In memory of Daddy Long-legs

When it opened in the winter of 1896, Brighton’s most improbable railway was not yet universally known as the Daddy Long-legs. Its promoters preferred Volk’s Electric Sea Car - a name that stressed novelty and maritime glamour rather than the prosaic fact that it ran on rails. Formally incorporated as the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway, it took only weeks for the public to supply a nickname that proved impossible to dislodge.

The line was the creation of Magnus Volk, already established with his electric railway along Brighton’s seafront (see this blog’s very first article - Whistle, hoot, whistle). Extending that system eastwards on land meant costly engineering through unstable cliffs. Volk’s solution was to avoid the cliffs altogether by placing the railway in the sea. Between 1894 and 1896, standard-gauge track was laid directly onto the seabed, fixed to concrete sleepers drilled into the chalk in the shallows between Brighton and Rottingdean.

The single passenger vehicle - officially named Pioneer - was neither boat nor tram but an uneasy hybrid. A large saloon carriage sat high above the water on four long steel legs, each mounted on a wheeled bogie that followed the submerged rails. Electric power was supplied by overhead wires mounted on poles set into the seabed, an arrangement that worked tolerably in calm conditions and poorly in rough seas. Because it operated offshore, the Sea Car was treated partly as a vessel and was required to carry maritime safety equipment and a qualified sea captain on board.

The railway opened to the public on 28 November 1896, making this winter the 129th anniversary of its launch. Its debut was dramatic and inauspicious. Within days, a severe storm capsized the carriage. Volk rebuilt it with longer legs and raised electrical gear, and services resumed in 1897. For a short time, the Sea Car functioned as intended, carrying thousands of passengers on what was marketed as a ‘sea voyage on wheels’.

The English Channel, however, proved an unforgiving environment for fixed infrastructure. Tides, wave action and shifting shingle scoured around the track supports, while new groynes and coastal works altered sediment movement along the bay. Maintenance became constant and costly. Plans to divert the route further offshore to avoid new sea defences proved financially impossible, and by 1901 the railway was dismantled and abandoned.

What survives today is not rail but footprint. The metalwork was removed for scrap, but the concrete sleepers and seabed fixings were left in place. These remains are normally buried beneath sand and shingle. Only on exceptionally low spring tides, often in winter and only for a brief window around slack water, can parts of the alignment sometimes be made out as a faint, ruler-straight line beneath the surface east of the Palace Pier.

Seen then, the Daddy Long-legs ceases to be a cartoonish curiosity and becomes something more exacting: a measurable line in the landscape, briefly legible, marking the moment when Brighton attempted to extend its electric railway not along the shore - but straight through the sea.

Sources: National Railway Museum, Volks Electric Railway Association and My Brighton and Hove. The top image is courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, and the other two can be found at Wikipedia.

Fallen stars in disguise?

Some 125 years ago, buskers were a familiar and thriving presence on Brighton’s seafront. Their popularity was such that The Era - a long-running theatrical weekly founded in 1838 - felt moved to puncture a persistent myth: that the musicians and singers scattered along the promenade were fallen stars in disguise, disgraced actors, or even incognito aristocrats turning a penny between scandals. On 1 September 1900, the paper published a faintly sardonic survey of seaside performers under the headline ‘Buskers on Brighton Beach’, written by a ‘special correspondent’.

‘Quite an interesting fallacy exists in the mind of the casual holiday maker,’ the writer begins, ‘as to the identity of many of the performers at the seaside, on sands and beach’. Brighton, like Margate and other resorts, was awash with rumours of ‘Mysterious Musicians’ and ‘Promenade Prowlers’, supposedly hiding ruined careers beneath false beards and cheap costumes. The correspondent treats this with amused scepticism, mocking the idea that royalty might secretly be busking ‘to meet the demands of uxorious creditors’.

The article’s first task is to insist that busking itself is not disreputable. On the contrary, it is presented as honest labour, particularly for performers between engagements: ‘There is nothing discreditable in “busking”, and when out of a shop we see no reason why an actor, if he thinks fit, should not turn his singing or reciting talents to account until the tide turns.’

