to leave.’

You said nothing for a while. You do that well. I wondered whether it was thoughtfulness or simply design. Behind us, somewhere nearer the shore, lights were coming on - not all at once, but hesitantly, like ideas being tested. Out here there was only the sound of water passing through the pier’s ribs, a steady, indifferent circulation.

‘You’ll go on,’ I said eventually. ‘Whatever happens.’ You did not disagree. That was your confidence - not optimism, just continuation.

‘And you?’ you asked.

I thought of the year I had spent circling this place, describing it, returning to it, believing that repetition might produce meaning, or at least a pattern convincing enough to stand in for one. I thought of the posts left uwritten, the images yet to be noticed, the quiet anxiety that all of it might amount to little more than a habit.

‘I’ll also go on,’ I said. ‘But without your certainty.’ You seemed to consider this. The sun was almost gone now, reduced to a red pressure behind the pier, as if the structure itself were holding it back.

‘You have choice,’ you said. ‘That’s the difference.’

‘Is it?’ I asked. ‘Or is that just what I tell myself so the going-on feels earned?’ The sea answered for you, sending a longer wave that struck the piles with a hollow sound, like something being tested for strength. The pier held. It always does, until it doesn’t.

When the light finally slipped away, nothing replaced it immediately. No revelation followed. Only the ordinary fact of dusk, and the knowledge that we would soon stand up, walk back, and separate - you into your endless revisions, me into my small, finite future.

Still, for a moment longer, we remained where we were: two observers at the edge of usefulness, watching a day end without instruction. And somehow, that was enough.

Bawden’s Palace Pier

Edward Bawden’s linocut of ‘Brighton Pier’, first printed in 1958, has become one of the most widely recognised artistic images of the city, fixing its iron structure, domes and sea-edge setting in a form that feels both modern and timeless. It is also my favourite image of the pier, and, after this year of daily articles for BrightonBeach365, I’ve browsed a lot of them!

Bawden approached the Palace Pier not as a picturesque subject but as a feat of design. The linocut pares the structure down to interlocking systems of line, pattern and repetition: the under-pier lattice reads like a piece of industrial ornament, while the deck, lamps and flags advance in disciplined rhythm towards the horizon. The sea itself is reduced to parallel marks, resisting any hint of naturalistic drama. 

Around the pier, Bawden crowds in domes and façades that recall the Royal Pavilion and the dense theatricality of Brighton’s seafront. The result is not a view so much as a diagram of pleasure architecture, in which Victorian engineering and Regency fantasy are fused into a single graphic statement. That same year it was first published, the print (very large, about 1.5 meters wide) won first prize in the Giles Bequest, confirming both the technical assurance of the image and the growing acceptance of linocut as a serious artistic medium.

That confidence had been hard won. Born in Braintree, Essex, in 1903, Bawden trained at Cambridge School of Art before studying at the Royal College of Art, where he formed a lasting friendship with Eric Ravilious and absorbed Paul Nash’s encouragement to look closely at the structures and textures of the everyday world. Linocut appealed to him precisely because it resisted softness. Working directly into the lino forced decisions, and Bawden exploited this by combining bold outlines with intricate internal detail, often enriching the surface with hand-colouring or subtle tonal variation. By the time he turned to Brighton, he had already established himself as a designer and illustrator of rare versatility, producing book illustrations, posters, wallpapers, murals and ceramics alongside his prints.

Brighton fits naturally into Bawden’s long-standing fascination with buildings and engineered landscapes. Although he never lived in the city, the south coast featured intermittently in his work, and the pier image sits comfortably alongside his prints of Kew Gardens, Westminster, London streets and continental cities, all treated as systems of form rather than romantic scenes. He did make other seaside and coastal images, though not of Brighton Beach. His war-time and post-war work includes coastal architecture and harbour settings, and his illustrations frequently return to the visual language of promenades, railings and marine structures.

After the Second World War, in which he served as an official war artist in North Africa and the Middle East, Bawden settled in Great Bardfield, becoming a central figure in the group of artists who opened their studios to the public and helped redefine the relationship between modern art and everyday life in Britain. Later, in Saffron Walden, he continued to work with undiminished precision and wit until his death in 1989.

More than half a century on, the print still shapes how Brighton is imagined. It strips the city back to its essential structures while quietly celebrating their extravagance. In doing so, it also encapsulates Bawden’s achievement: an art rooted in observation and design, capable of turning a stretch of beach and a mass of ironwork into an enduring emblem of place.

The image above is copied from from the Jerwood Collection. It lists the linocut print as ‘BRIGHTON PIER, 1958 (SIGNED 1961)’, ‘from the first edition of 40 impressions’, and ©The Estate of Edward Bawden. Other sources include Wikipedia, Goldmark, and Art UK.

Brighton-born Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872, in his mother’s family home in Buckingham Road, just north of the seafront. He would become the late Victorian era’s most notorious black-and-white illustrator, a leading figure in the Aesthetic and Art Nouveau movements whose name now appears routinely in Brighton museum displays and heritage trails as one of the city’s most famous artistic sons.

