Kipling at Brighton Beach

Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865 in Bombay, then part of British India, making today the 160th anniversary of his birth. He was educated in England from the age of six, returned to India as a young journalist and writer in the 1880s, and achieved early fame with poems and stories rooted in Anglo-Indian life. By the 1890s he was one of the most widely read authors in the English-speaking world, later producing works that remain central to his reputation, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Just So Stories, Barrack-Room Ballads and the novel Captains Courageous. In 1907 he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Between India and later Sussex, Kipling spent unsettled years moving between London and the south coast of England. These were years of intense productivity, illness, restlessness and emotional volatility. Brighton belongs to this period. It was not a place of long residence, but part of the circuit of seaside towns that offered sea air, anonymity and a charged social atmosphere. Brighton Beach, with its press of bodies, its holiday freedoms and its sharp exposure of private feeling in public space, offered Kipling material very different from both imperial India and rural England.

The poem commonly known as Brighton Beach dates from this early English period, probably 1882 when Kipling was 17. It was never collected by Kipling in his lifetime (i.e. not put into poetry collections by Kipling himself), but has been included in modern scholarly editions of his juvenilia. Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879-1889, edited by Andrew Rutherford, was, for example, published by Clarendon Press in 1986. This can be freely read online at Internet Archive. 

The piece is a short, compressed lyric focused not on scenery but on a fleeting encounter between two people who recognise a momentary intimacy and just as quickly deny its future. The beach functions as a setting of revelation rather than romance. What flashes into being is not love, but knowledge, followed by retreat into routine and restraint. The poem’s emotional economy, its refusal of consolation and its emphasis on self-discipline anticipate aspects of Kipling’s later work, even as its tone belongs firmly to his youth.

Kipling would later settle more deeply into Sussex life, first at Rottingdean and then at Bateman’s near Burwash, where he lived from 1902 until his death in 1936. That later Sussex is rural, inward-looking and historically layered. Brighton Beach, by contrast, survives in his work as a place of exposure and passing contact, where certainty flares briefly and is extinguished just as fast. The poem stands as a small but telling example of how Kipling used specific places not for description, but as engines of moral and emotional pressure.

Brighton Beach

A flash in your eye for a minute -
An answering light in mine.
What was the mischief in it?
Who but we two could divine - 

Before those eyelids droop
Do I read your riddle -
Well I take it an angel may stoop
Sometimes, to the nether Hell.

We’ll argue it this way then
Tho’ it sound a trifle inhuman -
I am not your man among men,
Nor you my first dearest woman.

Each touched some hidden chord
In the other’s heart for a minute,
That sprang into light at a word
And pulsed with the music in it -

The veil was torn asunder
As I sighed and pleaded and wooed,
And we saw the truth there under
As it stands - uncouth and nude.

Now back to the work again -
In the old blind tread-mill fashion -
False hope, false joy, false pain,
Rechauffés of by gone passion!

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.

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). 

The Punch and Judy tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

Where have all the punters gone?

The Christmas season in Brighton is gathering pace: the Palace Pier tree is up (see yeterday’s post), the promenade lights are on, and this week three very different Santas have announced their festive plans - one greeting families high above the city, one in the heart of the pier, and one welcoming children beside the lifeboats. 

Brighton i360 has unveiled its full programme, with ‘Santa in the Sky’ returning from 11am on selected dates. Flights are scheduled hourly, and each visit promises a meeting with Santa in the clouds, a small gift, photographs, and the satisfaction of being, as the blurb puts it, on Santa’s nice list this year. Tickets for adults are £23.50, with the pod transformed into a mid-air grotto and Santa surrounded by elves and decorations.

For families wanting a longer experience, the i360 is also offering ‘Breakfast with Santa’, a one-hour event starting at 09.00 in the Drift restaurant. A full English breakfast comes with juice or a hot drink, and children can decorate their own bauble, write a letter to Santa, and post it via the ‘Northpole post box’. After breakfast the whole group takes a pod flight at 10.00 to meet Santa in the Sky, with gifts and photo opportunities included. Adult tickets are £32.50.

