The Mod Weekender

Thousands of scooters and sharply dressed Mods descended on Brighton this Bank Holiday weekend, with Madeira Drive once again the focal point of the annual Mod Weekender. Lines of Vespas and Lambrettas, many lavishly customised with chrome, lights and Union Jacks, stretched along the promenade, while the beach and seafront filled with spectators and photographers. For many, the weekend has become a living tribute to the subculture that defined the 1960s and found one of its most enduring homes in Brighton.

The Brighton Mod Weekender was established in 2005 by The New Untouchables, a London-based collective of DJs, promoters and enthusiasts committed to keeping Mod culture alive. The group had long been organising club nights and events centred on Northern Soul, ska, rhythm and blues, and 1960s beat music. Bringing their efforts to Brighton in the mid-2000s was both symbolic and practical: the city was immortalised in the 1979 film Quadrophenia and already had a global reputation as the spiritual home of the Mods. (See also Mods and Rockers clash in the 60s.)

The inaugural event in 2005 drew hundreds of scooters and enthusiasts, with daytime meet-ups on the seafront and late-night parties at venues such as the Komedia. Over the years it has grown into one of the largest gatherings of its kind, attracting visitors from across Britain and Europe. Scooter ride-outs to Beachy Head and beyond became part of the ritual, as did competitions for the best customised bikes, while the weekend marketplace offered records, clothing and memorabilia. The event also helped shift Brighton’s civic stance: once a city that banned Mods from its pier in the 1960s, it has since embraced them as part of its heritage and tourist identity.

The Weekender has not been without its defining moments. In 2014, thousands of Mods marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous 1964 seaside clashes with Rockers, filling Brighton’s streets with scooters in what local media described as the largest gathering since those heady days. In 2019, the seaside saw record crowds again, just before the pandemic forced a pause in 2020. When the event returned, the emphasis on heritage was clearer than ever, with exhibitions, photographic retrospectives and fashion shows anchoring the programme alongside the music and scooters.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Brighton Mod Weekender, and the celebrations have been extensive. Yesterday and today Madeira Drive was packed with scooters, while crowds lined the seafront to watch the ride-outs and browse the stalls.

Intrepidly into the sea

This month marks 170 years since the final monthly number of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes appeared in August 1855, an anniversary that recalls the novelist’s life and his enduring ties with Brighton - above all the pages that put Brighton’s beach, pier and sea-air squarely into Victorian fiction. In Vanity Fair he sketches the resort as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’, while in The Newcomes he steps onto the Chain Pier and, in a few gleeful lines, all but lets the surf spray the page.

Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811, sent to England as a child, and educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge (he left without taking a degree). After a short flirtation with art and a loss of much of his inheritance, he turned to journalism and illustration, writing for Fraser’s Magazine and later Punch, where The Book of Snobs made his name. He married Isabella Shawe in 1836; the marriage was shadowed by her severe mental illness, and he raised their daughters - Anne (later the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie) and Harriet Marian - largely on his own. His major novels followed in quick succession: Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853-55) and The Virginians (1857-59). In 1860 he became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine. He died in London on 24 December 1863 and was buried at Kensal Green. (See Wikipedia for more on Thackeray’s life and this sketched self-portrait.)

Brighton sits in the middle of both the life and the work. Thackeray knew the resort first-hand - letters mention him ‘sitting on the chain pier in a bath chair’, dosing himself with sea-breezes - and he was fond of calling the place ‘Doctor Brighton’, a quackish but kindly physician for overworked Londoners. In July 1859 Thackeray stayed at the Royal Crescent Hotel and produced a small watercolour titled Brighton from The Royal Crescent Hotel, July 17th 1859. Though best known as a novelist and satirist, he had trained as an artist and continued to sketch throughout his life, leaving behind drawings and painted vignettes of the places he visited.

When looking at his fiction, Brighton is less a backdrop than a mood: brisk, gaudy, restorative, faintly satirical. Vanity Fair uses Brighton as a stage where masks slip. Newly married George Osborne and Amelia Sedley take the air on the front; Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley work their separate hustles in lodgings, billiard rooms and on the cliff; and as the Waterloo campaign gathers, ‘all the principal personages’ decamp. Thackeray’s aside - Brighton as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’ - is both postcard and pin-prick.

The Newcomes (available to borrow digitally at Internet Archive) brings its readers to the seafront with a panoramic relish, the narrator Arthur Pendennis surveying the parade of bath-chairs, schoolgirls and telescope-wielding day-trippers. The scene catches the democratic sprawl of the beach long before cameras made it commonplace.