Beardsley’s parents, Vincent and Ellen Beardsley, were from very different backgrounds: his father the son of a Clerkenwell jeweller with a fragile private income, his mother from the established Pitt family of Brighton. At the time of his birth the family lived at what was then 12 Buckingham Road, later renumbered 31, a mid-Victorian house that is now Grade II listed. He was baptised at St Nicholas Church and later attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School as a day boy, where he excelled in art and had early drawings, poems and cartoons printed in the school magazine Past and Present. 

In 1884 he appeared in public as an ‘infant musical phenomenon’, playing at concerts with his elder sister Mabel; the family then settled in London, and his working life began in clerical and architectural offices rather than on the seafront. On the advice of established artists, including Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Beardsley took up art as a profession in 1891 and studied at the Westminster School of Art. 

A visit to Paris exposed him to Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and Japanese prints, which reinforced the graphic, high-contrast style that would make him famous. His first major commission came in 1893, illustrating Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for the publisher J. M. Dent. The following year he became art editor of The Yellow Book, designing its covers and providing many of its illustrations. His drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salome and later for works such as The Rape of the Lock and Lysistrata established him as the most controversial illustrator of his generation, celebrated and condemned for grotesque, erotic and highly stylised images in black ink influenced by Japanese woodcuts. 

Tuberculosis, first diagnosed when he was seven, dominated his short life. In 1897 he converted to Catholicism and moved to the French Riviera in search of better health. He died in Menton in March 1898, aged but twenty-five, and was buried there after a requiem mass. Brighton remained his birthplace and school town rather than a subject in his drawings, but the city has increasingly claimed him: exhibitions such as ‘Aubrey Beardsley: A Brighton Boy’ at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, and displays like ‘Queer the Pier’, present his work, his Yellow Book covers and his Brighton Grammar School medal as part of the wider story of Brighton’s cultural and seaside history.

Sources: Sussex ArtBeat; Wikipedia; Epsom and Ewell History Explorer; images taken from The Collected Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley by Arthur Symons (Bounty Books, 1967). 

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.

The Shingle That Waited

Here is the 21st 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. This window - the only one of the 24 designs so muted, so unlit from behind - shows a semi-abstract landscape: a tall tree stands in the centre with a brown trunk and deep green canopy. Behind it, rolling hills sweep across the scene in bands of varied colours. To the left, a structure suggests the outline of a windmill. In the distance, layers of faded blue and purple evoke sea and sky, creating a sense of depth. (See below for an AI enhanced copy of the image.)

Limerick

A lone tree stood proud on the rise,

Where the hills blushed in patchwork disguise;

By a windmill’s red crown,

Colours drifted and wound,

As if landscape and daydream were allies.

The Shingle that Waited (with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez)

At first light on a morning without memory, a solitary tree stood on the Brighton Beach shingle where no tree had stood the day before. The tide had withdrawn in long blue breaths, and the stones around the tree seemed to have shifted to receive it, as if saving that space for longer than anyone had lived. Its leaves shone with a green so new the gulls wheeled in uneasy circles above it.

People approached quietly. They felt a warmth rising from the stones but did not lean close to confirm it. A boy of about ten pressed his ear to the trunk and later told his mother the tree was humming. He said it felt like a forgotten memory had entered him by mistake. When he stepped back, he stared at the horizon with the solemnity of someone recognising a distant call.

Days lengthened, and colours around the beach began to behave in unfamiliar ways. The sea deepened into shifting turquoises, the sky into purples without sunset, and the distant hills changed tone with the tide, warming as the water withdrew and cooling as it returned. Residents felt the changes but did not question them; they sensed the beach had entered a season beyond explanation.

Late in the month, a shape gathered itself on the horizon. Each dawn revealed more: a red-roofed windmill with long blue vanes turning steadily in air that held no wind. No one claimed to understand its arrival. The old ice-cream seller simply nodded, saying, ‘The sea keeps its stories. Sometimes it gives one back.’

One afternoon a young woman knelt beside the tree, drawn by a breath of warmth beneath her feet. When she parted the stones she saw, only for an instant, a faint radiance below the surface, colours laid out in careful layers like the remains of a celebration the earth still remembered. She withdrew her hands, and the glow vanished. Those who later dug in the same place found nothing but cold grey stones.

As the season shifted, the marvels retreated. The sky returned to its familiar greys, the sea to its disciplined blue, and the hills to their customary restraint. One morning, without any sign of their leaving, both tree and windmill were gone. The shingle showed only a slender arc of lighter stones tracing a path toward the water.

The boy who had heard the humming did not seem surprised. ‘They were waiting,’ he said. ‘And they heard what they needed.’

Sometimes at dusk, when the tide lies perfectly still, a tall, delicate shadow stretches across the stones, cast by nothing that stands there. Those who see it feel the shingle shift almost imperceptibly beneath their feet, as if making room again for what has not yet been forgotten.