Down on the seafront the Palace Pier is running its own grotto in the Palm Court Restaurant, with Santa in residence on selected December dates. Families can book a traditional pier-side visit, complete with the arcade lights, deckchair colours and winter sea views that are part of Brighton’s festive backdrop. It offers a more classic, ground-level encounter for those who prefer Santa without the altitude.

Across town Santa will also be putting in a shift at Brighton RNLI, whose volunteers are once again running their own grotto experience inside the lifeboat station. The photographs used in their promotion - Santa in full costume, perched cheerfully beside the D-class inshore lifeboat, yellow wellies and all - underline the RNLI’s characteristically practical approach to Christmas. Families can book timed entry slots, meet Santa in a working coastal rescue environment, and support the lifeboat station’s fundraising at the same time.

Although the three events could not be more different in setting - one 450 feet in the air, one on the pier, and one at beach level beside the Atlantic 85 - all speak to the variety of Brighton’s seasonal offerings, and to how central the Santa visit has become to local December traditions. 

Between the i360’s cloud-level grotto, Palm Court’s pier-side classic, and the lifeboat station’s shoreline version, one might wonder if the place wasn’t over-run with Santas, and whether there are any actual punters left!

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.

Beach hut Facebook group

At this year’s Hove Beach Hut Association AGM at the Hove Club, held a few days ago, committee member Cathy Biggs told members that the association would not run or advertise the winter open evening on 13 December because there had not been enough interest. For an event many hutters describe as a Christmas institution, the decision marks a pause in one of Hove’s most visible seafront traditions and throws a spotlight back on the group itself - what it does, how it started, and what worries its members now.

The association grew out of a sharp clash with Brighton & Hove City Council in 2018, when the council proposed a 10 per cent levy on hut sales, replacing a flat £82 charge. With Hove councillor Robert Nemeth acting as figurehead, owners organised, argued that the new ‘tax’ was unfair, and saw the plan dropped in July that year. By May 2019 they had turned that campaign into a permanent body. An AGM at the Gather Inn adopted a constitution, elected Biggs as chair and set early priorities: tackling vandalism and break-ins, lobbying on unsafe cycling on the prom, and dreaming up social events that would show huts as part of the community rather than a private enclave.

Since then the association has become a routine presence in the local affairs. Its representatives appear in West Hove Forum minutes and council reports on coastal defence schemes, licensing and the new King Alfred leisure centre, feeding back hut owners’ views on everything from lifeguard cover to the impact of new groynes and seawall works. Consultation documents on the 2024 beach-hut licence and transfer fee explicitly reference the strength of responses channelled through meetings and AGMs, confirming the association as the default body the council deals with when it wants to know what hutters think.

The public face of all this is the Facebook group, now with roughly 2,600 members. Its ‘about’ line promises ‘a place for interesting stories’ and a meeting point for anyone who cares about Hove’s iconic huts, and the feed bears that out. Owners swap recommendations for carpenters, hut painters and handymen, ask how to repaint roofs or whether to use undercoat, and dissect insurance quotes that have doubled in a year. Posts explain hut pricing in plain language - location, condition, fees already paid and the time of year - and sales come and go between Rockwater and the lagoon, often with dry comments about lampposts, loos and dog beaches. New owners ask how to fit out the tiny interiors; others advise on bolt-cutters for seized locks, or the best way to stop a door swelling tight.

But the same channel carries a steady stream of wider concerns. Hutters share links about major coastal protection and groyne projects, the King Alfred rebuild and its impact on seafront facilities, and a proposed e-scooter trial where councillors reassure them that scooters will be electronically fenced off the prom. Toilets and taps are recurring flashpoints: members complain about seafront loos opening late and closing early in high season, or taps at Rockwater and Hove Lagoon being turned off just as year-round swimmers and hutters most need them. There are posts about suspected break-ins near the lagoon and frustrations over the handover of lifeguard duties to the RNLI. Parking rows surface too, most recently around ice-cream vans driving and stopping immediately in front of huts, with councillors pointing members towards Operation Crackdown for reporting dangerous or antisocial driving.