But this defence is immediately followed by deflation. The correspondent claims that most stories of famous actors ‘buskerading’ on the beach belong ‘chiefly to the region of fiction’. Having taken the trouble to observe performers on the Brighton front, the writer reports that, with one or two exceptions, they were not fallen professionals at all but lifelong street entertainers, ‘to the manner born, and had been street entertainers since childhood’.

What follows is a brisk, sometimes sharp-eyed catalogue of Brighton’s beach entertainments at the turn of the century. Originality, the correspondent complains, is scarce. Music-hall songs dominate, endlessly recycled for undemanding holiday crowds. Even variety, once sampled, soon palls.

Yet Brighton still stands out. Among the many acts observed ‘down at London-on-Sea’, it is Brighton’s Pierrot band that earns unqualified praise: ‘At Brighton the Pierrot band is far and away the best, the selection and the execution being above the average.’

The Pierrots - already an established Brighton fixture by 1900 - represent, here, the high-water mark of beach performance: disciplined, musically competent, and recognisably professional. Other named troupes fare less well, dismissed as ‘customary’, misnamed, or only intermittently entertaining. Ballad singers are ‘most plentiful’, leaning heavily on the popular composers of the day - Tosti, Molloy, Maybrick - while jugglers are ‘scarce’.

The most striking passages are reserved for the marginal figures of beach performance: blind musicians, paralysed instrumentalists, labouring hard for meagre rewards. Their presence reminds the reader that the beach economy was not merely comic or picturesque, but precarious and often harsh. Alongside them, older forms of popular entertainment persist: Punch and Judy drawing ‘crowds of willing customers’, marionettes and fantoccini keeping pace with what a wag calls ‘the origin of the drama’.

The conclusion is deliberately sour. Whether through genuine decline or the jaundiced eye of the observer, the correspondent finds Brighton’s beach entertainments wanting: ‘On the whole, however, the beach entertainments are deteriorating; they are not what they were, or else we are not.’

Conversation with performers yields little insight. Questions are suspected of being veiled appeals for money. And the final judgement is blunt: ‘real “buskers” seem to be dying out, and, perhaps, ’tis well’.

Sources: Editions of The Era can be accessed online via the British Newspaper Archive and Internet Archive. The photograph above - dating from the summer of 1899 - is courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. See also Busking on the seafront - yes please and The Punch and Judy tradition.

Neighbour of the wave

Winter on the Sussex coast has long been associated with health, sea air and bracing walks along the shore. When Brighton was consolidating its reputation as a fashionable watering place in the early nineteenth century, those qualities were already being recorded in print. In 1809 Mary Lloyd published Brighton: A Poem, Descriptive of the Place and Parts Adjacent, an extended verse account of the town that set out to capture its setting, its visitors and its daily rhythms.

Little is known about Lloyd herself. The book appears to be her only published volume. It was issued by subscription rather than through a commercial publisher, a common Georgian practice that secured sales in advance and reduced financial risk. The volume runs to eighty-eight pages and includes a substantial list of subscribers, among them the Duke of Clarence and Mrs Fitzherbert, alongside military officers and members of Brighton society. The book was sold in London and locally, and its subscription list indicates a readership closely connected to the resort and its seasonal life.

The volume is more than a single poem. Alongside the long descriptive piece are miscellaneous shorter poems, including several written in Scottish dialect, suggesting personal connections beyond Sussex. The book is illustrated with two engraved plates: a frontispiece view looking west across Brighton, and a separate plate depicting the Royal Chain Pier (and a nameplate). These images anchor the poem in recognisable topography and align the work with the growing market for picturesque views of the town.

The title poem itself is written largely in rhyming couplets and adopts the voice of a strolling observer, moving between shore, cliff and town. Lloyd stated her intention was to delineate Brighton’s scenes at the seasons and hours when they appeared most striking, and the poem progresses from morning activity to evening calm. Fishermen, boats, bathers and promenaders populate the beach, while the sea provides both spectacle and sublimity. Contemporary reviewers were reserved about Lloyd’s poetic powers, but noted that her work excelled in accuracy of description and in capturing the characteristic features of the place.