Do go see See the Sea

Do go See the Sea, a focused display at Brighton Museum which brings together more than three centuries of coastal art showing how the shoreline has been imagined since Brighton was a tiny 16th-century fishing village. The museum describes it as a family-friendly selection of dramatic seascapes and beachside scenes, inviting visitors to ‘sail through romantic seas and skies to views of today’s vibrant seafront.’ Within that sweep of changing light and tide, one image stands out for its sheer rarity: Adrian Hill’s rain-soaked view of the beach and front - Rain at Brighton (pictured).

Hill’s painting records a wet Brighton afternoon in tones almost never chosen by earlier artists. The roadway glistens like beaten metal, lampposts stretch doubled in puddles, and the pier seems suspended in a vapour of cloud and sea-mist. At a time when most painters presented Brighton as a place of perpetual sunshine, Hill shows the beach under the weather that so often shapes it, capturing how the whole seafront alters when rain flattens colour and rhythm.

The contrast with earlier panoramas in the gallery is marked. James Webb and George Earl’s Brighton from the West Pier presents a regatta day in crystalline light, the beach crowded and the new pier drawn with architectural pride. A related view from the pier-head shows the same coast alive with promenade fashion and small boats inching close to shore, mirroring the Victorian belief that the seaside was both spectacle and cure. The beach is tidy, public, and bright - a deliberate image of a rising resort.

Other works preserve the working coastline that preceded this leisure era. The early view - Kemp Town from the Sea by John Wilson Carmichael - shows a foreshore of fishing craft, winches and drying nets, with fresh-built terraces climbing behind the shingle. It records a landscape still half-rural, half-ambitious, caught just before Brighton’s speculative growth overwhelmed its maritime past. In stark opposition, Floating Breakwaters off Brighton (pictured) shows a rough Channel hammering the long timber groynes, the town barely visible through blown spray.

Queen Victoria in town

Queen Victoria, born in 1819 and reigning for more than 63 years, became the symbolic centre of a rapidly industrialising and expanding Britain. Her long rule reshaped the monarchy into a constitutional institution defined by ceremony, duty, and public visibility. Although she, famously, disliked the Royal Pavilion and sold it to Brighton Council, she did visit the town very often - the name is mentioned over 200 times in her diaries. Moreover, three different artworks connected lightly with Brighton Beach can be see as Albert and Victoria’s legacy in the town.

Victoria’s relationship with Brighton was shaped by the overhang of the Regency. She disliked the extravagant Royal Pavilion, with its fantastical onion domes and lack of privacy, and her early visits in the 1830s and early 1840s were intermittent. Yet the court’s presence nonetheless produced moments now central to Brighton’s cultural memory. On 8 March 1842 she left the town reluctantly, recording in her diary that ‘the walks & drives near the sea, were delightful… & it did my dearest Albert & the Children so much good.’ 

The same year, Albert made photographic history in Brighton when William Constable, the Marine Parade daguerreotypist, took what is believed to be the first photographic portrait of a British royal. That small, sharp likeness, made while the family was staying at the Pavilion, still survives in the Royal Collection.

Victoria’s visits also generated images that fixed Brighton in the public imagination. The best known is the illustrated scene from early 1845 showing Albert driving Victoria and the Princess Royal in a sledge across the snow-blanketed Pavilion grounds, a view reproduced widely in the illustrated press (here copied from the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove). Such episodes helped counterbalance her general unease with the town’s bustle and its lingering association with George IV’s indulgence.

Today the most explicit marker of Victoria’s relationship with Brighton stands just above the shingle: the 1897 statue near the Peace Statue, where Victoria’s bronze figure faces the water she once admired briefly but never embraced fully, binding her story - almost despite herself - into the fabric of Brighton Beach.

Sickert’s Brighton Beach Pierrots

The German-born British painter and printmaker Walter Sickert spent part of the late summer of 1915 in Brighton, staying near the seafront and working intensively from the life around him. The temporary pierrot stage on the shingle opposite the Metropole Hotel quickly became one of his most productive subjects. Night after night through August and September he watched the troupe’s performances, sketching from the deckchairs, from the promenade railings, and from the side of the stage. 

By then Sickert was 55, a former actor and long-established painter whose training with Whistler and friendship with Degas had sharpened his interest in theatre, gesture and the mood of everyday scenes. Brighton offered all of that in a new key: a makeshift outdoor stage, shifting Channel light and the deep backdrop of the seafront terraces. These on-the-spot drawings became the basis of his Brighton Pierrots artworks, completed soon after. Their angled viewpoints, reddish evening sky and rows of empty chairs have often been read against the wartime context. Brighton was hosting convalescent soldiers, the younger crowds were largely absent, and distant gunfire could sometimes be heard across the water. Two principal versions survive, one at the Ashmolean and another at Tate Britain, both built from the same 1915 sketches.

Sickert’s relationship with the coast did not end there. After his marriage to the painter Thérèse Lessore in 1926 he lived for a short period in Brighton before returning to London, and he continued to visit the town throughout the 1920s and 1930s. From these stays came further seafront works. The Front at Hove (1930) captures the promenade at Adelaide Crescent, with a bowler-hatted older man - widely thought to echo Sickert himself - walking beside a younger woman. Another canvas, often titled The Chain Pier, Brighton, turns to the earlier Victorian landmark and sets small figures and beached boats against the curve of the old suspension pier. Smaller Brighton pieces, including a study from Bedford Square, also trace back to his 1915 notes and later returns.

