Implicitly precarious

Graham Swift’s Here We Are - published in the UK five years ago today - is steeped in Brighton, with Brighton’s Palace Pier both setting and symbol in the summer of 1959, the heyday of seaside variety entertainment. Swift evokes the scene with precision: the stage ‘on a flimsy structure built over swirling water’, the pier boards beneath performers’ feet, the tang of salt air drifting into the theatre, and the nightly dispersal of audiences back onto the beach and prom. For him, the seaside is an ‘implicitly precarious’ place. 

The story circles around three performers: Jack Robinson, a gifted compère; Ronnie Deane, who takes the stage name ‘The Great Pablo’; and his assistant Evie White. The pier theatre is their world, a place of illusions, transformations, and betrayals, all played out above the restless sea. Ronnie, once a wartime evacuee lodged with a Brighton family, has made his identity anew as a magician. Evie, by day a shop worker in town, by night slips into sequins and vanishes nightly into Pablo’s illusions. Jack holds it all together with wit and warmth. But as the season that summer reaches its climax, Ronnie vanishes not just from the stage but from their lives. Swift then shifts the perspective to decades later, when Evie looks back on the Brighton summer that shaped everything. The pier, the gaudy lights, the endless stretch of pebbles, become bound up with memory, loss and the final trick that could never be undone.

Brighton is not only a backdrop here but a character in itself. Its beach is a place of impermanence, its pier a fragile platform where each night’s show disappears as soon as it is conjured. The book’s themes of illusion, disappearance and reinvention mirror the seaside town’s own rhythms, with its tides of visitors, its lights that glitter and fade, and its stages that once seemed to promise the world.

Swift, born in London in 1949, has always been a novelist of memory and what might be thought of as the ungraspable past. He read English at Cambridge and came to prominence with Waterland in 1983, a novel that blended history and personal inheritance, later adapted into film. His Last Orders won the Booker Prize in 1996, and across a dozen novels he has returned again and again to the mysteries of time, identity and loss.

Here is Swift in The Guardian writing about his book in 2021: ‘It seems I’m attracted to the seaside. It features in several of my books. A large part of my latest novel, Here We Are, is set not just in Brighton, but in a theatre on Brighton Pier. But then we are all, surely, drawn to the seaside. It’s a deeply compelling - and paradoxical - place. We go there for enjoyment, yet at the same time it is an elemental zone where land and water meet and thus, with or without the presence of cliffs, it is implicitly precarious. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.

Interestingly, the book’s cover - taken from a famous American natural history book, The Birds of America by John James Audubon - was given a bespoke billboard installation by the Buildhollywood agency. It features hundreds of individual feathers hand applied and said to create ‘a bold, textured display to match the dramatics of the novel’.

The merriest place to love

 

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

This is the opening verse in Clement Scott’s poem Brighton Pier which, in fact, is about the Chain Pier. Born on this day in 1841 he was one of the best-known theatre critics and journalists of late-Victorian London. For two decades he wrote reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and his notices could make or break a play. He also wrote travel sketches, popular verses, and several sentimental lyrics that caught the public mood in the age of seaside holidays and parlour song. His reputation in his own time was mixed: admired for his fluent style and influence, but criticised for the sometimes moralising tone of his criticism.

Scott married Isabel Busson du Maurier, the sister of George du Maurier, and the couple had four children. She died in 1890, and he remarried Constance Margaret Brandon, an English journalist and actress, in San Francisco. After an ill-considered 1898 interview in Great Thoughts, Scott was forced to retire as a theatre critic and he moved to Biarritz where he wrote The Drama of Yesterday and Today. He then worked for a couple of years at the end of the century for the New York Herald, later returning to London. In 1900, he founded The Free Lance, a journal for writers who worked by the job, which he edited. He died in 1904, and is barely remembered today, but see Wikipedia for more biographical information.

The poem Brighton Pier was among his lighter works. It was first published in Lays of a Londoner (Davide Bogue, 1882) and is freely available to read online at Internet Archive (a ‘lay’ being a short narrative or lyric poem). Like much of Scott’s verse it was designed to be read aloud or set to music, sitting close to the tradition of the popular ballad. Today it survives less as a work of high poetry than as a cultural document: a window into how Brighton was imagined in the late nineteenth century, when its pier, promenade, and beach had become central to England’s holiday culture. (Painting of the pier is by John Fraser and used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. The portrait is sourced from Wikipedia)

Here is Clement Scott’s full poem.

Brighton Pier

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

Wandering waves on the shingle dash;
 The sky’s too blue for a thoughtless tear;
Danger is nothing but pessimist trash,
And the morning’s made for a healthy splash:
 Come for a header from Brighton Pier!

Filled with life, see the children race -
 Motherly hearts they quake with fear -
Meeting the breezes face to face!
Whether we’re steady, or ‘go the pace,’
 Let us be young upon Brighton Pier!

Here she comes with her love-lit eyes,
 Hearts will throb when a darling’s near;
Would it be well to avoid her - wise?
Every fool in the wide world tries,
 But love must win upon Brighton Pier!

Lazily lost in a dream we sit -
 Maidens’ eyes are a waveless mere -
There’s many a vow when seagulls flit,
And many a sigh when lamps are lit,
 And many a kiss, upon Brighton Pier.

Dear old friends of the days long fled,
 Why did you vanish and leave me here?
Girls are marrying, boys are wed,
Youth is living, but I seem dead,
 Kicking my heels upon Brighton Pier!

Remembering the Old Lady

Half a century ago today, Brighton’s West Pier, affectionately known as the Old Lady, closed to the public for ever - and quite possibly she has become more famous and loved since then. Opened in October 1866, the 1,115-foot iron promenade designed by Eugenius Birch was built on screw-piled columns and laced with a light lattice so seas could run through it rather than break it. Early visitors paid at paired toll houses and strolled past octagonal kiosks and serpent-entwined gas lamp standards whose motif echoed the Royal Pavilion’s interiors. 

By the mid-1870s a central bandstand helped turn air-taking into entertainment, and in the 1880s weather screens and a substantial pier-head pavilion arrived. Steamers berthed on the south side from the 1890s, and on one peak summer’s day in 1898 nine vessels were alongside at once. Eugenius’s son Peregrine Birch oversaw an 1893 pier-head enlargement and pavilion, and Clayton & Black’s grand concert hall of 1916 completed a half-century of building. 