Running through the group’s history is the winter open evening. As older members explain, it began as a church-run Advent event: one hut opening each night from 1 to 24 December, a charity effort organised by a local vicar. Rising insurance costs ended that format around the time of Covid, and hutters reinvented it as a single night in December when dozens of huts would open together, decorated and lit along the prom. Brighton & Hove News’s report on the 2022 edition described some 60 huts taking part, hundreds of visitors and collections for local and Ukraine-related charities, with association secretary Peter Revell calling it ‘quite a spectacular’. Online Advent-calendar posts of hut photos and Christmas jokes followed in later years, helping to draw in people who did not own huts at all.

Against that backdrop, this November’s AGM decision not to run or promote a 13 December evening this year feels significant. In the Facebook comments beneath Biggs’s announcement, members lament the loss and call it ‘so disappointing’ and ‘a Christmas institution’, while a few, like Sue Storey, immediately pledge to open their own huts anyway and invite neighbours to do the same. The association itself continues to field consultations, circulate petitions about the floral clock or seafront toilets, and coordinate responses to new hut fees and licence conditions. But the fate of the most visible, most joyful expression of Hove’s hut culture now depends on whether enough owners choose to go it alone on a dark December night, without the familiar banner of the association above the event’s name.

See also 161, what have you done?

Darker side of the beach

Yesterday, a brief hearing at Brighton Crown Court set a trial date for the criminal case concerning the alleged rape on Brighton Beach at about five in the morning on 4 October 2025. Three men, each charged with two counts of rape, appeared before the court (Brighton and Hove News). However, one of the defendants, a 25-year-old Iranian man, required a Kurdish interpreter, but only an Arabic interpreter was present, forcing the court to adjourn the formal arraignment. The other two defendants, both Egyptian nationals aged 20 and 25, waited in the dock as the judge worked through the scheduling problems that have delayed the case since October.

The alleged offence took place on the lower esplanade, a stretch of seafront below the main promenade and between the piers - an area of the beach that can remain busy even through the small hours. The investigation has been running under the Sussex Police codename Operation Brampton. The woman, aged 33, reported that she did not know the men. Officers made arrests quickly, and since mid-October all three defendants have been held in custody while interpreters, legal representation and immigration-status documents have been assembled for the Crown.

Det Supt Andrew Harbour was quoted in The Guardian and the BBC on 6 October: ‘This has been a fast-paced investigation with all three suspects having been identified thorough investigative work. I commend the bravery of the victim who we continue to support with specialist officers.’

At yesterday’s hearing, the court confirmed that the full trial will begin on Monday 16 March 2026 and is expected to last around three weeks. Until then the defendants will remain on remand. The judge repeated that the timetable would not be pushed back again, noting the need to avoid further delay for both the complainant and the defendants. With the administrative obstacles now cleared, the next significant moment in the case will come in the spring, when the jury is sworn and the evidence is heard for the first time.

Although hard numbers are obscured by under-reporting and shifting terminology in press archives, Brighton has seen a small but consistent pattern of rape cases reported specifically on the beach itself across the last half-dozen years. According to ChatGPT, police statements and the publicly visible press record suggest roughly a dozen distinct investigations since 2019, many centred on the two-pier corridor and the lower esplanade. It is worth noting, however, that the media footprint is significantly larger, because each incident generates multiple appeals, hearings and follow-ups, producing dozens of articles and giving the impression of a wider surge than the underlying case numbers alone might indicate.

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.

The Town Beehive

Fifty years ago, in 1975, a modest paperback appeared under the imprint of QueenSpark Books - a fledgling community press run from Brighton’s Queen’s Park. Its title, The Town Beehive: A Young Girl’s Lot in Brighton 1910-1934, announced its subject with quiet pride. The author, Daisy Noakes, had been born in Princes Road in 1910 and lived almost her entire life within walking distance of the seafront whose hum and hustle she immortalised.