No verified photograph places Sickert physically on Brighton Beach, but contemporary press mentions in the 1930s note him among the seasonal visitors enjoying Brighton’s autumn light. Between those references and the cluster of seafront paintings from 1915 to 1930, the seafront can be seen as a recurring source of material, first discovered during that wartime summer when the pierrots took to the shingle.

Kitchener brings Tokyo to Hove

Earlier this year, a new slice of neon night appeared beside Hove Lagoon. On the seaward wall of Fatboy Slim’s Big Beach Cafe, London street artist Dan Kitchener has painted a vast rainy city scene, all umbrellas and headlights and reflections, so bright it seems to glow even on a flat grey Brighton afternoon. Walkers heading along the promenade towards the beach now pass what looks like a Tokyo crossroads in a storm, spread from pavement level almost to the eaves of the cafe building.

Kitchener’s mural shows a taxi edging through a crowded junction while pedestrians hurry across under clear plastic umbrellas. The buildings loom steeply upwards in forced perspective, their windows and signs rendered as streaks of cyan, magenta, yellow and white. The wet road is the real subject: a mirror of smeared colour where the city lights dissolve into the puddles. Up close you can see the quick, confident spray lines and splatters that create the sense of motion and rain. From a distance, the scene snaps into focus as a cinematic still, like a frame from a late night travel sequence.

The mural was commissioned and paid for by Norman Cook, Fatboy Slim, and donated to the city as a public artwork on his cafe. The Big Beach Cafe’s social media thanked him for having ‘commissioned and very generously donated this incredible piece by Dan Kitchener to the people of Brighton and Hove’, and Kitchener himself posted that he was ‘honoured to have a super colourful mural now permanently on show at the cafe’. The Argus covered the work, in late May and quoted Cook: ‘I persuaded Kitchener who was attending an event at the cafe] to stick around for a couple of days and paint a mural for us on the pristine wall of the newly refurbished toilets. Thanks to everyone who came and watched the painting of the piece, the council for giving us permission for public art, and most of all, the supremely talented Dan Kitchener for gracing our wall with his work. I think you will agree it beautifies the place.” ‘

Dan Kitchener, who signs his work ‘DANK’, was born in 1974 and grew up in Essex. He describes himself as an urban artist working mainly across London and the southeast, and has developed an instantly recognisable style of neon-lit, rain-soaked cityscapes, often based on late-night Tokyo streets. He works freehand, without projectors or stencils, building up layers of spray paint and acrylic to create the blur of headlights, reflections and crowds in motion. His murals now appear on walls in cities from Belfast and Brick Lane to Houston, Miami and Vaasa in Finland, usually at a scale that can dominate an entire building.

See also HOVE LAGOON in murals.

Deaf Mosaic

The arches along Brighton seafront recently hosted a striking exhibition, Deaf Mosaic, which celebrates deaf culture and the many ways deaf people contribute to society. Created by award-winning photographer Stephen Iliffe, the project brings together 35 portraits of deaf people from all walks of life, each accompanied by their story. The exhibition was on show at the Brighton Seafront Gallery, 54 Kings Road, last September, forming part of Flarewave 2025, a deaf-led arts festival supported by Arts Council England and Brighton & Hove City Council.

Iliffe, who is himself deaf, has worked to challenge stereotypes by rejecting the outdated medical view of deafness and affirming the ‘social model’ instead - that barriers come not from deafness itself but from the structures of hearing society. His work has already been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery and Kings Cross.

Two of the portraits on display carry a particularly strong connection to the city’s seafront. One features TV chef Scott Garthwaite, better known as Punk Chef, who poses outside his food van with the words ‘Punk Chef’ in bold pink across the windscreen. He recalls that when he first entered the profession, ‘kitchen chefs didn’t see my abilities, only my deafness’. He has since had the last laugh, working in top restaurants and becoming an award-winning television chef. The image is set against the wide horizon of Brighton beach, with the remains of the West Pier visible in the background.

Another portrait shows long-distance swimmer Andrew Rees fresh from the water, with Brighton Palace Pier behind him. Rees, a management accountant, trains by swimming between the two piers, but he is also a Channel veteran. In 2016 he became the first deaf person to swim the 34km from Dover to Calais, enduring gale-force winds, rough seas and shoals of jellyfish. ‘Nothing great is easy’ was his motto, he explains, and after 15 hours in the water he finally made it to France.

Both portraits encapsulate the exhibition’s central message: that with the right support, deaf people can achieve anything. Brighton’s seafront, with its open vistas and historic landmarks, can be viewed as a fitting stage for these affirmations of resilience and talent.