Attendance surged after the First World War with more than two million paying visitors recorded in 1919, a high-water mark for the resort economy. The pier also carried a bathing station at the north-east corner of the head, a detail often missed in later photographs. In April 1900 tragedy struck close inshore when a naval boat swamped near the pier and seven bluejackets from HMS Desperate were drowned; the men are buried locally.

The West Pier was the first pleasure pier to be protected at the highest level: listed in 1969 and upgraded to Grade I in 1982. It doubled as a film set, notably for Oh! What a Lovely War! in 1968. Ownership changes and post-war decline brought tight finances; a local company failed in the mid-1970s as repair orders loomed. The city declined to buy the asset and on 30 September 1975 the pier closed completely to the public. The company went into liquidation and the structure vested in the Crown before the newly formed West Pier Trust later acquired it for a peppercorn £100, beginning decades of advocacy and plans.

Exposure then accelerated the damage. A section fell in 1984 and the Great Storm of 1987 shook more loose. For safety the shore link was removed in 1991, isolating the seaward buildings. National Lottery support of £14m in 1998 raised hopes of full restoration with a commercial partner, but storms in late 2002 brought partial collapses, and two separate fires in March and May 2003 devastated both pavilion and concert hall. Further winter losses followed in 2013-14. Limited demolition around the root cleared the way for the i360 project in 2010, while the offshore ironwork gradually separated into the familiar twin rust-red islands.

Even as a ruin the pier gathered new life. In winter months vast starling murmurations began to wheel between the Palace Pier and the West Pier’s skeleton before carpeting the lower chords at dusk, turning the wreck into a wildlife stage. The Trust shifted to conservation-education: rescuing an original octagonal kiosk in 1996, seeking funds to restore it as a seafront learning centre, mounting exhibitions from historic archives, and occasionally auctioning recovered fragments to support its work. The ruin remains on Historic England’s At Risk register, with official advice long concluding that full restoration of the original structure is now beyond practical means.

Fifty years to the day since the gates were finally shut, the West Pier’s story still reads as a précis of Britain’s seaside age: engineering bravura, civic showmanship, mass leisure, precarious economics, and an afterlife as cultural memory and accidental sculpture. The serpent lamps are gone, the concert hall is sea-room for cormorants, but the outline still sketches Brighton’s horizon and the city’s abiding argument with the sea.

Here is a very brief list of some of the shows and acts that appeared over her 109 years open to the public.

1870s-1920s

Marie Lloyd, one of the most famous music-hall stars of her day; touring orchestras and conductors such as Sir Henry Wood; summer seasons of operetta, Gilbert & Sullivan productions, pantomimes; notable aquatic acts like daredevil divers and novelty acts including James Doughty and his performing dogs

1930s-1950s

Popular light entertainment, seaside variety and dance bands. Big names in British comedy such as George Robey and Stanley Holloway

1960s-1970s

Pink Floyd in 1972, The Who in 1964, Jimi Hendrix in 1966, The Rolling Stones in the early 1960s, Genesis, Deep Purple, and The Kinks.

Selected sources and links; West Pier Trust, My Brighton and Hove, Wikipedia. Images courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.

Brighton’s oldest pier

This week in 1822, work began on Captain Samuel Brown’s Royal Suspension Chain Pier, the town’s first true pier and a bold answer to Brighton’s surf that made boat landings treacherous. Brown, a naval engineer fresh from his Trinity Chain Pier in Edinburgh, drove the first piles on 18 September 1822. The 1,134-foot structure opened on 25 November 1823: four towers carried swept iron chains, a 13-foot-wide timber promenade ran out over the sea, and a toll gate on the esplanade kept order. 

The pier was conceived as a packet-boat stage to France and quickly doubled as a promenade lined with amusements: a camera obscura at the head, a reading-room and library, kiosks and a weighing machine, military bands, even shower baths. William IV came to admire it; Turner and Constable painted it (see Constable on the beach, and The Pavilion pivots 90°). Early blows, however, came with storms in 1824, 1833 and 1836. Here is a diary entry by Gideon Algernon Mantell, a surgeon famous for his diary (and for his fossil collection).

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.’ For more on Mantell, see Brighton in Diaries.

Steamer trade ebbed to more sheltered Newhaven, so managers turned to entertainment and spectacle. The town grew around it: the Aquarium arrived to the west in the 1870s; the West Pier opened in 1866 and pulled crowds; by the 1890s a grand new Palace Pier was authorised on condition the ageing Chain Pier be dismantled. It closed in October 1896, already tired, its oak piles and ironwork strained after seven decades of gales.

On 4 December 1896 the Channel finished the job. A fierce winter storm tore the old pier to pieces and hurled wreckage along the front, battering the half-built Palace Pier. Brighton salvaged what it could and kept the memory close to shore. The dainty Gothic toll kiosks were later re-erected at the Palace Pier entrance; the signal cannon that once boomed a steamer’s arrival still sits on the deck; masonry footings cling to the beach and, at the very lowest tides in recent years, the stumps of piles have shown and gone again under shifting shingle. 

Sources (text): Wikipedia, National Piers Society, Institute of Civil Engineers; (images) The Regency Society (aquatint drawn and published by Joseph Cordwell, 1823-1824) and John Huddlestone’s The Brighton Story.

We gave it away to the crabs

Piers are stepping-stones
out of this world, a line of poetry
flung out to sea on a whim,
a dazzle of sea lights
glimpsed between floorboards.

This is the opening stanza to Hugo Williams’s poem i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003), first published in the London Review of Books four years ago today. It’s an affectionate portrait of the old pier but far from sentimental, capturing instead the tension between seaside gaiety and slow decay, and placing the ruined structure firmly in the realm of memory and mortality.

Williams, born in Windsor in 1942, is the son of actor Hugh Williams and model-actress Margaret Vyner. Educated at Lockers Park and then Eton, he began publishing poems while still at school and went on to build a career marked by wit, intimacy and a finely-tuned autobiographical eye. His first collection, Symptoms of Loss, appeared in 1965, and over the decades he became recognised as one of Britain’s most distinctive voices, blending humour, candour and a conversational ease with themes of family, memory, illness and love affairs. His marriage to Hermine Demoriane has provided a recurring source of inspiration, as have the lives and deaths of his siblings, and his later years brought powerful reflections on dialysis and transplant surgery.