QueenSpark’s founders had set out to publish the voices of working people, and Noakes was among their first and most enduring discoveries. She wrote with humour, precision and memory unclouded by nostalgia. Her words carried the weight of a life lived in modest rooms, in domestic service, and later among the deckchairs and boarding houses of interwar Brighton.

 The Town Beehive was followed by two further volumes, The Faded Rainbow and Street Noises, as well as radio and television appearances. She became a familiar presence on BBC Southern Counties Radio, interviewing fishermen and stallholders with the same unvarnished curiosity that animated her writing. Later she appeared in the BBC’s Out of the Doll’s House, a landmark account of women’s history, and was honoured by Sussex University for her contribution to local culture.

Noakes’s style was direct and her recall extraordinary. The sea, for Daisy, was both backdrop and lifeblood - the edge of the world against which Brighton’s fortunes rose and fell. She remembered the beach not as a picturesque resort but as a working stage, crowded with buskers, vendors, families, and barefoot children chasing coins through the shingle. Few writers of her generation - and certainly none from her background - recorded the soundscape of the town so closely, from pier bands and concert parties to the black minstrel troupes who sang at low tide.

What gives The Town Beehive its lasting warmth is Noakes’s unpretentious humanity. Her Brighton is not the Brighton of postcards or pleasure palaces, but of aching legs, shared cups of tea, and the kindness of sisters. It is a Brighton of ordinary lives, played out within sight and sound of the surf. More about Noakes can be read at My Brighton and Hove and Writing Lives.

The Town Beehive is free to read online at the Queenspark website. Here are two extracts/

‘One of the times we were all together was Armistice Day of the First World War. With young George in the pram, we all walked to Brighton Sea Front and along to the West Pier. Everyone seemed to be singing and dancing, and I remember soldiers and sailors in uniform, the worse for drink, staggering around. We then walked back through the town to New England Hill, and all went in a cafe, where Dad bought a large jug of tea and one cup which we took turns in drinking out of. I still remember to this day how my legs ached with walking, and longed to have a ride in the pram if only someone would carry George, but no, it did not happen.’ (The image below is an illustration by ChatGPT.)

‘The seafront had plenty of attractions. There were bands that played on the Pier, two concert Parties, the one near Black Rock was called Jack Shepherd’s Entertainers, the one near the West Pier was Ellson’s Entertainers.

At this one, talent contests were held on Saturday afternoons, but one was only eligible to compete if one had a paid seat. The cheapest was 6d. I had earned 5d. that morning, and after a lot of persuasion my sister Emily gave me the other 1d. if I would sing her favourite song at that moment: “God send you back to me”. She had been friendly with a South African wounded soldier, and he had gone home. So we walked there and back but happy because I won a Teddy Bear for first prize.

Black minstrels played their banjos at low tide on the sands, and would get the children to join in the choruses, I remember “Oh Moana” and the actions. People on the Pier would throw pennies down to the sands, and the boys would scramble for them. All sorts of vendors were on the beach with newspapers, Brighton Rock and the Whelk Stalls where one could buy a small plate of whelks, cockles, mussels or winkles, and one could leave the plate on the beach to be collected.’

Raging with the greatest violence

‘A severe hurricane and occurring at the spring tide, the low tracts along the coast were inundated and considerable damage occasioned thereby. I drove to Brighton and arrived there between one and two, at the time the sea was raging with the greatest violence, the surf dashed over the pier and occasionally hid it from our view.’ This is from the remarkable diary of Gideon Algernon Mantell - doctor, geologist, and fossil collector - who died this day in 1852. Born in Lewes, he moved to Brighton where he lived in a house on Old Steine becoming something of a celebrity palaeontologist.