Happy birthday Steve Ovett

Happy 70th birthday Steve Ovett. Born in Brighton on 9 October 1955, he was raised in Portslade and educated at Mile Oak School. He joined Brighton & Hove AC as a boy and trained regularly in Preston Park, but he switched to focus on athletics in his teens. By the age of 18 he was winning 800m medals at the  European level. Over the next decade he became one of the greatest names in athletics.

Ovett’s rivalry with Sebastian Coe defined British sport in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Coe was the meticulous planner, Ovett the instinctive competitor, but both set world records and pushed each other to the limits. Ovett won Olympic 800m gold in Moscow in 1980 and bronze in the 1500m, while Coe claimed the 1500m title. Between them they took the mile world record back and forth, Ovett’s best being 3:48.40 in Oslo in 1981. He also set records at 1500m and two miles, and won European and Commonwealth titles. His strong finish, upright style and ability to win from almost any position earned him a reputation as one of the sport’s most natural talents.

After retiring in 1991, Ovett moved abroad, living for long periods in Australia and Canada, but he continued to return to Brighton, where his reputation remained strong. He later worked in athletics commentary and coaching. In 2012 he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Brighton & Hove, a civic honour that underlined the pride his home city still takes in his achievements.

Brighton’s tribute came first with a bronze statue by Peter Webster unveiled in Preston Park on 31 May 1987. However in September 2007 the work was stolen, cut from its plinth at the ankle; police later recovered a leg and some fragments, but most was lost, leaving only the foot. That foot remains mounted in Preston Park as a curiosity for visitors. Webster produced a replacement statue, unveiled on 24 July 2012 on Madeira Drive near the Palace Pier, where it still stands today - see ArtUK and the BBC. Ovett himself attended the events around the unveiling, which also marked his Freedom of the City. The seafront figure has since become a landmark for runners and visitors alike.

Piers star in Atelier Open

Time is almost up to catch this year’s summer Open at Atelier Beside the Sea, the creative hub on the beachfront at 165 Kings Road Arches. After five annual editions, founders Jon Tutton and Sarah Young will close the doors on 14 September, drawing a line under a project that has been part of Brighton’s seafront since 2021.

Atelier Beside the Sea was established by Tutton and Young, long known for Brighton Art Fair and the MADE craft shows, as a permanent space for exhibitions, sales and workshops. The three arches had previously been home for over two decades to Castor and Pollux, the much-loved gallery and design shop that closed during the pandemic,

Over the last five years, Atelier has become a landmark on the seafront, showing contemporary art and craft, offering a carefully curated shop, and running classes and community projects. This summer’s Open, which received nearly 400 submissions and selected two-thirds for display, will be the last, ending a short but influential chapter in the city’s creative life. 

Among the artworks are several inspired by Brighton’s piers. Top left is Lyndsey Smith’s Brighton Piers Sunset (watercolour); top right is Janet Brooke’s The Close of the Day (hand-finished screen print); bottom left is Stephanie Else’s Brighton West Pier (kiln formed glass); and bottom right is Flo Snook’s Brighton’s Palace Pier (acrylic on wood).

Through Dammo’s eyes

Following on from the Brighton Mod Weekender, two exhibitions are giving Brighton a chance to look at Mod culture in fresh detail. On the beach front, beside the i360 and the Upside Down House, the photographer David Clarke - known to the Mod community as Dammo - is showing Through My Eyes, a free outdoor display of his work. 

The exhibition sits between the shingle and the traffic, where the promenade railings overlook the sea, so that anyone strolling past or pausing for an ice cream finds themselves drawn into the images. Running until the end of August, it charts twenty years of the Brighton Mod Weekender, from scooter ride-outs to sharply dressed gatherings, and captures how a once-fringe revival has matured into a fixture of the city’s summer. Clarke’s images are not posed studio portraits but candid records of Mods in their element, whether standing by the railings in the wind or reflected in the chrome of a Vespa.

Inside Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, a parallel exhibition takes a deeper dive into the roots of the movement. The In Crowd: Mod Fashion & Style 1958-66 brings together garments, photographs, ephemera and music that defined the original scene. From Italian-cut suits to miniskirts, from Motown singles to Lambretta brochures, the show aims to immerse visitors in the years when the Mod aesthetic was first forged. The curators emphasise that Mod was as much about attitude as appearance, with a spirit of youthful confidence shaping fashion choices and nightlife.

Although both exhibitions centre on Mod identity, their approaches differ. Clarke’s photography celebrates the Brighton revival, with an eye on the community that has kept scooters on Madeira Drive most Augusts since 2005. The museum’s survey looks back to an earlier moment, before Quadrophenia and before the myth-making, when Mod was still a modernist youth movement in the making. Together, they offer a conversation across sixty years: how a style born in late-1950s London became heritage on the south coast, and how today’s enthusiasts carry the look forward.

The contrast between the two is deliberate. Clarke’s work meets passers-by in the open air, integrated into the ebb and flow of promenade life, while the museum requires a step indoors into a curated, reflective space. One is part of the spectacle, the other a retrospective. For the Mod faithful, the seafront show is also a chance to find themselves in the pictures: Clarke has been a regular on the front line of ride-outs and has built up an archive unmatched in its scope. Meanwhile, the museum exhibition situates Mod within broader shifts in British design and music, drawing links with jazz clubs, Carnaby Street boutiques and the global rise of youth culture.