Williams’s books include Love-Life, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, Billy’s Rain, which took the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Collected Poems, which secured him the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Although most of his life has been rooted in London, he has long contributed travel writing, journalism and poetry that reach into England’s coastal imagination. His work often circles themes of seaside towns, childhood holidays and the shifting moods of shorelines, placing him within a tradition of poets for whom Brighton and other resorts serve as shorthand for both freedom and transience.

Williams’s poem i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003) was first published in the London Review of Books (Vol. 43, No. 18, dated 23 September 2021), and can be freely read on the LRB website. It later appeared in book/pamphlet form in The West Pier, published by New Walk Editions in 2022.

The poem is considered an elegy to the Brighton beach ruins of the West Pier. Written in his typically spare and understated style, Williams evokes the pier as a decaying skeleton of its former grandeur, a structure whose collapse into the sea mirrors the erosion of memory and time. The poem treats the West Pier as both a civic monument and a personal touchstone, registering its slow disintegration not with nostalgia but with a wry acceptance of impermanence. In Williams’s hands, the pier becomes an image of loss that is as much about the inevitability of decline in human life as it is about the destruction of a beloved seaside structure. See also: the Sphinx Review; The London Magazine; and my own reflections on the ruins (written before I knew of Williams’s poem) - see In a silvery sea of time.

The portrait of Williams is a screenshot taken from a video of him talking to camera last year, when the T. S. Eliot Prize team invited him into a film studio to reflect on having won the T. S. Eliot Prize five years earlier.

i.m. The West Pier (1866-2003) by Hugo Williams

Piers are stepping-stones

out of this world, a line of poetry

flung out to sea on a whim,

a dazzle of sea lights

glimpsed between floorboards.

For 50p you can study eternity

through a telescope

and never have to go there,

only promenade to nowhere and back

in an atmosphere of ice cream

We used to take the speedboat ride

between the two piers,

pulling the canvas up to our chins

when the spray flew in our faces.

Now we stand and stare

at the remains of our innocence,

twisted girders piled up

in a heap of dead holidays,

while Brighton limps out to sea

on its one good leg.

*

There it is over there,

a little rusty island moored off-shore,

the empty cage of its dome

lying lower in the water

every time I come down.

Where are the luminous dolphins

on the merry-go-round?

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West?

We could have saved the old pier,

but we gave it away to the crabs

and put up a giant pogo-stick

on the seafront,

a middle finger to its memory.

Now only seagulls cry

in what’s left of the concert hall,

only storms shift the scenery.

It sinks below the horizon,

a black and tangled sunset

surrounded by bubbles.

Madame Esmeralda, gypsy fortune-teller,

presses her lips to the glass

of her waterlogged cubicle

and gurgles her apologies

for getting it all so wrong.

Women bathing allowed!

On this weekend in 1896, The Illustrated London News reported ‘the opening of the bathing from the end of Brighton pier to swimmers of our sex.’ It marked a milestone in women’s freedom on the English coast, and the article added a heartfelt plea for more facilities for female swimmers across the country.

‘A delightful piece of news for all whose it may concern,’ the paper declared, ‘is the opening of the bathing from the end of the Brighton pier to swimmers of our sex. The pleasure of diving into fifty feet of water needs to be felt to be understood. It is good to see that there are plenty of women able to take advantage of the concession: daily, up till ten o’clock, the cabins are in constant demand, and it has become a popular amusement for visitors to go to watch ten or a dozen ladies swimming about with perfect freedom and strength of limb.’

Until the 1890s, women at Brighton had been confined largely to bathing machines and segregated areas of beach, often under strict supervision. Mixed bathing was still controversial, and even when ladies’ clubs existed, they often lacked proper facilities. Brighton Swimming Club, founded in 1860, did not admit women until 1891, and then only to a separate ‘Ladies’ Section’ that swam under rules of modesty and restricted hours. The ILN article describes how remarkable it was that women could now dive from the pier-head into deep water, a privilege long taken for granted by men.

The article went on to say:‘For poor girls, facilities for learning to swim in large towns are still imperfect as compared to those open to boys. With a little cost and trouble, provision might be made for women swimming in the lakes of our public parks, as men and boys do. Even those who live near rate-supported baths find that these are only open to girls at low prices for two or three hours a week, whereas boys can bathe for twopence or threepence at any time. Brighton may lead on to reforms for the masses in this matter.’

Nationally, the paper’s plea was well judged. In London and other large towns, campaigners argued that swimming was not just recreation but healthful exercise and even a lifesaving skill that every girl should be allowed to learn. The Brighton initiative, reported approvingly in 1896, was taken as a model that might encourage reform elsewhere.

Brighton would later become home to champion women swimmers such as Hilda James and Mercedes Gleitze in the early 20th century, but the scene described that September - ten or twelve women ‘swimming about with perfect freedom’ under the gaze of visitors - was a small revolution in itself.

NB: I have used two images to illustrate this piece but neither are directly related to the text about bathing from the pier. The Illustrated London News cover pre-dates by a year the edition used as a source for this story. Moreover, the famous image - Mermaids at Brighton - by William Heath, c. 1829, predates it by 70 years. 

The starlings have gone mad

Today marks the 16th anniversary of the publication of The Death of Bunny Munro - Nick Cave’s darkly comic novel partly set in Brighton. One particular passage focuses on the burning down of the West Pier.

Cave, an Australian singer, songwriter, novelist and screenwriter, has been closely associated with Brighton since the early 2000s. Having lived for years in Hove with his wife Susie Bick and their children, Cave was often seen around the city and became a familiar if sometimes reclusive presence. 

Brighton has figured in both his music and his fiction: he wrote and recorded albums here, and its seafront and piers became woven into The Death of Bunny Munro. His time in the city was also marked by personal tragedy, most notably the death of his son Arthur in 2015, after which Cave and his family later relocated to London and Los Angeles.

The Death of Bunny Munro, published on 8 September 2009, follows the disintegrating life of a Brighton-based door-to-door cosmetics salesman. Bunny, a compulsive womaniser and alcoholic, is left to care for his young son after his wife’s suicide. As he spirals into chaos, his grotesque behaviour and addictions clash with moments of tenderness toward his child. The novel mixes bleak comedy, surreal imagery and local detail, casting Brighton in a lurid and unsettling light. Here is one extract from the book.

Bunny . . . says, ‘Libby, baby, where do we live?’

‘Brighton.’

