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.

Churning sea water

Found on the beach: sea foam. At first sight, there’s not much to the creamy-white frothy stuff that gets blown across the Brighton Beach shingle now and then, and, yet, look it up and you soon find yourself at the intersection of ocean chemistry, biology, and weather. 

When waves churn up water containing dissolved organic compounds - mostly proteins, lipids, dead plankton, fragments of seaweed, and microbial by-products - these act as surfactants, lowering surface tension and allowing bubbles to form and persist. The rougher the sea, the more vigorously the water column is mixed, drawing these organics from deeper layers to the surface. Brighton’s English Channel water, especially after storms that rip up seaweed beds, is particularly good at producing short-lived, bubbly foam.

A single litre of seawater can contain millions of phytoplankton cells, and when some species die off in blooms, the cellular breakdown releases long-chain molecules that are remarkably similar to the stabilisers used in food foams (like the head on a beer). That’s why foam can look so creamy despite being nothing more than air, water, and microscopic biological debris.

Globally, sea foam becomes more intriguing - and sometimes alarming. The most notorious examples are the ‘foam tsunamis’ of Australia’s east coast, where intense storm swell can drive metres-deep, cappuccino-coloured foam through seaside towns. In 2020 at Yamba and 2007 at Sydney’s beaches, whole cars disappeared under it. The foam itself was harmless; the force of the waves beneath it was not.

In California, the breakdown of Phaeocystis algal blooms has produced foam rich in proteins that can become irritant, stinging exposed skin. Conversely, along South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal coast, winter sardine runs produce a slick of fish oils that help create thick ivory-coloured foam valued by surfers because it flattens chop on the surface.

The strangest example comes from the North Sea, where researchers found sea foam rich in microplastics - tiny fragments that stick to the bubbles and are blown far inland, making foam one of the vectors by which coastal microplastic pollution travels beyond the shoreline. The foam acts like a sticky film, picking up plastic shards, tyre particles and airborne dust.

Foam can also carry nutrients and spores. After the giant Sargassum blooms in the Caribbean, decaying mats generate surfactants that fuel disproportionately large foam lines on beaches; these sometimes carry bacterial loads high enough to make cleanup crews wear masks. In contrast, in Iceland and parts of the Baltic, sea foam streaks can be associated with whitish pumice ash, swept into the surf after volcanic eruptions.

Even the colour can be telling. Most foam is white because the bubbles scatter light uniformly, but brown foam signals a higher concentration of organic matter; greenish foam often appears during phytoplankton bloom collapse; and pinkish foam has occasionally been recorded after massive blooms of pigmented dinoflagellates - the same organisms responsible for some red tides.

Brighton’s foam, by comparison, is modest, fleeting and almost always benign. It’s simply the English Channel exhaling - a reminder of the constant churning, mixing, and invisible biological life just offshore, thrown up in small bright heaps that the wind leaves on the stones for a few minutes before carrying them away.

More information can be found at National Ocean Service, Science Direct, Marine Insight and How Stuff Works. The photograph of foam on the beach at Yamba was found at the BBC (Nature’s Weirdest Events).

The Mystery of the Crowded Boats

Here is the 20th 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 image shows four small boats are clustered together on lively, broken water, their hulls overlapping as if pressed close at a busy mooring. In the foreground, a yellow boat and a white-and-red one tilt toward each other, their cabins and decks picked out in clean, angular lines. Behind them lie a vivid red boat and a pale grey one, half-hidden but still distinct, riding at slightly different angles as if shifting with the tide. Strong verticals rise from all four, suggesting taut mooring lines or slender masts, while the sea around them is fragmented into sweeping bands of deep blue, light blue and green, giving the whole scene a sense of movement and bright coastal weather.

A limerick starter

Four boats on a restless blue sea

Were tangled as tangled could be.

Said the yellow one: ‘Mate,

Is this some kind of date?’

Replied red: ‘Only if you moor with me.’

The Mystery of the Crowded Boats (with apologies to Enid Blyton)

Julian spotted the cluster of boats first. They were moored oddly close together, their bright colours bobbing on the choppy water just east of the old West Pier. The four of them were almost nose-to-nose, as if whispering secrets. George shaded her eyes and frowned.

‘They weren’t like that yesterday,’ she said. ‘Look - they’re practically jammed together. Something’s happened.’