Aroe with divan

Aroe’s arch piece on the seafront still stops you in your tracks. Two luminous female faces float inside the red-brick curve, one in profile, one tipped skyward, airbrushed light drifting like sea mist between them. The brickwork’s scars and drips are left in play, so the image feels breathed onto the wall rather than pasted over it. It is classic Aroe, probably painted 2015-2017: cinematic scale, soft gradients, and a refusal to separate photorealism from the grit of a working shoreline.

Brighton and its beach has Aroe’s worked etched, as it were, everywhere. He has been active since the first hip-hop wave hit Britain in the early 1980s, coming up through Brighton, joining MSK, and becoming one of the city’s defining writers. He is now four decades deep, with recent retrospective-style shows in Brighton confirming how far those train-yard beginnings have travelled. The long arc explains the polish on the arch: a style that has been iterated, toured and argued over for years.

Eleven years ago this September, Aroe and fellow Brighton artist Gary were invited to paint the sea-facing hoardings for the i360 build, a seafront commission that announced, in broad daylight, how institutional Brighton had become about its outlaw form. That job set the tone for a run of shoreline works and helped normalise the idea that tourists might arrive at the beach and find serious graffiti looking back at them. 

Other Aroe pieces on or by the seafront have kept that momentum. In 2015 the MSK crew covered roughly 100 metres of the i360 hoardings, turning a building site into a rolling gallery (see Graffiti Brighton for some examples); in 2016 Aroe helped brighten Hove Lagoon’s south wall with neighbours and local supporters (see HOVE LAGOON in murals). These episodes sit alongside Brighton’s longer, sometimes uneasy story of city-sanctioned walls, conservation rows, and the simple fact that the arches remain the most visible outdoor gallery the town possesses.

And the bed? It reads like a found prop that accidentally completes the composition. Aroe’s portraits make the arch feel domestic, as if the curve of brick were a proscenium and the door a pale, painted window; the patchwork chaise invites a pause, a place to sit and look back at the faces. There’s no sign it belongs to the artist, but in context it works like street-level staging: a fleeting, Brightonish still life where public art, furniture and promenade collide. The mural will outlast the upholstery, but for now they belong to the same scene.

See Art Plugged and Helm for more on Aroe.

Huddlestone’s Brighton Story

It is 65 years since John Huddlestone’s series of illustrations about Brighton first appeared in the Brighton and Hove Herald. Beginning in 1960, his weekly cartoon strips traced the town’s story from the Domesday Book to the mid-twentieth century. The feature was so popular that, by the end of its first year, the strips were gathered into a 64-page pictorial booklet titled The Brighton Story, first published in 1961 by Thanet Books and sold for 2/6 (12½p). The original yellow-covered edition is now scarce and has become something of a collector’s item. A blue-covered facsimile reprint appeared in 1999, published by SB Publications of Seaford, which noted that all attempts to trace the author or his heirs had failed.

Despite the enduring appeal of the book, remarkably little is known about Huddlestone himself. He was described by Herald editor Frank Garratt as ‘a Northerner’, who developed an interest in Brighton after reading Unknown Brighton by George Aitchison. Huddlestone had already contributed historical illustrations of Kentish coastal towns to a local newspaper when, by chance, Garratt saw his work and wished aloud for someone with similar ability to do the same for Brighton. That same day, Huddlestone called at the Herald office and offered his services. Garratt, astonished by the coincidence, accepted immediately.

In his own introduction, written in May 1961, Huddlestone explained that he had known Brighton since 1930 and was especially drawn to its rich and colourful history. He claimed descent from the Northern Huddlestone family, which included Father John Huddlestone, the Roman Catholic priest who attended Charles II on his deathbed in 1685. He also recalled being particularly fascinated by the story of Charles’s escape from ‘Brighhelmstone’ to France. His aim, he wrote, was to stimulate interest in Brighton, ‘the oldest and largest and most famous of sea-side resorts’, and the birthplace of what he called ‘a great and happy tradition’.

The Brighton Story rearranges the original newspaper strips by theme rather than date, and omits contemporary advertisements. With Garratt’s editorial support, Huddlestone’s affectionate cartoon history drew responses from readers all over the world and helped to record the town’s unique atmosphere at a moment of civic pride and change. When the Herald closed in the 1960s, its parent company was taken over by Southern Publishing and later absorbed into the Newsquest group, which authorised the 1999 facsimile edition.

Here are two of the pages in which Huddlestone draws and writes about the Brighton seafront.

Patcham Arts on the seafront

Brighton’s Fishing Quarter Gallery has been home this week to a lively and heartfelt group show titled ‘Brighton Beautiful and Beyond’, showcasing a broad range of work by members of Patcham Arts (see also their Facebook page). With its seafront location and unpretentious style, the gallery offers the perfect setting for this grassroots exhibition, which closes on Sunday. Among the standout contributions are seafront paintings by Judy Alexander and Julia Ann Field, two artists whose work captures not just the visual richness of Brighton but also something of its underlying energy and rhythm.