The poem repeatedly returns to the meeting of land and water, where human activity gives way to the scale and movement of the sea. To close with Lloyd’s own words, here are unedited extracts describing Brighton’s shore and seaward outlook: (Sources: Googlebooks and Quaritch.

Brighton: A Poem

Extract 1 (opening)

‘BRIGHTON! thou loveliest neighbour of the wave,
Whose stately cliffs the rolling surges lave,
Where roseate health, amid the breezes play,
Whose gentle breathings cool the fervid ray
Of scorching summer; pleasing gay Retreat,
Beauty, and fashion’s ever favourite seat:
Where splendour lays its cumbrous pomp aside,
Content, in softer, simpler paths to glide;
Where in succession, various pastimes sport,
Where nature’s grand and simple beauties court,
Where every taste may find a charm to please,
If fond of the sublime; the surging seas
Their vast floods rolling on the sounding shores,
When the bold wind unfolds the billowy stores;
Will lift with solemn awe the wond’ring soul,
To Him! who bade those mighty waters roll.’

Extract 2 (early-morning shoreline and the beach)

‘How sweet the sea-girt shore to pace along,
What time the lark begins her matin song,
When the mild moon her regency declines,
And to the glorious sun the reign resigns;
While the blue waves rejoicing in the light,
Reflect the golden smiles that chase the night.’

Extract 3 (fishermen coming in)

‘How sweet to mark the vessels’ devious way,
Their white sails glittering in the morning ray;
What time the weary fisher ends his toil,
And homeward steers, exulting o’er the spoil:
See the bold youths, who snare the finny train,
Press every sail, and through the liquid plain,
Cheerly pursue their course, to gain the shore,
While joyous they survey their hard-earn’d store;
And ere the boat has clear’d the surging deep,
Advent’rous, in the waters see them leap,’

Austen’s unseen Brighton

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, the great chronicler of English places and manners. One of her books above all - Pride and Prejudice - has a direct and consequential link to Brighton and its beach, even though they are never once described.

The novel, first published in 1813, centres on the Bennet family, a middle-class household with five unmarried daughters and a precarious financial future. The story follows the growing relationship between Elizabeth Bennet, the second eldest daughter, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy landowner whose pride and reserve initially offend her. Alongside this central courtship runs a series of secondary plots involving reputation, marriage, and social judgement.

One of these concerns Lydia Bennet, the youngest sister, who is impulsive, flirtatious, and largely uncontrolled by her parents. When a militia regiment is stationed near the Bennet home in Hertfordshire, Lydia becomes infatuated with the officers. Among them is George Wickham, a charming but unprincipled soldier who forms a brief attachment to Elizabeth before revealing himself to be unreliable and deeply in debt. Wickham later transfers with the regiment to Brighton, then a fashionable seaside and military town.

Lydia is allowed to accompany the wife of the regiment’s commanding officer to Brighton for the summer. There, free from family restraint, she renews her acquaintance with Wickham. The two run away together, first to London, with no intention of marrying. Their disappearance threatens to disgrace not only Lydia but the entire Bennet family, whose daughters’ chances of respectable marriage depend on female reputation.

The crisis is resolved only through the private intervention of Fitzwilliam Darcy, who tracks the couple down, pays Wickham’s debts, and secures a marriage settlement. The family is saved from public scandal, but the damage narrowly avoided leaves a lasting impression. Reflecting on events, Elizabeth Bennet later observes that ‘Had Lydia never been at Brighton, she had never met Wickham.’

It is at this point that Brighton’s peculiar role in the novel becomes clear. Although it is named repeatedly, Austen never describes the town itself. There is no account of the beach, the sea, the buildings, or the daily life of the resort. Brighton exists entirely as a place of reputation rather than observation, a setting defined by what it permits rather than what it looks like.

For Austen’s contemporary readers, that would have been enough. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Brighton was already firmly established as a fashionable seaside resort and military centre, associated with sociability, display, and a loosening of ordinary moral restraints. To send Lydia there is to remove her from domestic supervision and place her in a setting where temptation lurks. Austen needs only to name Brighton for its implications to be understood.