Timmy barked in agreement and pulled at his lead. Anne, who always noticed the smaller details, pointed to the sandy shingle at their feet.

‘There are fresh imprints here,’ she said. ‘Two sets - and one of them looks as though the person was carrying something heavy. The prints sink deeper.’

Dick, who was already scrambling towards the nearest groyne, gave a low whistle. ‘And here’s another clue - look at this rope end. It’s been cut clean through. Someone’s taken one of the boats out, and put it back in a terrible hurry.’

George’s eyes shone. ‘Let’s hire a dinghy from the fishing hut and go over to them. If someone’s been up to mischief, we might still catch them.’

Minutes later, they were rowing hard through the shifting green-blue water, Timmy perched at the bow like a proud figurehead. As they drew nearer, the four boats looked even stranger. The yellow one was scuffed along its side, the grey one had a new dent near the stern, and the white-and-red boat was sitting lower in the water than any of them liked.

‘Julian!’ Anne cried. ‘It’s overloaded!’

They pulled alongside, and Dick leaned over. Inside the half-sunken boat lay a wooden crate, still wet and half wedged beneath the seat. Rough stencilled letters ran across its side: BEACH HUT 243 - KEEP SHUT.

‘It must have come loose from its mooring wherever that was, and drifted here’ Julian said. ‘And now it’s stuck between the other boats.’

George tugged at the crate and the lid came away with a snap. Inside were neat rows of shiny tin canisters, each labelled MODEL ROCKET FUEL - CAUTION.

‘Rocket fuel!’ Dick said in astonishment. ‘What on earth is it doing here?’

Julian looked back towards the beach, where the line of colourful beach huts curved towards Hove.

‘I think someone’s planning something they shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘And whoever keeps hut 243 may be in danger, not involved. We must inform the coastguard immediately.’

Timmy barked triumphantly. The children tied the red boat up to the others, and hauled the crate into their own dinghy before setting off to return to shore. Behind them, the four boats rocked together as though relieved to have given up their secret.

By the time the sun dipped behind the West Pier ruins, the Famous Five had uncovered a plot, saved a string of beach huts from a fiery mishap, and earned themselves enormous ice-creams from the grateful hut-owner - just the sort of ending, Anne thought happily, that Brighton Beach always seemed to give them.

Deep sea angling in Hove

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steamer trips from Palace Pier

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

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

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

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

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

See also Palace Pier light and dark.

I thought I saw a figure

The sea had risen without warning, a white delirium of spray and roar. It came not in waves but in convulsions, as if the element itself were sick of containment and meant to unmake its boundaries. The wind pressed the foam flat, then tore it upward again, shredding it into a kind of blizzard. Somewhere in that confusion I thought I saw a figure.

It was no more than a dark suggestion in the cataract, a shifting form that seemed to heave forward and be dragged back in the same instant. Each time the sea struck, the human form appeared to resist; each time it fell away, the shape dissolved into whiteness. I could not be certain there was anyone there at all. Still, the mind insists on pattern - a head, an arm flung upward, a body twisted in the labour of survival.

I stood on the shingle, trying to avoid being overbalanced by the force of the waves, salt burning my lips, waiting for the form to resolve itself into fact. But the sea gave me nothing. The longer I watched, the more it seemed the apparition was not in the surf but in myself - a man conjured by exhaustion, guilt, memory. The old fear that the world was alive and would not have him.

When at last the tide receded, it left the beach furrowed and gleaming, the foam thinning into nothing. The figure was gone, if it had ever been. Yet I knew that part of me had been smashed out by the sea, had been taken - like a drowned man never found - the part of me that still believed there might be meaning in the tumult, a face in the water, a will behind the wave.

(After William Golding.)

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.

The Thruster Buster

Found on the beach: a Thruster Buster single-shot firework, its casing damp and salt-streaked among the Brighton pebbles. The label still legible - ‘Shooting Direction’ helpfully printed for whoever last took aim - links it to Kimbolton Fireworks, one of the best-known British brands. Each tube launches a single 30 mm shell, a quick pulse of lift and colour before silence returns. 