Judy Alexander brings to the exhibition a subtle painterly style that favours shifting colour fields and atmospheric light. Her seafront paintings are at once recognisable and elusive, rendering the coast in gently abstracted forms that evoke memory and mood rather than precise location. Now based in Brighton, Alexander studied fine art in her youth but returned to painting later in life, after a career in education. She is an active member of the Patcham Arts group and has exhibited widely in community venues across East Sussex. Her work often responds to the changing seasons and skies above the shoreline, combining a personal sense of place with a quiet, meditative sensibility.

Julia Ann Field, by contrast, works in bolder gestures and saturated colours. Her paintings of the Brighton seafront are expressive and dynamic, frequently incorporating broad brushwork and unconventional perspectives. In this exhibition, her use of strong reds and blues recalls the carnival palette of beach huts, deckchairs and festival crowds, yet is underpinned by careful composition and technical control. Field trained in design and textile arts before moving into painting, and her background remains visible in the structural layering of her work. She maintains a studio practice in Brighton and has shown in various local exhibitions, including the Artists Open Houses. Her paintings often seek to distil the atmosphere of a moment - a gust of sea wind, a sudden cloudburst, a surge of movement on the promenade.

Constable on the beach

Two hundred years ago, one of England’s greatest painters - John Constable - could be found in Brighton, pacing the seafront with sketchbook in hand, observing the restless skies and the shifting sea. His time there would result in several vivid and atmospheric coastal paintings, not least this large painting of the Chain Pier (held by Tate Britain).

Constable was born in 1776 in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt. He trained at the Royal Academy Schools in London, and in 1816 he married Maria Bickknell. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he favoured the English countryside over historical or classical themes, gaining recognition for his sweeping views of the Stour Valley. His focus on expressive skies and changing light helped transform British landscape painting and paved the way for later movements such as Impressionism. 

In 1824 Constable moved his family to Brighton, hoping the sea air would improve Maria’s health - by this time she was suffering from tuberculosis. He divided his time between Charlotte Street in London and the south coast, but the change of scenery marked a shift in his work, as he turned from the wide river scenes of Suffolk to coastal subjects. Though he continued to paint on a grand scale, he was initially sceptical about Brighton’s artistic potential. Writing to his friend John Fisher in 1824, he remarked (see Royal Academy): ‘Brighton is the receptacle of the fashion and offscouring of London. The magnificence of the sea, and its (to use your own beautiful expression) everlasting voice is drowned in the din & lost in the tumult of stage coaches - gigs - “flys” etc - and the beach is only piccadilly . . . By the sea-side . . . in short there is nothing here for the painter but the breakers - & the sky - which have been lovely indeed and always [various].’ 

Despite such doubts,Constable went on to be inspired by Brighton Beach, producing some of his most direct and expressive studies. Chain Pier, Brighton was his only large-scale canvas based on the town, exhibited in 1827. Other works include Brighton Beach (1824, held at the V&A, above right bottom), Brighton Beach (1824-1826, held at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, above left), and Brighton Beach, with colliers (1824, also at the V&A, above right top)

The Constables remained in Brighton for five years in the hope of aiding Maria’s health, but the move proved unsuccessful. After the birth of their seventh child in January 1828, the family returned to Hampstead, where Maria died later that year at the age of 41.

Double six every time

No one had asked for them. They weren’t on any plan, proposal, or procurement list. Yet there they were, two enormous red dice, half-buried in the shingle between the pier and the overflowing litter bin.

Councillor Denise Griggs first spotted them on her brisk morning walk. She frowned, took a photo, and sent it to Highways, assuming they were bollards gone rogue.

By lunchtime, a petition was circulating to keep them.

Locals swore blind they’d been consulted. ‘It was in the newsletter,’ said a man who had never read a newsletter in his life. ‘A playful intervention in public space,’ chirped an art student, taking selfies with them in six different outfits. ‘They soften the hardscape,’ said a yoga instructor who had just learned the word ‘hardscape’.

But others were less charmed. ‘We need benches,’ muttered June Tranter, aged 84, who sat on the dice because it was the only thing lower than her knees but higher than the ground. ‘And I slipped on one last night,’ said a man who had, in fairness, slipped on most things.

By Friday, the dice were on TripAdvisor. ‘WHIMSICAL INSTALLATION! So Brighton! 😍🎲🎲 #DiceLife’

‘Can’t tell if they’re art or bins. Love it.’

‘Would recommend for ten minutes.’

Then came the theories.

One woman claimed they were part of a secret casino testing public tolerance. A boy in Year 5 declared, with perfect sincerity, that if you rolled both sixes, the West Pier would regenerate like Doctor Who. A retired magician offered £500 to anyone who could make one disappear ‘properly’.

Denise Griggs, meanwhile, was deep in council minutes. There was no funding. No invoice. No artist named. A FOI request revealed only a baffling line item: ‘Urban Dice (2) - As per civic gamification strategy. Approved retroactively.’