Mantell was born in Lewes in 1790, the son of a shoemaker. Apprenticed as a teenager to a local surgeon, he later trained at St Bartholomew’s in London before returning to Sussex to practice. His first fame came not from medicine but from geology: he was the discoverer of the Iguanodon, among the earliest of the creatures that would come to be called dinosaurs. His book The Fossils of the South Downs (1822) made his name, and within a decade he had identified a second great reptile. Yet his ambition remained medical: he longed to establish a prosperous practice among the aristocracy drawn to Brighton by the Pavilion court of George IV and William IV.

In 1833 he finally moved his family to 20 The Steyne, at the heart of fashionable Brighton. To his frustration, he became less a physician than a celebrity geologist. Visitors besieged his home, eager to see his fossils. In 1838, the collection was purchased by the British Museum. That same year he bought a practice in Clapham Common, which soon became a success and allowed him frequent trips to London to attend institutional meetings. He moved again in 1844 to Pimlico, where he remained until his death on 10 November 1852. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia and Dinohunters.

A lifetime of diaries kept by Mantell were edited in 1940 by E. Cecil Curwen, whose father had lived in Hove. Extracts were first published that year in Sussex County Magazine under the title The Diaries of Gideon Mantell, F.R.S., based on Curwen’s fuller transcription now held at Barbican House, Lewes. Many of Mantell’s original notebooks and letters, however, were taken to New Zealand by his son Walter Baldock Durrant Mantell and are preserved today in the Alexander Turnbull Library and at Te Papa Tongarewa. 

Later editions have sought to complete Curwen’s partial selection: John A. Cooper’s The Unpublished Journal of Gideon Algernon Mantell, 1819–1852 (2010) makes available the sections omitted from Curwen’s edition and is freely accessible online, while  another volume covering June-November 1852 was separately published by R. Dell in 1983. It is Curwen’s typescript, together with these supplements, that remains the principal record of Mantell’s day-to-day observations of life in Brighton and Lewes. They reveal a man of abundant restless energy, fired with an ambition to become immortal in the realms of science, but also one who sought solace in the sea air and who described with striking immediacy the changing moods of Brighton’s coast.

Here are several diary extracts about Brighton Beach contained in Curwen’s original The Diaries of Gideon Mantell.

16 August 1823

‘Drove to Brighton; the sea very rough and magnificent. I walked along to the beach and seated myself on a rock, viewing with delight the tempestuous foaming of the billows around me: the hull of a vessel wrecked the preceding night was lying near me, and was hurled to and fro by the impetuosity of the waves. The foam from the surges dashing through the piles of the pier was fine and imposing.’

23 November 1824

‘A severe hurricane and occurring at the spring tide, the low tracts along the coast were inundated and considerable damage occasioned thereby. I drove to Brighton and arrived there between one and two, at the time the sea was raging with the greatest violence, the surf dashed over the pier and occasionally hid it from our view. So soon as the water was retired so as to allow of walking on the esplanade, we went to the Pier, which was much damaged by the waves; the railing in many places washed away, and the platform destroyed, so as to render access to the Pier-head difficult and dangerous: however we ventured to the farthest end although every now and then a sea dashed over us, and completely drenched us, but the awful grandeur of the scene more than compensated for the inconvenience of our situation.’

29 October 1836

‘A dreadful hurricane from the SSW at about eleven AM it was terrific - houses unroofed - trees torn up by the roots: chimney-pots and chimneys blown in every direction - sea mountains high. Went to the Pier, and was present when violent oscillations began to be produced by the hurricane: the whole lines of platforms and chains were thrown into undulations, and the suspension bridges appeared like an enormous serpent writing in agony - at length one of the bridges gave way, and planks, beams, iron rods - all were hurled instantaneously into the boiling surge! The tension of the bridge being thus set at liberty, the remaining bridges gradually became motionless; the damage done to this beautiful structure cannot be much less than £1,000. Some persons were killed by the falling of chimneys and lead blown off the houses.’

See also Brighton’s oldest pier.