‘And where is Brighton?’ he says, running a finger along the row of miniature bottles of liquor arranged on the bedside table and choosing a Smirnoff.

‘Down south.’

‘Which is about as far away from “up north” as you can get without falling into the bloody sea. Now, sweetie, turn off the TV, take your Tegretol, take a sleeping tablet—shit, take two sleeping tablets—and I’ll be back tomorrow. Early.’

‘The pier is burning down,’ says Libby.

‘What?’

‘The West Pier, it’s burning down. I can smell the smoke from here.’

‘The West Pier?’

Bunny empties the tiny bottle of vodka down his throat, lights another cigarette, and rises from the bed. The room heaves as Bunny is hit by the realisation that he is very drunk. With arms held out to the side and on tiptoe, Bunny moonwalks across the room to the window. He lurches, stumbles and Tarzans the faded chintz curtains until he finds his balance and steadies himself. He draws them open extravagantly and vulcanised daylight and the screaming of birds deranges the room. Bunny’s pupils contract painfully as he grimaces through the window, into the light. He sees a dark cloud of starlings, twittering madly over the flaming, smoking hulk of the West Pier that stands, helpless, in the sea across from the hotel. He wonders why he hadn’t seen this before and then wonders how long he has been in this room, then remembers his wife and hears her say, ‘Bunny, are you there?’

‘Yeah,’ says Bunny, transfixed by the sight of the burning pier and the thousand screaming birds.

‘The starlings have gone mad. It’s such a horrible thing. Their little babies burning in their nests. I can’t bear it, Bun,’ says Libby, the high violin rising.

The photograph of the West Pier above is credited to Terry Applin and can be found at The Argus.

The Crazy Mouse

This year marks a quarter of a century since the Crazy Mouse first arrived on Brighton Pier. Installed in 2000 by Reverchon of France, it quickly established itself as a landmark attraction, standing at the seaward end with its tangled lattice of track and sharp hairpin bends visible from the promenade and beach.

The ride’s distinctive appeal has always been its unpredictability. Four-person cars spin freely as they negotiate sudden drops and tight corners, so no two rides are quite the same. A generation of families, teenagers and day-trippers have been thrown backwards, sideways or forwards around its upper levels, the element of chance making the Crazy Mouse as lively and chaotic as its name suggests.

Over the years, Brighton Pier’s amusements have changed repeatedly, with new thrill rides introduced and old favourites taken down, but the Crazy Mouse has endured. Its survival for 25 years makes it now one of the pier’s oldest attractions, the illuminated yellow sign as recognisable as the helter-skelter or the carousel. Other rides have made headlines - such as a 2004 fine after a different coaster was found operating with a missing track section, or a 2019 incident on the Air Race - but the Crazy Mouse has run without serious incident, testament to its durability and design.

As Brighton Palace Pier continues to balance Victorian heritage with modern amusements, the Crazy Mouse holds its place as both a crowd-pleasing roller coaster and a slice of seaside history. A quarter of a century on, it remains what it was in 2000: noisy, unpredictable, and irresistibly fun.

Piers star in Atelier Open

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

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

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

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

Only for the bravest!

A quarter of a century old this year, the Wild River log-flume ride has become a fixture on Brighton Palace Pier, offering generations of visitors the chance to climb, plunge and get soaked against the backdrop of the Channel.

Installed in May 2000, Wild River is a standard two-drop model manufactured by the French firm Reverchon and was part of a wave of new attractions brought in to refresh the pier’s appeal at the turn of the millennium. Each boat carries up to four passengers, climbing to a peak before plunging into a splash-filled pool, and riders are almost certain to emerge wet, if not drenched. The pier’s own publicity calls it ‘a big thrill. . . only for the bravest of riders’.

Height restrictions require passengers to be at least one metre tall, with those under 1.2 metres riding alongside a paying adult. Pregnant visitors, those with neck, back or heart conditions, vertigo or mobility issues are advised not to ride, partly because evacuation in the event of a stoppage can involve a steep walk down from the track. No loose footwear or hats are allowed, and single-ride tickets currently cost £6, though unlimited-ride wristbands are available.

For many visitors the Wild River has been a cooling interlude between the pier’s faster, more intense attractions such as Turbo (see Loop-the-loop). One teenage reviewer in 2019 recalled the slow incline to the top, the plunge into ‘icy depths’, and how on a hot day it was ‘a blessing . . . refreshed with cool water’, prompting repeat rides among their group. Others remember it as a reliable family favourite, where the excitement comes as much from the shared anticipation as from the splash itself.

More elaborate log‑flumes elsewhere in Europe include Phantasialand’s Chiapas in Germany - an Intamin‑built ride with three drops, intense theming and a steep 53° plunge - often ranked among the world’s best for its immersive design. In the UK, Blackpool Pleasure Beach’s Valhalla is another standout: an indoor, multi‑effect flume combining fire, snow, audio‑animatronics and two lift hills, though it is far more theatrical than Brighton’s modest version.

100 years ago, 200 years ago

Exactly 100 years ago today, the Brighton & Hove Herald reported that a 49 year old visitor from London had died in the sea at Brighton Beach. Encouraged by his son to swim, the father appeared at first to have drowned, but it was then established that he had died from heart failure caused by shock. The same edition of the Herald carried a feature - ‘From our files of 1825’ - giving a snapshot of Brighton Beach events exactly 200 years ago.

Brighton & Hove Herald, Saturday August 8, 1925

SAD BATHING FATALITY - Visitor’s Death from Shock.

Within a few hours of his arrival in Brighton on Sunday for a holiday, Mr Robert Dargavel, aged 49, a steel and copperplate engraver, of Cavendish-road, Balham, London, had a bathe in the sea, which proved to be fatal. At the time, it was thought that death was due to drowning, but evidence at the inquest on Tuesday by Dr. H. A. Baines, of Cannon-place, showed that the deceased was suffering from inflammation of the lungs and pleurisy, and that death was due to heart failure from shock.

The circumstances of Mr Dargavel’s death were unusual. His son, Mr Leonard Albert Dargavel, a motor driver, told his father that he proposed to have a bathe, and his father said that he would bathe too. The son swam out some distance and saw nothing more of his father until his body had been brought ashore. Mr John Taylor, a boatman and coxswain of the Brighton lifeboat, when bringing in a load of passengers, saw the deceased standing in shallow water some yards from the shore. A few moments later he saw the deceased fall. Mr Taylor ran into the water, and, with the assistance of another boatman, Mr George Bert Souch, of Artillery-street, brought Mr Dargavel ashore.