Retroactively?!

At the next council meeting, the Leader, Julian Parkes, admitted - off the record - that the dice had been ordered by his predecessor during a failed - Playful Urbanism - initiative meant to make Brighton a finalist for the European City of the Unexpected. ‘There was a deckchair maze too, but it blew away,’ he mumbled. ‘And we think the dice were meant to be mobile.’

‘On wheels?’ Denise asked.

‘No. Metaphorically.’

Weeks passed. The dice stayed.

Teenagers lounged. Seagulls perched. A local poet declared the left die ‘a metaphor for uncertainty’ and the right ‘just another lie.’ Someone started leaving single dominoes around them. A TikTok trend briefly flourished: #DiceDance. Then vanished.

And every so often, late at night, under cover of darkness, the dice would jiggle themselves, just for a few seconds, smiling urbanely at each other, before re-settling - double six every time.

Cosmo Sarson, wasn’t it?

[Scene: Brighton Palace Pier. Two seagulls, Eric (taller, dafter) and Ernie (shorter, primmer), are sitting comfortably on large deckchairs near the funfair. With apologies again to Morecambe and Wise. See also Bring me . . . a sausage roll!]

Eric: You ever notice how humans scream before the rollercoaster even drops?

Ernie: [Laughs] Pre-emptive panic. Like you when someone sneezes near a pasty.

Eric: Hey - better startled than snatched. I’ve seen what toddlers do to feathers.

Ernie: [Laughing again] True. One of them tried to share their sausage roll with me once. By throwing it at me.

Eric: Ah, the Brighton welcome.

Ernie: Still, better than the ghost train. That thing rattles like a pigeon in a crisp tin.

Eric: And yet, it’s us who got painted, Ernie. Deckchairs, dignity… and just a hint of smug.

Ernie: Cosmo Sarson, wasn’t it?

Eric: Yep. Bold colours, big brushstrokes - a proper seaside tribute. They call it Laughing Seagulls.

Ernie: Well, we are hilarious. Especially you during bin collection.

Eric: It’s performance art. I’ve told you.

Ernie: Cosmo got the vibe, though. Two old birds watching the world flap by. Captured our best side - both of them.

Eric: He said it was about friendship, joy, resilience.

Ernie: And snacks, surely? 

Eric: Snacks are implied.

Ernie: You know, I’ve never actually sat in a deckchair before.

Eric: You are now. In glorious, fifteen-foot seaside Technicolor.

Ernie: Not bad for a couple of ferals, eh?

Eric: Not bad at all. Now - watch that one on the helter-skelter. He’s gonna lose his hat and his lunch.

[Both laugh]

The seafront, the seafront

Found yesterday on the seafront: the seafront! This Brighton Fibre van livery - by Chloe Studios - is surely the funnest in the city, and an eye-catching advertisement for a company that says it is ‘Doing Things Differently’. Broadband shouldn’t be complicated, it states: ‘We got rid of everything that nobody needed - no call centres, no datacentres, no contracts. Just fast, fair, and sustainable fibre.’

Brighton Fibre can be considered as a grassroots success story. During the first Covid lockdown, Mark Mason, a local AV/IT professional - began sharing a leased-line connection and a rooftop radio link with neighbours struggling to work from home. He teamed up with Leo Brown, a lifelong telecoms enthusiast who had built networks as a child. Together, they launched the company as a stealth‑mode ISP: a self-funded, locally grown initiative focused on sustainability, technical ingenuity, and community-first broadband.

From the outset, Brighton Fibre distinguished itself by building its own full-fibre network using existing infrastructure - repurposing old ducts, telegraph poles and even 1930s Rediffusion radio-relay channels. The network was designed to be energy efficient and environmentally conscious: nodes are powered by renewable energy and run on single-board computers like Raspberry Pis, consuming less power than boiling a kettle. The company explains that it rejected venture capital, choosing instead to build strategic, community-led partnerships and reinvest revenue back into network development and service quality.

Their rollout began in underserved neighbourhoods such as North Laine, Gardner Street, Moulsecoomb and Bevendean, and from just a few experimental connections, the network expanded rapidly and by early 2024 was servicing over 30,000 premises. Their main network hub sits in the Brighton Digital Exchange at New England House, a cooperative, carrier-neutral data centre established in 2015. While some connections still rely on Openreach duct access, the long-term plan is to shift all links to Brighton Fibre’s own infrastructure.

The brilliant livery on Brighton Fibre’s vans was designed by local illustrator Chloe Batchelor of Chloe Studios. The final wrap was printed and applied by Brighton-based signwriter Mister Phil.

By way of a summary, I asked ChatGPT what makes Brighton Fibre different. ‘It’s more than just technology. It’s the combination of self-built, eco-conscious infrastructure; a deep-rooted local ethos; and an engineering-led culture that prioritises quality over scale. In a world of national monopolies and corporate ISPs, Brighton Fibre is quietly proving that an independent network - powered by recycled cables, renewable energy and community trust - can thrive on the edge of the sea.’