Prof. Powsey’s West Pier feats

At the height of the Edwardian seaside boom, few spectacles drew a crowd like the high dives of ‘Professor’ Powsey. From a spindly wooden tower on Brighton’s West Pier he hurled himself into the Channel from 80 feet up, sometimes head first, sometimes astride a bicycle. His name appeared on countless postcards, his performances billed as ‘Professor Powsey’s Sensational High Dive of 81 feet’ or ‘The Great Cycle Dive’.

The most widespread image of his act shows him riding off a platform above the West Pier, still in the saddle. But other, less common photographs do still exist - such as the two on the left above that passed through Toovey’s auctioneers at one time or another.

Powsey’s Brighton Beach performances took place around 1905-08, part of a circuit of seaside stunts that included Margate, Blackpool and Scarborough. Yet Brighton became his signature setting. On clear afternoons he climbed the narrow frame above the pier, waved to the crowd, and dropped into a small patch of sea fenced off by boats. These were feats as much of nerve as of balance, undertaken in unpredictable tides and wind.

The diving tradition continued with his daughter, Miss G. Powsey, who performed on the same pier a few years later. A postcard from the Royal Pavilion & Museums collection shows her captured in mid-dive before the domed concert hall, continuing the family’s blend of danger and elegance that had thrilled the seaside crowds. See also Powsey Family History.

Picture credits: Top left - Toovey’s; top right - Wikipedia; bottom left - Toovey’s; bottom right - Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.

I confess I like tar

‘I like to go down on the beach among the fishing boats, and to recline on the shingle by a smack when the wind comes gently from the west, and the low wave breaks but a few yards from my feet. I like the occasional passing scent of pitch: they are melting it close by. I confess I like tar: one’s hands smell nice after touching ropes.’ This was written about Brighton Beach by John Richard Jefferies, an English nature writer born on this day in 1848. Although not well remembered, he turned his attention to Brighton in at least two books of essays - Nature Near London and The Open Air.

Jefferies was born on 6 November 1848 at Coate Farm, near Swindon in Wiltshire. His early years were steeped in rural observation - he studied the hedges, brooks and fields around him with a sharp eye and lyrical sensibility. He worked as a local journalist - reporting for the North Wiltshire Herald and the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire Standard - and began to publish articles on natural history and rural life in the Pall Mall Gazette and other London papers. In 1874 he married Jessie Baden, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer at Syde near Cirencester, and the couple had three children, though the third died young.

Jefferies earned his living precariously as a freelance essayist and novelist; the success of The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) brought him a wider readership and regular commissions from magazines such as Longman’s, The Graphic and The Standard. His blend of realism, spiritual intensity and precise nature description made him one of the leading English nature writers of the Victorian age. Although his name is most often linked with Wiltshire, he moved south in later life, seeking sea-air and convalescence on the Sussex coast. He died in August 1887 at Goring-by-Sea in West Sussex.

In his last years, he published two books of essays: Nature Near London (Chatto & Windus, 1883) and The Open Air (Chatto & Windus, 1885) both with lyrical passages about Brighton and its seaside. These first two are from a chapter in Nature Near London called ‘To Brighton’.

‘The clean dry brick pavements are scarcely less crowded than those of London, but as you drive through the town, now and then there is a glimpse of a greenish mist afar off between the houses. The green mist thickens in one spot almost at the horizon; or is it the dark nebulous sails of a vessel? Then the foam suddenly appears close at hand - a white streak seems to run from house to house, reflecting the sunlight: and this is Brighton.’

‘Westwards, a mile beyond Hove, beyond the coast-guard cottages, turn aside from the road, and go up on the rough path along the ridge of shingle. The hills are away on the right, the sea on the left; the yards of the ships in the basin slant across the sky in front. With a quick, sudden heave the summer sea, calm and gleaming, runs a little way up the side of the groyne, and again retires. There is scarce a gurgle or a bubble, but the solid timbers are polished and smooth where the storms have worn them with pebbles. From a grassy spot ahead a bird rises, marked with white, and another follows it; they are wheatears; they frequent the land by the low beach in the autumn.’