This reticence is striking because Austen was perfectly capable of writing about the seaside when she wished. In Persuasion, Lyme Regis is vividly rendered, its Cobb forming the setting for a pivotal accident. In Sanditon, her unfinished final novel, she turns her attention to a speculative seaside resort, analysing promenades, bathing machines, health claims, and commercial optimism. These places are described and judged. Brighton is not.

Biographies say there is no firm evidence that Jane Austen ever visited Brighton. Her surviving letters place her instead at coastal towns such as Lyme Regis, Sidmouth, Dawlish, and Worthing, where she stayed for several months in 1805-1806. Worthing, a quieter and less conspicuous rival to Brighton, appears in her correspondence as a place of walks, mild society, illness, and boredom - the kind of lived experience she habitually transformed into fiction. Brighton remained known to her largely by reputation.

That reputation was sufficient. In Pride and Prejudice, Brighton functions not as landscape but as catalyst. It is the place where supervision weakens and consequences begin. Austen’s refusal to describe the beach or the town turns Brighton into an abstract moral space rather than a physical one.

Sources include Project Gutenberg, Brighton Museums, Jane Austen - A Life by Claire Tomalin and Wikipedia. The imagined book cover above was created by ChatGPT. 

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). 

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

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.

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.

If you seek his monument . . .

Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, in 1750, Richard Russell, not yet famous, published De Tabe Glandulari, the treatise that would change both his career and the fate of Brighton. Its argument - that seawater, taken internally and externally, could treat diseases of the glands - propelled a little-known Sussex physician into national prominence. More significantly for Brighton, it directed medical attention to a town then struggling with erosion, collapsing cliff lines and a declining fishing economy. Russell’s decision to base his cure specifically on Brighton’s beach gave the town its first sustained influx of visitors.

Born in 1687, Russell studied medicine at the University of Leyden. He returned to England, practising in his home town Lewes from the 1720s. By the 1740s he had become convinced of the therapeutic power of the sea. De Tabe Glandulari was the outcome: a detailed Latin defence of marine treatment that was swiftly translated into English and circulated well beyond Sussex. It was the first substantial medical work to promote both the drinking of seawater and immersion in it, and it was unusually pointed in praising Brighthelmstone’s marine environment over inland spa cures.

Demand for Russell’s regimen soon overwhelmed his Lewes practice. By 1753 he had moved permanently to Brighthelmstone, purchasing a marshy plot on the Steine for £40 and building the town’s largest house. It had direct access to the beach, dedicated rooms for convalescents and south-facing windows intended to maximise exposure to sea air. Around it grew Brighton’s first recognisable health quarter, complete with bathing attendants, suppliers of warm seawater and the earliest stirrings of fashionable patronage. Figures of rank began appearing among his patients, giving the town a social standing it had never previously enjoyed.

Russell’s reputation rose accordingly. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752, he became one of the most prominent provincial physicians of his generation, and his treatise passed through multiple editions. His will later required his son William to assume the surname Kempe in order to inherit family property, an unusual stipulation noted at the time. Russell died in 1759 and was buried at South Malling near Lewes. His practice was taken over by Dr Anthony Relhan, and his large house on the Steine evolved into what is now the Royal Albion Hotel. 

This hotel was very badly damaged by a fire in 2023. Of what remains, part was demolished for safety reasons, and the rest remains closed off and covered in scaffolding, Nevertheless, it’s just possible to spy the commemorative plaque for Russell which says: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ Brighton’s identity as a centre for sea air, convalescence and coastal recreation began with Russell and remains to this day.

For more on Russell see Wikipedia (which is also the source of the portrait above), an entry in Tim Carder’s Encyclopaedia of Brighton which can viewed online at My Brighton & Hove, and Brighton Journal. 

Signal cannon relic

The small black-painted gun that sits on the Brighton Palace Pier today - now rather forlorn and out of place beside the men’s toilets and perhaps appropriately close to the thump of the funfair - is one of the surviving signal cannons from the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, which stood a few hundred metres to the east between 1823 and 1896. The Chain Pier operated as both a pleasure promenade and a working embarkation point for cross-Channel vessels, and its cannons played a practical role in that maritime life. They were fired to announce the departure or arrival of packet boats, to signal in thick weather, and occasionally to warn small craft off the pier’s immediate approaches. Contemporary guidebooks note that visitors often gathered to watch the gun being discharged before a steamer cast off, a brief spectacle folded into the pier’s daily rhythm.