Kimbolton began life in Cambridgeshire in the 1960s, its founder Reverend Ron Lancaster combining chemistry teaching with pyrotechnics. The company became a by-word for organised displays, providing fireworks for royal jubilees, university celebrations, and village fêtes alike. Though the business was sold after Lancaster’s retirement, the brand endures in the retail market - its modest ‘single shots’ now scattered through supermarket shelves and, it seems, Brighton’s shingle.

The Thruster Buster is a small and simple firework: one lift charge, one burst, a few seconds of applause in the sky. Retailers describe it as a low-cost alternative to a rocket, designed to minimise debris (an ‘eco-alternative’ to a stick rocket because there’s no wooden stick to litter the ground). On Guy Fawkes Night it might have soared high over Madeira Drive, blossoming briefly above the Palace Pier before falling unseen into the sea or onto the pebbles.

Domes Beneath the Waves

Here is the 19th 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 image shows a stylised architectural scene dominated by domes and towers. The largest dome rises centrally, flanked by smaller ones, all with bulbous, onion-like shapes that evoke an exotic, palatial skyline. Vertical pillars and arch-shaped windows support the structure, while the sky behind is rendered in soft blue tones that contrast with the golden and amber hues of the domes. The whole composition has a rhythmic balance, with repeating ovals and arches giving it a sense of harmony and grandeur.

A limerick starter

A palace of domes in the sky,

Seemed built for a dream passing by;

Its minarets gleamed,

As if Brighton had dreamed

Of being a Sultan’s Versailles.

Domes Beneath the Waves (with apologies to Salmon Rushdie)

On certain evenings, when the tide withdraws like a curtain from a stage, the domes of the sea begin to rise. Tourists do not see them, of course - their eyes are fixed on the Pavilion up the road, that grand, improbable wedding cake of empire. But the locals, the old strollers of Brighton Beach, know: when the light dips and the gulls turn black against the sun, the reflection in the shallows is not a reflection at all. It is memory - architecture dreaming itself back to the sea.

A boy named Karim sells shells from an upturned ice-cream tub near the Palace Pier. He has heard his grandmother’s stories of domes that float like lanterns under the Channel, relics of the Prince’s folly that slipped from land into myth. One evening, as the beach empties and the gulls fall silent, he wades out where the surf softens into glass. The water trembles with colour - amber, sapphire, milk-white - and beneath his toes he sees, for a heartbeat, a city of gold and glass, breathing.

The domes pulse, as if the Pavilion itself is exhaling through the seabed, sending bubbles that smell faintly of cardamom and salt. Within them swirl voices - Indian servants gossiping about the mad English prince, sea-bathers laughing in the cold, a band tuning for a ball that never quite ends. Karim reaches down; the glow flickers like a lantern in wind.

Then a voice speaks - not to his ears but through his bones. We are the domes that England dreamed, it says. Half built from desire, half from guilt. When you look at us, boy, you look at both.

He blinks, and the light collapses. Only the Pavilion remains behind him, ridiculous and beautiful against the dusk - its turrets dark with evening, its minarets poking holes in the last of the sun. The sea lies flat and grey again, as if nothing has happened. But in the shallows his footprints still glow faintly, like a script written in a language the tide refuses to erase.

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.

Groyne works due to start

Brighton and Hove Council have released further documents concerning the latest phase of the project along Kings Esplanade, Hove, to remove seven existing groynes (six concrete, one timber) and install nine new timber groynes, replenish the shingle beach with 160,000 m³ of marine-dredged material, and raise a 50-metre section of the King Alfred sea wall with reinstated heritage railings. The project forms part of the Brighton Marina to River Adur Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk Management (FCERM) Scheme, a partnership between Brighton & Hove City Council, Adur District Council, Shoreham Port, the Environment Agency and the Western Esplanade Management Company. See More shingle and better groynes.

The planning application, submitted 28 October 2025 by JBA Consulting for Brighton & Hove City Council, seeks to discharge conditions 4-13 of permission BH2024/02513, including biodiversity, archaeology, and intertidal survey requirements. Together these documents confirm that the Hove frontage is entering a major, environmentally-governed reconstruction phase - balancing climate-defence engineering with commitments to sustainability, ecology, and public amenity. The works - to start in December - will form part of a strategy designed to provide a 1-in-200-year standard of protection for at least fifty years, addressing sea-level rise and erosion pressures.