The more extensive passages below are from ‘Sunny Brighton’ in The Open Air.

‘Some of the old streets opening out of the King's Road look very pleasant on a sunny day. They run to the north, so that the sun over the sea shines nearly straight up them, and at the farther end, where the houses close in on higher ground, the deep blue sky descends to the rooftrees. The old red tiles, the red chimneys, the green jalousies, give some colour; and beneath there are shadowy corners and archways. They are not too wide to whisper across, for it is curious that to be interesting a street must be narrow, and the pavements are but two or three bricks broad. These pavements are not for the advantage of foot passengers; they are merely to prevent cart-wheels from grating against the houses. There is nothing ancient or carved in these streets, they are but moderately old, yet turning from the illuminated sea it is pleasant to glance up them as you pass, in their stillness and shadow, lying outside the inconsiderate throng walking to and fro, and contrasting in their irregularity with the set facades of the front. Opposite, across the King's Road, the mastheads of the fishing boats on the beach just rise above the rails of the cliff, tipped with fluttering pennants, or fish-shaped vanes changing to the wind.’

‘I like to go down on the beach among the fishing boats, and to recline on the shingle by a smack when the wind comes gently from the west, and the low wave breaks but a few yards from my feet. I like the occasional passing scent of pitch: they are melting it close by. I confess I like tar: one’s hands smell nice after touching ropes. It is more like home down on the beach here; the men are doing something real, sometimes there is the clink of a hammer; behind me there is a screen of brown net, in which rents are being repaired; a big rope yonder stretches as the horse goes round, and the heavy smack is drawn slowly up over the pebbles. The full curves of the rounded bows beside me are pleasant to the eye, as any curve is that recalls those of woman. Mastheads stand up against the sky, and a loose rope swings as the breeze strikes it; a veer of the wind brings a puff of smoke from the funnel of a cabin, where some one is cooking, but it is not disagreeable, like smoke from a house chimney-pot; another veer carries it away again, - depend upon it the simplest thing cooked there is nice. Shingle rattles as it is shovelled up for ballast - the sound of labour makes me more comfortably lazy. They are not in a hurry, nor “chivy” over their work either; the tides rise and fall slowly, and they work in correspondence. No infernal fidget and fuss. Wonder how long it would take me to pitch a pebble so as to lodge on the top of that large brown pebble there? I try, once now and then.’

‘When this peculiar bank appears at Brighton it is an almost certain sign of continued fine weather, and I have noticed the same thing elsewhere; once particularly it remained fine after this appearance despite every threat the sky could offer of a storm. All the threats came to nothing for three weeks, not even thunder and lightning could break it up, - “deceitful flashes,” as the Arabs say; for, like the sons of the desert, just then the farmers longed for rain on their parched fields. To me, while on the beach among the boats, the value of these clouds lies in their slowness of movement, and consequent effect in soothing the mind. Outside the hurry and drive of life a rest comes through the calm of nature. As the swell of the sea carries up the pebbles, and arranges the largest farthest inland, where they accumulate and stay unmoved, so the drifting of the clouds, and the touch of the wind, the sound of the surge, arrange the molecules of the mind in still layers. It is then that a dream fills it, and a dream is sometimes better than the best reality. Laugh at the idea of dreaming where there is an odour of tar if you like, but you see it is outside intolerable civilization. It is a hundred miles from the King’s Road, though but just under it.’

‘There is a scheme on foot for planking over the ocean, beginning at the bottom of West Street. An immense central pier is proposed, which would occupy the only available site for beaching the smacks. If carried out, the whole fishing industry must leave Brighton,- to the fishermen the injury would be beyond compensation, and the aspect of Brighton itself would be destroyed. Brighton ought to rise in revolt against it.’

The portrait above is from Wikipedia, and the fishing boat image is from the collection of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.