Mr Taylor, assisted by Mr Souch, immediately commenced artificial respiration. Shortly afterwards, P.C. Henry Tindall arrived and took over the task. This officer continued the process for about twenty minutes, and, with the assistance of Sergeant W. Cook and P. C. A. Hobden, it was continued for about an hour, two methods being tried.

Dr. Baines, at the inquest, paid a warm tribute to the manner in which the work of artificial respiration was attempted so assiduously and efficiently by the police. If there had been any possible chance of deceased’s life being saved in that way, said Dr. Baines, in all probability it would have been saved.

The Borough Coroner (Mr W. D. Peskett) expressed his gratification at this latest testimony to the services of the police. In the course of the evidence, it was revealed that Mrs Dargavel, widow of the deceased, who had travelled to Brighton with her husband and son, was on the beach when the body was pulled ashore. The son told the Coroner that his father had not been very well at times, but had not had medical treatment, and had been able to attend to his business.

A verdict to the effect that deceased died from natural causes, produced by shock, was returned.

Here also are three verbatim notices from the same page of the 8 August edition of the Herald

Brighton & Hove Herald, Saturday August 8, 1925

BRIGHTON 100 YEARS AGO - From our Files of 1825.

Lady Byron disembarked here on Tuesday from her yacht. After a stay of a few hours, her ladyship sailed for Southampton.

On Sunday last 4,200 persons visited our inimitable Chain Pier.

Yesterday morning two strange boats with no persons on board were perceived in the offing. A boat from the shore secured them, when it turned out that they had broken from their moorings and drifted from Worthing during the strong gale.

NB: Both images above are used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. The top image is dated c. 1925; and the lower image is dated c. 1825.

My only literary prize

In the early 1990s, I took part in a Brighton Festival writing workshop on the famous novel Brighton Rock. It was an interesting experience, if a little disappointing. The workshop included entry to a short story competition with a £50 prize, and I duly entered. On this day, in 1992, I received notification that I’d won the competition and the £50 - it remains the only literary prize I’ve ever won. But, at the time, I was convinced - as my diary reveals - that I must have been the only entrant. Here is the story of that prize - in two extracts from my diaries.

4 May 1992

‘Friday saw the opening of the Brighton festival with a splendid procession of children and their school-made dragons. For the whole of Saturday, I’d signed up for a Brighton Rock workshop but I had little idea what it would be like. I dutifully arrived on the Palace Pier a little before 10 and took a couple of pictures - the light was astonishingly bright and clear and the pier furbishings were looking as spanking new and clean as I’ve seen them; they must have had a coat of paint within the last few weeks and the glass in the windows had been spotlessly cleaned.

At 10 exactly, I approached the tiny group of people in the centre of the pavement at the entrance to the pier. The literature event organiser was there holding a wad of tickets; there was a large well-built man of around 50 introduced to me as Tony Masters who I didn’t know from Adam; otherwise there were two other punters like me - Jake, a dead ringer in character and pretensions for my old flatmate Andy, and Bob. Masters, who turned out to be quite a well known and prolific writer, never really recovered from the fact that so few people had signed up

We removed to a banquet suite in the Albion Hotel where Tony talked a while about his working methods, about Brighton Rock (he had known Graham Greene) and about what we were going to do during the day - i.e. a walk in the morning and writing session in the afternoon. 

I suppose I too was disappointed that the turnout was so small. The walk was certainly a disappointment - we walked up and down the pier, passed the Forte’s cafe on the corner directly opposite the pier which was the setting for Snow’s. Tony insisted it would have been more sleazy in the time Greene researched the book but I thought otherwise - Rose says she couldn’t get another job as good and I suspect it was quite posh then, even more so than now. Tony said the same thing about the pier and the Albion hotel (where Greene stayed when in Brighton) but again I would have thought the pier would have been quite rich in those days given the amount of visitors it used to get. Our resident writer seemed determined to impose the sense of sleaze and squalidness that exudes out of the whole book on all the locations. We then walked up to Nelson Place which is where Pinkie grew up and where Rose’s parents live. Tony seemed to insist he could really feel ‘a sense of place’ (the title of the workshop) in this location but I didn’t get anything from it all. 

For a while we sat in the pub Dr Brighton’s which in the book and formerly was the Star and Garter where Ida was often found. I suppose I knew Brighton too well already. There are dozens of locations around the city which have real character and feeling but, the pier apart, we didn’t go near any of them. After a short break for lunch we retired to the same room in the hotel. It became clear that Tony has a lot of experience of such workshops - he has worked a lot in schools it seems and written a lot for children - and was determined to maintain a highly positive attitude and wring something out of us. We had five minutes to write down the bone of an idea based on any inspiration we had had on the walk; then we were given a bit less than an hour to actually write up the idea.

Apart from general thoughts about the gaudiness of the attractions on the pier and the similarity perhaps with Brighton itself in some respects, three pictures on the pier had struck me: the sight of a lanky youth, standing silent and motionless staring at a video machine; a small boy who refused to walk over the slats of the pier because he could see water below and chose instead to walk along the boards laid down for pushchairs; and the colour of the sea - a translucent turquoise which seemed to have a light source of its own - as spotted between the slats when walking through a covered part of the pier.

Pressed into creating a story line and taking my cue from a simple example put forward by Tony himself, I turned the youth into a rather lonely character yet to leave home, addicted to the video machines, his only pleasure, and on the edge of making an important decision in his life. I have him watching the small boy choose the safe path over the boards and seeing himself. A group of lively youngsters enter the amusement arcade and stand near the youth. He starts thinking about how he has never met people like this and so on. I was surprised how much I actually wrote in the short space of time but I suppose that’s my experience as a journalist showing through. Although Tony insisted that one should not enclose one’s characters into a finished plot and allow them room, I had sewn up my plot before I began writing. Tony said all one needs is to be able to see four or five scenes ahead (have a narrative thrust) and then one can write. Well, I couldn’t do this, I had already found the end to my story viz: the group of lively youngsters tease the youth and eventually nag him to come along with them for a bit. The first thing they do is go up the helter skelter. The youth, tied up in the imaginary world of the video games, has never actually been on any of the fairground rides and he is frightened sick of going to the top of the helter skelter and sliding down round virtually over the sea. Moreover, he has to spend his last coin of the day. The story finishes as he begins his slide down - a symbol really that he must begin his real life.