The Construction Environmental and Social Management Plan (Van Oord, revised 24 October 2025) outlines how the year-long build will proceed from December 2025, with the main compound on Western Lawns and a smaller ‘plant refuge’ near the Southern Water outfall. Noise and vibration will be monitored weekly, and dredged shingle pumped ashore and profiled daily to avoid overnight stockpiles. The plan identifies multiple sensitivities - residential blocks, heritage seafront architecture, bathing-water quality, marine ecology, and a buried medieval settlement - and prescribes detailed mitigation covering noise, dust, lighting, waste, fuel storage, invasive species, and archaeological protection.

An ecological baseline survey by JBA Consulting (September 2025) recorded limited species diversity typical of a high-energy shingle foreshore. Algal and invertebrate colonisation was largely confined to the lower sections of the groynes, where Ulva seaweeds, winkles and barnacles dominated, and small mussel colonies occupied gaps between planks. The report recommends using Integrated Greening of Grey Infrastructure (IGGI) features - rope wraps, honeycomb blocks, and concrete ‘Vertipools’ - to encourage marine growth and deliver biodiversity net gain in line with the Environment Act 2021. These eco-textures will be fitted to the new groynes, partly as an educational resource under the city’s Our City Our World programme.

Brighton Swimming Club

On 4 May 1860 a handful of regular sea-bathers met at the Jolly Fisherman in Market Street and founded Brighton Swimming Club, today recognised as the country’s oldest continuously running swimming club. The pioneers had been bathing from the beach near the Lion Mansions on Grand Junction Parade in the late 1850s; by formalising their group they introduced subscriptions, rules and early safety practices to what had been an informal pastime. Founder members included George Brown and the celebrated one-legged swimmer and lifesaver John Henry Camp, whose motto, ‘I dare the waves a life to save’, reflected the club’s public-spirited character.

Through the 1860s and 1870s the club became a fixture of Brighton’s seafront life. Its members staged crowd-pleasing aquatic displays off the West Pier, including the much-reported raft ‘tea parties’, and they helped normalise sea swimming as recreation rather than therapy. Photographers recorded the swimmers’ culture, from informal 1860s beach portraits in drawers and top hats to later team images outside the club’s King’s Road Arches headquarters, where the address numbers changed over time as the seafront was renumbered. Membership grew rapidly from a dozen to several dozen within three years, mirroring Brighton’s boom as a resort.

By the early 1910s Brighton’s enthusiasm for sea swimming had become fully institutionalised. The Palace Pier built a £6,000 bathing station on piles of greenheart oak, complete with curtained changing cabins, rafts and spectator seating. When the new facility opened in June 1913, the Brighton Herald reported that the Brighton Swimming Club had been granted its own private quarters beneath the pier, ‘handsomely equipped’ and inaugurated with a special fête. Members staged diving and ornamental swimming displays, with prizes for fancy diving and a 65-foot high dive by the visiting champion Professor Oscar Dickman of Australia. The paper called it ‘one of the most attractive swimming resorts ever seen in Brighton’, a mark of how far the club had evolved from an informal gathering of hardy bathers to a centrepiece of civic leisure.

Traditions established in the Victorian period proved remarkably durable. The club’s Christmas Day swim is documented back to the 1880s and became a hardy local ritual, interrupted only by beach closures in wartime. From the later 19th century, as public baths opened, the club broadened beyond salt water to embrace pool training and competition, while still maintaining its daily sea section. Water polo, diving and what would become artistic swimming all found a home in the club’s expanding programme. Women’s swimming developed alongside, with a separate Brighton Ladies Swimming Club founded on 2 December 1891; that organisation evolved into today’s Brighton Dolphin SC. By the early 20th century mixed bathing had become acceptable in Brighton, but the distinct women’s club shows how the city nurtured female swimmers on their own terms as participation widened.

The inter-war years added a signature race to the calendar. In 1936 Brighton Corporation donated a trophy for an annual West Pier to Palace Pier swim, and the ‘Pier to Pier’ became a midsummer highlight. Competitors once dived from the West Pier itself; since that pier’s closure the start moved to the adjacent beach. Apart from wartime and occasional rough-sea cancellations, the race has run ever since, drawing Olympians, Channel swimmers and club stalwarts to cover roughly a kilometre along the front.