The guns themselves were small muzzle-loading pieces mounted on simple timber beds, never intended for defence but for audible reach along the seafront and out to sea. Contemporary accounts confirm that a signal gun was kept on the Chain Pier and fired on ceremonial occasions. John George Bishop’s The Brighton Chain Pier: in memoriam describes how, during the celebrations for King William IV and Queen Adelaide’s arrival in 1830, ‘a signal gun was fired from the Chain Pier, as well as from the Battery, to indicate the welcome intelligence that their Majesties had arrived.’ Moreover, surviving pier toll records are said to indicate routine maintenance costs for ‘signals’ or ‘signal guns’, suggesting they were kept in regular working order through the pier’s lifetime. By the late nineteenth century, as the Chain Pier aged and cross-Channel services shifted west to the Palace Pier landing stages and to Newhaven, the signal guns fell gradually out of use.

The storm of 4-5 December 1896 destroyed the Chain Pier completely (see Brighton’s oldest pier), scattering its timbers along the beach. Some fittings were salvaged by the Palace Pier Company, including ironwork, lamps and at least one of the old signal cannons. It remained in storage for decades before being brought onto the Palace Pier as a heritage object. The weathered wooden carriage now visible beneath it is a modern reconstruction, but the barrel is original to the Chain Pier era. The small plaque on the pier deck dates it to the operational life of the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, 1822–1896, and stands as one of the last tangible artefacts from Brighton’s first great pier.

Sources: Wikipedia, Brighton & Hove Museums. PS: The full original name of the pier was the Brighton Marine Palace & Pier Company which explains the BM and PP initials on the wall behind the cannon. 

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.

Hove Lagoon watersports

On a bright salt-washed morning the blue clubhouse of Lagoon Watersports beside Hove Lagoon looks almost theatrical, its white lettering impelling passers-by to learn, improve, progress. The building, raised slightly above the path and fronted by a tangle of kayaks, Pico dinghies and wakeboard gear, has become one of the most recognisable structures on the Brighton Beach seafront. What began as a modest watersports base more than thirty years ago is now woven into the daily life of the lagoon and the lives of thousands who first stood on a paddleboard, hauled a sail upright or felt the sudden tug of a wake-cable here.

Lagoon Watersports was formally incorporated in 1989 and has been run by the same management since the mid-1990s. Its chosen setting, Hove Lagoon, is an artificial remnant of the old Salt Daisy Lake, a brackish hollow that was gradually formalised during interwar landscaping of the Kingsway (see Brighton Toy Museum website which is also the source of the photograph below). The company turned this shallow, wind-swept waterbody into a training ground for beginners, school groups and would-be sailors. Over the years its programmes expanded across two sites - sheltered lessons and wakeboarding at the lagoon, and yacht sailing and power-boat sessions from Brighton Marina.

The lagoon has regularly thrown Lagoon Watersports into the local press. When the first cable-tow wakeboarding system went live in 2011 it drew a flurry of interest as one of the earliest installations of its type in the UK. By 2013 the centre was running three cables, including a beginner line and a rail section that drew riders from across the region. Newspapers ran bright, summery photographs of young wakeboarders skimming across the lagoon, a striking contrast to the placid model-yacht scene once associated with the site.

There have been quirkier stories too. One Argus report captured the arrival of paddleboard yoga on the lagoon, describing early sessions wobbling across the water. Another covered a women’s watersports day that saw first-timers taking to kayaks and paddleboards in breezy conditions, relishing the sense of achievement even when the wind and chop made the lagoon feel more like open sea. These sat alongside the regular run of charity challenges on icy January mornings, youth groups completing multi-sport days in howling south-westerlies, and the occasional windsurfer being blown clean across the lagoon and into the reeds, to the delight of watching schoolchildren.

The company’s daily rhythm sees staff usher in wetsuited school groups, kayaks carried to the slipway in lines, and the wake-cable’s soft mechanical hum drifting across the water whenever conditions are calm. The blue clubhouse stands at the heart of it all, part workshop, part briefing room, part symbol of Brighton and Hove’s multivarious beach culture.