Pretty crass eh! Well, what can one do in 45 minutes. Jake wrote three sentences in Tom Wolfe style about a film star (Cher-like) who has come to Brighton to film a few scenes but falls over on the pier and is going to have an affair with a young street-wise lad. Bob also wrote just a few words about a tailor’s shop he’d seen. They were highly descriptive and emotive even and promised well.

We talked for an hour or so about these attempts. Jake found my writing Kafkaesque, Bob liked it and Tony explained that I wrote rather economically without much description, that I didn’t waste words. He said whereas from Bob’s contribution he could touch the scene, with mine he got a strong visual sense. I don’t think he made any judgement as to whether it was any good or not, nor can I think of anything he said that might actually help me write the story better. Oh yes, he said I was very observant.

The cost of the workshop also includes the chance to send in a story (max 3,000 words) to the organisers who will then award a £50 prize as well as provide some constructive criticism. I shall certainly take advantage of that offer. If just three people turn up at the second of the two workshops and every participant sends in a story, I would still have a 15% chance of winning the prize!

I have to say that I liked Tony and found myself very much on his wavelength - I could tell in advance what pictures he might point out (at one point he was saying that one was unlikely to meet a Pinkie character these days but just at that moment two punks passed us in the street and we both acknowledged the irony of that) - and I could agree with much of what he said about other writers and films. At over 50, he has been a writer for thirty years he said, and is clearly much in demand, for films and television, and also pushes out a lot of books. I suppose if I were ever to be a writer, I would want to have as varied a portfolio as this man.’

5 August 1992

‘ “I am delighted,” Adrian Slack, organiser of the literature part of the Brighton Festival, writes, “to inform you that you have won first prize in the short story competition. I enclose a cheque for £50”. Well, well, well. My first ever literature success. Well, it would be if I wasn’t reasonably sure that I was probably the only entrant. Shame I didn’t get second and third prize as well. The story - Helter Skelter - was supposed to be read by several judges and a critique provided, that might have been more useful than the £50 prize.’

My policeman on the pier

‘We battled past the sodden deckchairs, fortune-tellers and doughnut stalls, my hair coarsening in the wind, and my hand, clutching the umbrella above Tom’s, going numb. Tom’s face and body seemed set in a determined grimace against the weather. “Let’s go back . . .” I began, but the wind must have stolen my voice, for Tom ploughed ahead and shouted, “Helter-skelter? House of Hades? Or ghost train?” ’ This is an extract from Bethan Roberts Brighton-set novel, My Policeman, published on this day in 2012. While themes of repression, betrayal, guilt, and enduring love are explored against a backdrop of post-war conformity, Brighton Beach provides both a place of apparent freedom and quiet entrapment.

Roberts was born in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1973. She studied English Literature at university before returning to writing via a part‑time MA in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester, which she completed over three years while working in television in Brighton. In 2006, she won the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook short‑story prize, which helped launch her literary career.

Her debut novel, The Pools, was published in 2007, earning the Jerwood/Arvon Young Writers’ Award. The follow‑up, The Good Plain Cook (2008), was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and selected as a Time Out Book of the Year. On 4 August 2012, My Policeman was published by Chatto & Windus. The novel is set in Brighton in the 1950s and explores a love triangle between a policeman, his wife, and his secret male lover. It was chosen as Brighton City Read 2012, became an Irish Times Book of the Year, and was turned into a film in 2022.

Mother Island appeared in 2014, winning Roberts a Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize, and Graceland, a fictionalised account of Elvis Presley’s early life, was published in 2019. Roberts also writes short fiction and drama for BBC Radio 4; she has worked in television documentary production and has taught creative writing at the University of Chichester, Goldsmiths, University of London, and West Dean College. She is based in Brighton with her family. For more biographical information see The Royal Literary Fund or New Writing South.

My Policeman is a tragic love story set in 1950s Brighton, where social conventions and laws criminalise homosexuality. The novel centres on Tom Burgess, a young policeman who marries Marion, a schoolteacher, while secretly maintaining a romantic relationship with Patrick, a museum curator. The story unfolds through dual narratives - Marion’s confessional manuscript and Patrick’s diary - both written decades later, as the emotional consequences of the hidden triangle are laid bare.

Here’s one extract in which Marion, on her honeymoon, is choosing a fairground ride.

‘And so, a few minutes later, we were strolling arm in arm towards the noise and lights of the Palace Pier.

My bouclé jacket was a pretty flimsy affair, and I clung to Tom’s arm as we sheltered beneath one of the hotel’s umbrellas. I was glad there’d been only one available, so we had to share. We rushed across King’s Road, were splashed by a passing bus, and Tom paid for us to go through the turnstiles. The wind threatened to blow our umbrella into the sea, but Tom kept a firm grip, despite the waves foaming around the pier’s iron legs and throwing shingle up the beach. We battled past the sodden deckchairs, fortune-tellers and doughnut stalls, my hair coarsening in the wind, and my hand, clutching the umbrella above Tom’s, going numb. Tom’s face and body seemed set in a determined grimace against the weather.

“Let’s go back . . .” I began, but the wind must have stolen my voice, for Tom ploughed ahead and shouted, “Helter-skelter? House of Hades? Or ghost train?”

It was then I started to laugh. What else could I do, Patrick? Here was I, on my honeymoon, battered by a wet wind on the Palace Pier, when our warm hotel bedroom - bed still immaculately made - was only yards away, and my new husband was asking me to choose between fairground rides.

“I’m for the helter-skelter,” I said, and started running towards the blue and red striped turret. The slide - then called The Joy Glide - was such a familiar sight, and yet I’d never actually been down it. Suddenly it seemed like a good idea. My feet were soaked and freezing, and moving them at least warmed them a little. (Tom has never felt the cold, did you notice that? A little later in our marriage, I wondered if all that sea swimming had developed a protective layer of seal-like fat, just beneath the surface of his skin. And whether that explained his lack of response to my touch. My tough, beautiful sea creature.)

The girl in the booth – black pigtails and pale pink lipstick – took our money and handed us a couple of mats. “One at a time,” she ordered. “No sharing mats.” ’

A sea on fire

Alison MacLeod’s novel Unexploded, long-listed for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, was published twelve years ago today. Set in Brighton during the early stages of World War II, the story revolves around the lives of Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont, a married couple navigating the tensions and fears of wartime life as they face the imminent threat of a German invasion. In particular, the narrative contains vivid portrayals of the beach and piers being closed down and shut off from daily life, one character even imagining the sea on fire.