War brought the only sustained break in the club’s daily sea routine, when beaches were mined and barred. Peace restored the rhythms of early-morning swims, competitions and community service, with club volunteers continuing the long tradition of watchfulness on a lively, sometimes treacherous shore. In the 21st century the surge of interest in open-water swimming put Brighton’s oldest sporting institution back at the centre of a national trend, while heritage work under the ‘Floating Memories’ banner secured and interpreted archives stretching to the club’s first minute books.

Today, the club’s sea-swimming section operates from its long-established base, The Arch, on the lower promenade east of Palace Pier. Open every day of the year, it provides showers, changing space and board storage for members who swim daily in all seasons. Annual membership begins each April, with fees covering upkeep of the seafront facilities; when capacity is reached a waiting list applies. The section’s swimmers range from casual dippers to long-distance enthusiasts, many training for events such as the Pier to Pier race or Channel crossings. Despite the expansion of pool-based squads and other disciplines, the daily ritual of entering the sea from the club’s Arch headquarters remains the institution’s core tradition and the living link to its 1860 origins.

See also Sussex Women bathing allowed! and Photo History for more detail and photographs (inc the sepia image above).

Houdini’s West Pier stunt

The extraordinary escapologist Harry Houdini died 99 years ago today, on 31 October 1926. He appeared several times in Brighton and, on at least one occasion, performed a spectacular stunt from the West Pier. Many years later a young Ronald Cunningham - who would become The Great Omani - came across a second-hand copy of The Secrets of Houdini which inspired him to follow in the master’s footsteps - even to the extent of repeating the same stunt from the West Pier on the fiftieth anniversary of Houdini’s death.

Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, Houdini rose from vaudeville beginnings to become the world’s most famous escape artist, thrilling crowds with feats of endurance and ingenuity. In December 1904 he topped the bill at the Brighton Hippodrome, and local tradition records that as part of his visit he staged a shackled leap into the Channel from the West Pier, a publicity stunt that packed the promenade with spectators. He remained underwater for close to two minutes before surfacing free of chains.

The only source I can find for this event is a memoir written by Omani. In the memoir, he says he once met a retired theatre electrician, Bert Croyle, who claimed to have worked with Houdini and seen the West Pier stunt. I’ll let Omani tell the tale (from The Crowd Roars, QueenSpark Books, 1998).

Chapter: A salute to Houdini

Once it was my privilege to meet an elderly gentleman in his late seventies, by the name of Bert Croyle. In his early days he had worked in London as head electrician in many of the big variety theatres. He had worked with many famous artists and vaudeville stars of yesterday. Me knew the Ching Ling Soo, who met an untimely death on stage when presenting the ‘catching a ballet in the mouth’ trick. He also knew and had worked with the legendary Great Houdini. He told me that Houdini was a very pleasant and polite man to work with, though conceited and at times very temperamental. But then what great artist isn’t temperamental? 

During his tour of England, it appears Houdini had visited Brighton and had appeared top of the bill at the Brighton Hippodrome. Sadly, like many other theatres, the Hippodrome is now a Bingo Hall. Only the ghosts of yesterday tread the boards to the phantom music of bygone days. One day, Bert Croyle and I were sitting down sipping a glass of wine when he suddenly said. ‘You know. I actually saw Houdini perform his famous death jump from West Pier. This was a publicity stunt to advertise his show at the Brighton Hippodrome. He was handcuffed, chained and padlocked and jumped from the pier into the sea and escaped underwater in about two minutes. The pier was packed. What a showman he was that night. As always with Houdini, the theatre was sold out. I asked Bert how long ago it was that Houdini performed on the West Pier. ‘About fifty years ago,’ he replied. ‘Right,’ I said, you’ve just given me an idea for my next stunt. I will perform Houdini’s jump from where he performed it on the West Pier, with handcuffs and chains, as he performed it fifty years ago. I will present it as a salute to the memory of the world’s all time greatest escapologist.’ 

This was a very good story and I had agreed to sell it to a well known London agency called Features International as an exclusive. The morning before the stunt was due to take place, Bert Croyle and I had an interview with one of the BBC radio stations and we discussed the forthcoming stunt. One question the interviewer asked Bert was ‘Do you think that Omani is as good as Houdini? He has done some amazing things.’ Bert hesitated, turned to me and asked what I thought. ‘Simple,’ I said, ‘Houdini was the greatest of all time. Long after our names are forgotten he will still be a legend.’ ‘You may be right,’ said Bert, ‘but Omani is the best we have got today.’ 