Hooray for Horatio’s

At the far end of Brighton’s Palace Pier, and settled easily into the funfair area, sits Horatio’s, an elegant all-purpose bar with what must be nearly 40 years of history. It evolved as the pier shifted from Victorian theatreland into full-blown seaside spectacle, and by the late 1980s it had become the pier’s resident big, breezy social hall - a place where the smell of sea spray and hot doughnuts drifted through the doors and where the floor could tremble slightly whenever the Turbo Coaster launched its cars overhead.

In 1984, when the pier was purchased by the Noble Organisation, it introduced free admission and new attractions. Two years later, it also embarked upon an £8 million refurbishment and enlargement programme which included new entrance kiosks, a remodelling of the Palace of Fun, and the opening of both the Fish and Chip Café, Victoria’s Bar (now the Palm Court Restaurant - see Fish and chips or moules) and Horatio’s Bar.

As the pier modernised, so did Horatio’s. It grew from a simple drinking space into one with occasional music events. Local bands began to play weekend sets, filling the glass-fronted room with Brighton’s familiar mix of covers, ska, indie guitars and the odd sea-shanty revival. Jazz arrived too, and Horatio’s became one of the venues used for the Brighton Jazz Festival, hosting double-header evening concerts with world-class players performing as waves thudded beneath the ironwork. Dance nights joined the offerings - Cuban salsa sessions with live percussion and teaching pairs leading crowds through rueda circles under the rope-woven ceiling.

A collaboration with The Latest led to a variety of performances not just music but spoken word events, film showings, club nights, art exhibitions, comedy nights. ‘We host everything,’ the Latest website says ‘from the monthly talk-based Cafe Scientfique and the infamous Catalyst Club events, to music shows hosted by The Great Escape, burlesque performance nights, Fringe theatre, charity events, kids events and loads more.’ Latest TV, meanwhile, broadcasts live interviews and band sessions directly from Horatio’s. 

A major refit in the late 2010s gave Horatio’s a more modern coastal look - rope-woven ceiling panels, timber slats and bi-fold doors that open straight onto the sea. But its essence hasn’t changed. This is still where parents take a breather between rides, where football fans crowd around big screens, where local musicians cut their teeth on stormy midweek evenings, and where - now and then - the whole place rocks gently when a winter sea pushes hard against the pier piles.

Sources: Wikipedia and My Brighton and Hove (but note the text here is taken from Tim Carder’s printed book, The Encyclopaedia of Brighton).

Deep sea angling in Hove

At the far western end of Brighton Beach, where Hove meets Portslade-by-Sea, and where the millionaires enjoy their private patches of pebbles, there’s a distinctive looking building - a Martello tower? - with shack attached. Small boats are tied up alongside, and there are notices advising one not to talk to winch operators except in an emergency. This is the Hove Deep Sea Anglers Club, well over a century old now, and going strong.

The club was founded in 1909 by a Hove policeman with the aim of enabling local residents to take small boats from the beach and fish offshore. At a time when beach-launched craft were common along the Sussex coast, the club provided a formal base for what had become a popular pastime on the Hove foreshore. Its early wooden hut, erected in 1922 on the Western Esplanade, marked the club’s first permanent home.

Over the decades, Hove Deep Sea Anglers became known not just for fishing, but for colourful camaraderie and elaborate tales. Annual dinners in the 1920s featured the reading of classic verses like the Fisherman’s Prayer, and the evening was often filled with jokes and friendly banter. One legendary member, Alderman A. W. F. Varley, was renowned for winning over fifty prizes for sailing, rowing, fishing, and even cycling, which made him something of a local celebrity.

The club has several record catches in its logbooks. The story goes that one angler landed a salmon so large that, as he recounted, ‘even I may never need to lie’. In recent memory, there have been memorable weekends where boats returned so laden with fish that spontaneous beachside barbecues erupted, with the catch turned into a feast for all. Not all adventures ended with triumph: a famous Safety First demonstration in 1933 saw the Shoreham lifeboat ‘rescue’ a boat lent by the club secretary, giving the club a moment in local lore and sending up a cheer among members for its commitment to safety and spectacle.