MacLeod is a Canadian‑British novelist, short story writer, and academic, born in Montreal and raised in Quebec and Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has lived in England since 1987, and has become a dual citizen. She was Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester until 2018. Since then she has been writing full time while maintaining visiting academic roles and serving as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. While Unexploded was published on 26 July 2013, and is her best-known work (having been serialised on BBC Radio 4), Bloomsbury has also published a story collection, All the Beloved Ghosts ( 2017), and the novel Tenderness (2021).

In Unexploded, Geoffrey is appointed superintendent of a newly improvised internment camp for enemy aliens, while Evelyn, restless and emotionally isolated, begins volunteering there. She meets Otto Gottlieb, a German‑Jewish painter labeled a ‘degenerate’ and interned under Geoffrey’s supervision. They begin an emotional entanglement that forces Evelyn to question her marriage, motherhood, and moral compass. Geoffrey, meanwhile, spirals into his own moral failures: prejudice, infidelity, and emotional cowardice. 

Unexploded can be previewed at Googlebooks. Here are two extracts. 

Chapter 14, page 103

‘A hundred yards from the Palace Pier, Geoffrey let himself loiter under the canopy of a derelict oyster stand. The day was overcast, the sea the colour of gunmetal, and the beach abandoned, closed for the war by order of the corporation. The signs had been hammered to the railings down the length of the prom.

He fumbled in his jacket pocket for his cigarette case. On the Pier, the rides stood quiet. Only a few defiant anglers tried their luck from the end of the deck. In the tide, mines bobbed beneath the surface, out of view, horned and deadly. Every fishing boat had vanished, as if by some ill-fated sleight of hand.

He tried to focus on the survey for the Committee, on the report he would need to compose to confirm that all was in place for Churchill’s visit. He’d been avoiding the task all week.

He cupped the flame of his lighter against the breeze and drew hard on his cigarette. Every beach chalet, including his own, had been strategically manoeuvred and filled with stones. Up and down the shingle, anti-landing-craft spikes lay in heaps, ready to be dug in. Vast coils of barbed wire blotted the views east and west, while concrete tank-traps stood five feet high, colonising the shore. Across the King’s Road, the elegant rooftops of the Grand Hotel and the Métropole had been upstaged by the guns on the new naval station.

Without the boats, without the herring dees and the winkle- pickers, the shingle was a bleak vista darkened by the apparatus of war and the rank of oil drums that stretched endlessly towards Hove. Each drum squatted beneath the prom, ready to be rolled down the beach, past the ghosts of erstwhile paddlers, children and old people, into the sea. Each bore ten thousand gallons of petrol, and, for a moment, looking out, he saw it, the impossible: a sea on fire.

Even as he walked the beach, white sheets and pristine table linen were hanging from every window on the Channel Islands. That was the morning’s news.

Any day. It could be any day.’

Chapter 22, page 169

‘If London looked to the steadiness of Big Ben and the gravitas of St Paul’s for a reminder of dignity in strife, Brighton’s emotional compass had been the ring-a-ding-ding and the music, the electric lights and the ticket-stub happiness of the Palace and West piers. When the Explosions Unit had arrived that evening back in June, the town prepared to lose its bearings. Even to the casual observer, each pier looked like nothing less than a welcoming dock, an unloading zone for any invading ship, and while both were spared outright destruction, section after strategy section - of decking, piles and girders - was blasted into the sea.

That year, Alf Dunn, Tubby’s middle brother, turned fourteen and craved something more than digs in bombed-out houses. As the starlings gathered and the sun slid from the sky, he and a dozen others also descended on the seafront.

It was no casual operation. They had wire-clippers for the barbed-wire fencing, rope from a builder’s yard, switchblades for cutting it, and mud for camouflage. The tide was rising, but the evening itself was calm, and there was just time to cast a rope bridge from gap to gap, using the stumps of the blasted piles and relying on Tommy Leach’s skill with knots.

The trick to a successful traverse, Ali explained, was to lie on top of the rope, bend a knee, hook the foot of that same leg over the rope, and keep the other leg straight for balance. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Your pins don’t move. It’s your arms and hands that get you from end to end. If you slip under the rope, don’t panic. Hook a leg and the opposite arm over, and push down with the other hand to right yourself.

Tubby and Philip had been allowed to bring up the rear, if only to bear witness and to carry the bucket of camouflage mud. They watched Alf army-crawl his way to the first, second and third landings, wave from the deck, and glide back.’

The Great Omani

Twenty-five years ago, Brighton’s seafront bade a flamboyant farewell to one of its most extraordinary residents: Ronald Cunningham, better known by his stage name, ‘The Great Omani’. On 10 July 2000 - his 85th birthday - Omani staged what he declared would be his final stunt, astonishing a crowd at the Norfolk Hotel by escaping from handcuffs while both his arms were set ablaze with lighter fluid. Frail, in a wheelchair, and undergoing treatment for kidney dialysis and cancer, he ensured that his last act was as daring and theatrical as the countless spectacles he had performed along Brighton’s historic front - many of them centred on the West Pier, the backdrop to some of his most audacious feats.

Living modestly at 10 Norfolk Street, Cunningham was a true local legend whose improbable career as a stuntman and escapologist spanned nearly half a century. Born into a wealthy family, he drifted through his early years without ambition until a twist of fate changed everything. As he browsed in a London bookshop, a volume of Houdini’s tricks fell from a shelf and landed squarely on his foot. ‘That moment changed my life,’ he later said. Taking it as a sign, he resolved on the spot to become a stuntman, adopting the name ‘The Great Omani’ simply because, in his words, it sounded ‘exotic and exciting, just like Houdini’s’.

His acts were as audacious as his origin story. Omani became the first man to travel from London to Brighton on a bed of nails, then made the return journey entombed in a ton of concrete. In a heartfelt homage to his idol, he staged a dramatic underwater escape from Brighton’s West Pier - echoing Houdini’s own feats of the 1920s. According to The Argus, ‘The Great Omani could be regularly seen jumping from the end of the West Pier, wrapped in chains and on fire’. His repertoire included smashing bottles on his throat with a hammer, diving through flaming hoops, and extricating himself from burning structures - stunts performed with a blend of swagger and scrupulous preparation. Remarkably, across his long career, he was only seriously injured twice, both times due to mistakes by assistants: once when a cardboard house was set alight with petrol poured inside, another time when a leaking fuel can caused minor burns during a flaming dive.