Several years had passed since I had performed on the West Pier. It had changed owners and now belonged to the Métropole Hotel, Brighton. The morning of the stunt arrived and Frank Durham, a director of Features International, and his camera-girl arrived to pick me up at my house. With my suitcase packed with manacles, chains and a pair of bathing trunks, I got into his car and we headed for the West Pier.

On arrival we were in for a shock. A battery of about a dozen cameramen and reporters were waiting for us. A gathering of the media such as one might expect had the rumour got around that Dolly Parton was going to appear topless!’

See also The Great Omani. Picture credits: Wikipedia, Brighton Hippodrome, and ChatGPT.

Slow in the Wintry Morn

This day in 1806 died Charlotte Smith, the poet and novelist whose Elegiac Sonnets established her as a leading voice of early Romanticism. One of her most famous works is The Emigrants, a long poem published in 1793 and set explicitly on the cliffs to the east of Brighton, then known as Brighthelmstone. Its combination of personal melancholy, political sympathy, and local coastal imagery made it one of the most striking poetic responses to the turbulence of the French Revolution and the transformation of the Sussex seashore.

Smith was born Charlotte Turner in London in 1749, the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. Married at 15 to Benjamin Smith, she endured an unhappy union marked by financial ruin and repeated imprisonment for debt. To support her twelve children she turned to writing, publishing Elegiac Sonnets in 1784 while her husband was in the King’s Bench Prison. The book became a sensation, going through multiple editions and influencing Wordsworth and Coleridge. Over the following two decades she produced both poetry and a string of innovative novels that engaged with contemporary politics, women’s rights, and the injustices of the legal system.

Despite chronic illness and poverty, Smith continued to write until her death at Tilford, Surrey, on 28 October 1806. Among her most enduring works is The Emigrants, written during the war with revolutionary France. It is addressed to her friend William Cowper, whose own Task had inspired her, and takes as its scene the Sussex coast overlooking Brighton. In the poem’s two ‘books’ (around 80 pages in total), she meditates on the plight of French exiles driven to England, weaving their suffering into her own reflections on war, tyranny, and compassion. 

Here are the first few lines of the first ‘book’. It opens with a note - ‘Scene, on the Cliffs to the Eastward of the Town of Brighthelmstone in Sussex. Time, a Morning in November, 1792’ - and begins with a powerful evocation of the pebbled beach and troubled Channel.

The Emigrants

Slow in the Wintry Morn, the struggling light
Throws a faint gleam upon the troubled waves;
Their foaming tops, as they approach the shore
And the broad surf that never ceasing breaks
On the innumerous pebbles, catch the beams
Of the pale Sun, that with reluctance gives
To this cold northern Isle, its shorten’d day.
Alas! how few the morning wakes to joy!
How many murmur at oblivious night
For leaving them so soon; for bearing thus
Their fancied bliss (the only bliss they taste!),
On her black wings away! - Changing the dreams
That sooth’d their sorrows, for calamities
(And every day brings its own sad proportion)
For doubts, diseases, abject dread of Death,
And faithless friends, and fame and fortune lost;
Fancied or real wants; and wounded pride,
That views the day star, but to curse his beams. . .

Brighton’s fishing past

Just inside the vaulted arches of the marvellous Brighton Fishing Museum rests Sussex Maid, a clinker-built beach punt that once worked the inshore waters off Brighton and Shoreham. Her black-painted stem proudly bears the registry mark SM 380, the ‘SM’ denoting Shoreham. With her varnished planking and bluff bow, she embodies the traditional form of Sussex beach boats that for generations were launched and hauled directly from the shingle.

The Sussex Maid was built in the 1920s by Courtney & Birkett of Southwick, a noted yard for small fishing craft. She belonged to Brighton fisherman Robert ‘Bobby’ Leach, part of the long-established Leach fishing family, and was worked with nets and lines in the waters off the beach. Although fitted with an auxiliary motor, like other Brighton boats, she would have been hauled up the shingle by capstan and crew.