The club’s history includes some lively disputes, particularly with neighbouring clubs during annual competitions. Once, a neighbouring club accused Hove anglers of ‘over-baiting,’ sparking a good-natured war of words that lasted for months. Another time, the mistaken identity of the club’s circular extension - often thought to be a Martello tower but not actually built until the 1980s - became a running joke among members, with playful bets taken on how many tourists would ask about its ‘Napoleonic’ origins each summer.

In late October 1996, high winds hit the Sussex coast early in the morning, parts of the clubhouse were demolished, the roof caved in, several walls collapsed, the snooker room was levelled and the interior of the club was under two feet of water. Fortunately, so the club’s own history states, ‘the bar survived unscathed, much to the relief of the 450 members’ and the repair bill amounted to around £20,000.

Today, the club maintains a fleet of around a dozen boats, launched most weekends of the year. It stands as a long-standing landmark and one of the last reminders of the era when small-boat fishing was a prominent leisure pursuit directly connected to the beach. Alongside its angling programme, the club hosts lunches, bar events, darts and snooker leagues, poker nights and seasonal gatherings, sustaining a membership that mixes long-standing families with new recruits drawn by its maritime heritage - often lured by tales of monster catches, fierce competitions, and a touch of chaos in local lore.

Main sources: Judy Middleton’s excellent Hove in the Past, and Hove Deep Sea Anglers.

Steamer trips from Palace Pier

This poster - found in Palace Pier by Albert Bullock and Peter Medcalf - advertises P. & A. Campbell’s Brighton excursions to the Spithead Naval Review of 1924, one of the great maritime set-pieces of the interwar years. The Review took place on Saturday 26 July, with the King observing long lines of capital ships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines anchored across the Solent. The event brought together around two hundred vessels, including representatives of the Dominions and visiting fleets assembled during the Imperial Conference. It was the first major Review since the war and was intended as a demonstration of stability and naval cooperation after the upheavals of the previous decade.

Brighton had its part to play. Campbell’s Sussex steamers - most prominently the earlier Devonia and the newly renamed Brighton Belle - were advertised on the Palace Pier railings and along the West Pier concourse, offering passengers a full afternoon cruise along the Sussex coast before joining the mass of small excursion craft mustering off Spithead. Leaving Brighton in mid-afternoon and early evening, the steamers carried holidaymakers through warm Channel air, past Shoreham and Worthing, and on towards the Isle of Wight, where the lines of warships stretched out like a floating city. Once darkness fell the fleet was illuminated from stem to stern, with searchlights sweeping across the water as the royal yacht made its slow progress through the anchorage.

Before the war and on this stretch of coast, the most powerful steamer, operated by Campbell, had been the Brighton Queen, a broad-sponsoned paddler that dominated departures from the pier. Recognisable from her high funnel (see photo, also from the Palace Pier book), she would shoulder out into deeper water before turning. But in 1915 she had been lost on minesweeping duty, and by 1924 she existed only in postcards and recollections traded on deckchairs below the pier head.

In 1924, the scale of the Naval Review would have been impressive, ships ranged in perfect alignment, their electric outlines reflected perhaps in still water, and the succession of salutes and night-time illuminations that carried on long after the King had departed. For Brighton’s excursionists it was a full day and night away, but the piers were busy again before breakfast, with talk of the searchlights, the size of the battleships, and how the holiday steamers seemed tiny against the bulk of the fleet. It was one of the last great Reviews before the naval reductions of the 1930s, and for those who embarked from the Palace Pier that July, it was a rare glimpse of the world’s largest fleet assembled within a day’s sail of Brighton Beach.

It is worth noting that the authors of Palace Pier mistook the poster above as advertising a much earlier and pre-war event. The caption (in the book but edited out of the poster image) reads ‘The coronation of King Edward VII was to have taken place on 26 June 1902. A few days before the coronation the King was taken ill with appendicitis and the Naval Review was postponed. The King made a speedy recovery and the event took place on 16 August 1902.’ However, the Brighton Belle, one of the two vessels making the round trip to Spithead, was not even built until 1905!

See also Palace Pier light and dark.