That final spectacle on his 85th birthday was meant to be his swan song (see this video at Youtube - the source of the screenshot above), yet in true Omani fashion he couldn’t resist also marking his 90th birthday with a last defiant farewell (see My Brighton and Hove). He died in 2007. Further information is available online at Wikipedia, but also in The Crowd Roars - Tales from the life of a professional stuntman The Great Omani which can be freely downloaded as a pdf from QueenSpark Books.

The Pier first sees red - in neon

Exactly one hundred years ago, on 11 July 1925, The Brighton & Hove Herald reported a dazzling leap into modernity: the first brilliant neon sign blazed across the front of the Palace Pier. It was a spectacle the likes of which the town had never seen - a vivid red beacon spelling out Palace Pier, its letters edged in electric blue, visible from a considerable distance along the bustling seafront. This photo - courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove - is dated to 1925 (though I know not if it actually includes any neon illumination).

At the time, neon was still a novel wonder. Invented by French engineer Georges Claude and first unveiled to the public at the Paris Motor Show in 1910, neon signs were a marvel of engineering and chemistry, harnessing the glow of electrified gas to paint the night in colours more vivid than anything achieved by traditional incandescent bulbs. In Britain, neon advertising only truly began to catch on in the early 1920s. Londoners were awestruck by neon displays on places like Hammersmith Bridge, and Brighton was determined not to be left behind.

The Brighton & Hove Herald of 11 July 1925 was almost breathless in its report, explaining that the new Palace Pier sign was among the first uses of neon illumination in the town - part of a wider effort to give the seafront a ‘brighter aspect by night’. The paper described how ‘huge shaped glass tubes’, bent to form the letters, were filled with neon gas which glowed fiercely under electrical charge, producing a luminous red unlike anything seen before. Surrounding blue lamps heightened the effect, creating what the Herald called ‘a colour combination that was quite attractive.’

The article goes on to give more details; ‘The words of the sign are formed by vacuum tubes charged with neon gas and electricity, which produces the brilliant light. The sign on the Pier takes 8,000 volts (alternating current), but it is so cheap in consumption of current that it costs only 2 1/2 d. an hour to run; and after the sign has been lit for a month that amount will be reduced to 2d. With the aid of a little lunar limelight, a wonderful colour effect was obtained on Tuesday night, but this was for ‘one night only.’ A great orange-coloured moon rose out of the wall of dark over the sea, and the orange of the moon and the flaming ruby of the sign produced a colour combination that was quite impressive.’

This local marvel was part of a global neon boom that would come to define the visual culture of the 20th century. Within a few years, neon would spread to Blackpool’s promenades, Piccadilly Circus, and Times Square, becoming synonymous with nightlife, glamour, and the thrilling energy of modern cities. But on that July evening in 1925, Brighton stood proudly at the forefront of this new luminous age.

Cheese and Clarity

Here is the 11th of 24 stained glass window designs on the Palace Pier which AI and I are using as inspiration for some of these BrightonBeach365 daily posts - see Stained Glass Window 1 for background. This one is a vibrant and inviting still life scene. At the centre, there’s a tall green wine bottle labeled ‘WINE’ next to a filled glass of red wine. To the right, there’s a rustic loaf of bread and a large wedge of cheese adorned with a couple of red grapes. On the left, a plate overflows with colourful fruit - bananas, red apples, oranges, and dark grapes. The background features a bright blue sky with white clouds, visible through a window framed by stylised golden foliage, giving the whole scene a cheerful and leisurely atmosphere. 

A limerick starter

A bottle of red by the shore,

With brie, crusty bread, and much more - 

The waves kissed my feet,

The camembert sweet,

And I burped, ‘This is what life is for.’

Cheese and Clarity (in the manner of M. F. K. Fisher)

It was on Brighton Pier, one sunny morning in July a long time ago, that I tasted what I can only describe as a moment of suspended truth. The sea, more aquamarine than English Channel has any right to be, lapped beneath the boards with that sly, deceptive calm particular to days just before a storm. I had walked the length of the pier, past the thump of arcade machines and the shrillness of seagulls, until I found a place to consumer my picnic lunch, a place of improbable peace: a narrow table-for-one outside a shuttered café, laid not with linen, but possibility.

The meal had been packed by a friend in Hove, a woman with the kind of confidence in food that doesn’t require apology. In the small canvas tote, wrapped in wax paper and string, was a half-round of Sussex Slipcote - creamy, yielding, its curd scent as tender as memory. There was a baton of sourdough, still warm from an oven I imagined tiled and sunlit. And there was fruit: a fist of dark grapes, each like a polished bead; a plum so ripe it might have been holding its breath.

But it was the cheese that made everything still.

I remember how the knife slid through it, a slow sigh of a cut. How it spread against the bread with the texture of late-summer longing. I bit in, and everything dissolved: the salt air, the pier’s old iron bones, the sound of a child crying for more coins. For a moment, it was just me, the Slipcote, and a glass of red pulled from a thermos flask and tasting improbably of the south of France. There may have been a crust of honeycomb too - my memory folds here - and a wedge of quince paste, amber and dignified like a grandmother’s brooch.

Brighton’s beach glinted distantly, pebbles fizzing in the sun like soda water. I could just make out the broken skeleton of the West Pier, its frame ghosted with rust. I wondered, not for the first time, what it means to love a place that is constantly eroding, and whether that same principle applies to people. Or cheese.

I stayed there a while. Long enough for the gulls to give up hope, and the sun to soften everything into shadow. The clarity of hunger had passed, but in its place: something softer, wiser. Not fullness, precisely, but a kind of peace.

If there is a meal worth remembering, it is never because it was perfect, but because something in the bread, or the cheese, or the view from a rickety pier told you a secret you didn’t know you needed to hear.

And the secret was this: You do not have to earn pleasure.

Not with labour, or loneliness, or a perfectly laid table. Not by pretending not to want it. You are allowed to sit on a salt-bitten bench above a bright and battered sea, and let a little wheel of cheese remind you that the good things - rich, ripe, sensuous - require no justification. They exist, like the sea and the sun, and so do you. That was enough.