Beach boats like this were the backbone of Brighton’s fishing community until well into the twentieth century. Their sturdy clinker hulls could withstand the pounding surf, and their crews were experts at reading tides and weather. The Sussex Maid is a rare survivor of that fleet. Retired from service, and now set among nets, lobster pots and photographs, she was preserved as the centrepiece of the Fishing Museum when it opened in 1994, standing as both an exhibit and a memorial to generations of Brighton fishermen.

Much of Brighton’s fishing history has been captured in Catching Stories: Voices from the Brighton Fishing Community (QueenSpark Books, 1996). The project, which began in 1993, sought to preserve the memories and daily realities of a declining local fishing community. Organised thematically rather than by individual life story, the book weaves selected excerpts from transcripts into chapters on beach life, types of fishing, the role of women, the market side of fisheries, and changing technologies and social pressures. It can be freely downloaded from QueenSpark’s website. 

Guest: Brighton Beach, Melbourne

Brighton Beach on the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, just 11km south of Melbourne, has been part of the city’s life for more than 150 years, its long sweep of sand framed by bathing boxes that have become as much a symbol of the city as Flinders Street Station. The Bunurong/Boon Wurrung people fished and gathered shellfish here for millennia, leaving behind middens along the bluffs. European settlement brought roads, the opening of Brighton Beach station in 1861, and an easy escape from the city once the line pushed through to Sandringham in 1887.

The first sea baths were built at Middle Brighton in the 1880s, grand timber structures enclosing a stretch of bay to allow men and women to bathe separately. After storms repeatedly wrecked them, a concrete-walled open-sea pool was built in 1936, still used daily by cold-water swimmers. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club had been formed earlier, in 1875, and grew with the marina into one of Victoria’s leading yachting centres. Just north, the bathing boxes began appearing in the 1860s, multiplying after the First World War and shifting higher up the sand in the 1930s as seawalls and promenades altered the foreshore.

By the mid-20th century the beach was already a magnet for popular culture. In 1959 Marilyn Monroe is said to have posed on the sand during her Australian visit (with husband Arthur Miller), the bathing boxes forming the backdrop to photographs (though I’ve not been able to find a source to confirm this). In recent times, there have been recurring seaweed invasions, with piles of rotting kelp and seagrass creating a stench along the foreshore, sometimes requiring heavy machinery to clear. Other summers have brought swarms of lion’s mane jellyfish, their metre-long tentacles driving swimmers from the water. Local councils experimented with booms and regular sand clearance, while health officers reassured residents the jellyfish were a nuisance more than a danger.

In 1930 Brighton Beach was the scene of one of the bay’s few fatal shark attacks, when 16-year-old Norman William Clark was seized near the Middle Brighton pier before horrified onlookers. Decades later a basking seal asleep on the sand led police to cordon off the beach until it swam away. Over the years, there have been fiercely contested council debates over whether the bathing boxes should remain. Public sentiment, though, and their growing heritage status have prevailed so they are now tightly controlled, passing between generations or fetching extraordinary prices on the private market. Reports in September 2025 of sales approaching one million dollars again underlined their status as coveted assets despite having no plumbing or power.

Today Brighton Beach remains a blend of heritage and utility. The Dendy Street Beach pavilion, completed in 2025, houses the Brighton Life Saving Club along with a café, toilets and showers. The Middle Brighton Baths continue to offer enclosed swimming with boardwalks and changing areas. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club operates a busy marina and social rooms. The Bay Trail runs the length of the foreshore, with car parks, ramps and stair access from the Esplanade. Seasonal dog rules, CCTV proposals to combat break-ins at the boxes, and ongoing sand renourishment programmes show how the beach remains actively managed. (The images above have been taken from Wikipedia and Googlemaps.)

The Social Science Association

150 years ago today the Social Science Association - a British reformist group founded in 1857 - opened its annual meeting, in Brighton for the only time in its 30 years history. The main events were hosted in the Pavilion estate, with plenary sessions in the Dome concert hall and, possibly, some events in the new aquarium’s Great Hall. The principal proceedings ran through Wednesday 13 October, with associated exhibitions on the estate continuing to Saturday 16 October. 

The choice of location was not incidental: Victorian medicine and social reform were already saturated with arguments about the health-giving qualities of sea air, sea breezes and the bracing effects of coastal climates. At Brighton in 1875, these beliefs surfaced directly in the Congress papers, providing a tangible link between the town’s beach and the themes under discussion.

The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science was founded in 1857 bringing together reformers, politicians, philanthropists and experts to debate public health, education, penal policy, political economy and social morality. Its annual congresses, held in major provincial centres, mixed presidential addresses with departmental sessions across law, health, education, economy and social morals, and became a recognised platform for introducing progressive ideas into public debate.

At Brighton in October 1875, the Association was presided over by Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare. Among the most notable contributions was Benjamin Ward Richardson’s presidential address to the health department, later published as Hygeia: a City of Health. In it he stressed free ventilation and exposure to natural breezes, a model that resonated with Brighton’s identity as a seaside health resort. A contemporary retrospective on Brighton as a Health Resort explicitly recalls a paper read before the Congress in 1875 that tied disease patterns to sea winds and the aspect of streets near the shore. The history of the Social Science Association is fully covered in Lawrence Goodman’s Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Although the Association never returned to Brighton, the 1875 meeting embedded the town within its reformist geography, and the proximity of the Dome and Corn Exchange to the seafront - alongside the prestige of the new Aquarium on Madeira Drive - gave the congress a clear Brighton Beach dimension.

The Brighton Reduction

Here is the 17th 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. One might see this image as an abstract landscape scene made of coloured shapes. Below are layered blue and turquoise forms suggesting water. Above are green and brown rounded shapes that resemble hills or fields. Higher up, soft beige and light green tones appear like distant rolling hills. At the top, pink and lavender shapes resemble clouds or a sky tinged with soft light.

A limerick starter

A hillside of blobs blue and green,

With clouds that look oddly obscene,

The mountains all bend,

Where no rivers descend,

A landscape both lumpy and clean.

The Brighton Reduction (with apologies to J.G. Ballard)

The last tourists arrived on a Friday afternoon, their coaches idling on the front while drivers smoked in the lee of the Palace Pier. They spilled onto the shingle in the usual choreography - sunhats, selfie-sticks, chips in cardboard trays - but something in their gait betrayed a hesitation. The sea no longer looked like sea. From the shoreline outwards it unrolled in flat turquoise planes, one after another, each without sound, as if a giant had pressed the surf beneath a sheet of glass. The air was heavy, a silence broken only by the cries of gulls that circled higher than normal, as though afraid to descend.

By the West Pier’s wreckage, a group of students sketched the horizon. They told each other that the Downs had shifted shape in the night. The ridges beyond Hollinbury now resembled swollen mounds of green enamel, smooth and depthless. The fields appeared as luminous discs of beige, stacked in tiers like a diagram of the earth’s crust. Clouds passed overhead in soft slabs of pink and violet, no longer responsive to wind but drifting according to some private geometry.

No authority acknowledged the transformation. The council issued bulletins about water quality and lifeguard patrols, as if the flattened surf were nothing more than a minor anomaly. The Argus ran a front-page photograph under the headline Another Record Summer Expected. Yet anyone who lingered on the beach knew the world had begun to surrender detail. Pebbles lost their speckles, reduced to uniform ellipses. Beach huts faded into primary blocks. Even the i360 seemed less a tower than a single unbroken line drawn against the sky.

A retired teacher named Meredith returned every morning with her binoculars. She had once catalogued the wildflowers along the promenade, recording the subtle shift of colour and petal. Now the planters yielded only solid discs of green. ‘It’s not erosion,’ she told anyone who would listen. ‘It’s design. The place is redesigning itself.’ Few paid attention; the visitors still wanted their ice creams and their photographs.

One evening, as the sun lowered into the sea, a strange glow filled the beach. The light had no source - it seemed to seep from the flat horizons themselves. Couples packing away towels paused, their shadows no longer falling behind them but spreading in perfect circles around their feet. A boy kicked at the surf and watched his leg pass through a turquoise panel that closed again without a ripple. When he pulled his foot back the skin was unnaturally smooth, like polished stone.

The following week, coaches stopped coming. The esplanade emptied except for a few solitary figures staring across the new landscape, waiting for some sign of reversal. But the sea continued to harden into pure planes, the hills into abstract domes, the sky into coloured strata. Brighton Beach had shed the clutter of its past - the piers, the bathers, the trivial architecture of pleasure - and revealed its true intention. It was becoming a diagram, a place stripped to its elements, ready for an order that was utterly indifferent to memory, or to man.