‘In Steyne Gardens, Brighton, the lodging-houses are among the most frequented in that city of lodging-houses. These mansions have bow-windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences, and ornamented with neat verandahs, from which you can behold the tide of human-kind as it flows up and down the Steyne, and that blue ocean over which Britannia is said to rule, stretching brightly away eastward and westward. The chain-pier, as everybody knows, runs intrepidly into the sea, which sometimes, in fine weather, bathes its feet with laughing wavelets, and anon, on stormy days, dashes over its sides with roaring foam. Here, for the sum of twopence, you can go out to sea and pace this vast deck without need of a steward with a basin. You can watch the sun setting in splendour over Worthing, or illuminating with its rising glories the ups and downs of Rottingdean. You see the citizen with his family inveigled into the shallops of the mercenary native mariner, and fancy that the motion cannot be pleasant; and how the hirer of the boat, otium et oppidi laudi et rura sui, haply sighs for ease, and prefers Richmond or Hampstead. You behold a hundred bathing-machines put to sea; and your naughty fancy depicts the beauteous splashing under their white awnings. Beneath the rippled sands (stay, are they rippled sands or shingly beach?) the prawn-boy seeks the delicious material of your breakfast. Breakfast - meal in London almost unknown, greedily devoured in Brighton! In ten vessels now near the shore the sleepless mariner has ventured forth to seize the delicate whiting, the greedy and foolish mackerel, and the homely sole. Hark to the twanging horn! it is the early coach going out to London.’

Little ol’ me

Hmm… these green buses aren’t very tasty. All showy paint, no chips inside. Crunchy, yes, but not the good kind. Not like a battered sausage. Or even one of those flapjack cubes from the café with the seafront awning. I miss those. Oh crumbs, literal crumbs - I miss crumbs. These days, crumbs wouldn’t keep me alive for five minutes, not since I’ve grown to the size of an SUV.

People screaming. I don’t want to hurt them. I thought maybe this time one of them would drop something hot and greasy and perfect. I don’t want phones; they taste almost as bad as beach pebbles.

Why did I peck the bus? Why do I keep pecking buses?

Oh no . . . someone’s filming again. Look at them, tiny hands raised like they’re trying to tame me. I’m not a monster. I’m just big. And starving.

That mixer thing, ahead of the green buses. It smells odd. Kind of like eggs? Hot pavement? A building site in summer? Maybe it’s got gravy inside. Maybe it’s a giant sausage roll for machines. Maybe - just one peck. One nibble. Ugh.

I didn’t ask to grow this big. One minute I’m arguing over a churro with Kevin, the next I’ve outgrown the bandstand and I’m scaring toddlers, and their parents are calling 999. I don’t even fit under the pier anymore. I used to roost there. It was cosy. It was safe. Now all I want is food.

There’s another bus. I’m getting a sense that I need to do more, work a bit harder to feed myself . . . The people inside, they’re looking very tasty. Oh look, some of them are getting off at the bus stop. I’ve grown too hungry to control myself, now I see the answer perfectly: this may be a bus stop for people, but it’s a food stop for little ol’ me.

KRS‑2519CRGB‑1

Found on the beach: a custom or OEM RGB seven‑segment display module, tailored for a specific device or manufacturer. One side of the object features a digital display with a three-digit readout, the letters ‘L’ and ‘R’ in blue and green respectively, a lightning bolt icon, and a distinctive logo composed of multi-coloured fan-like blades. The reverse side shows a printed circuit board marked ‘KRS‑2519CRGB‑1’ and ‘2520’, alongside gold-plated contacts and through-holes indicative of surface mounting.

The part number, ChatGPT, advises does not appear in public electronics catalogs or databases, suggesting the component was produced either for internal use by a specific brand or as part of a mass-produced but undocumented consumer device. The inclusion of ‘CRGB’ implies RGB lighting capability, meaning the segment display can change colour, possibly to indicate power levels, warnings, or operational states. The number ‘2520’ may refer to a production batch or date code, such as week 20 of the year 2025.

Such displays are commonly used in e‑bikes, electric scooters, children’s ride-on vehicles, smart sports gear, or small remote-controlled electronics. The L/R notation may signify directional indicators, balance sensors, or audio channel outputs. The lightning bolt icon, a near-universal symbol for electricity or charge, hints at a function related to battery monitoring. The visible wear and absence of surrounding components suggest the item was once embedded in a plastic housing, likely waterproof or weather-resistant, before being separated and washed ashore.

Despite the lack of direct identification, other modules with similar codes, such as KRS‑2351AW, are listed on electronics supplier sites as LED or RGB seven‑segment displays, used in meters, control panels, or dashboard-style readouts. 

Sources: Amax Technologies and Bossgoo

Where the sea has no memory

Here is the 14th 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 coastal landscape. In the foreground, rounded white shapes suggest foamy waves breaking onto the shore, with different shades of blue indicating the sea. To the right, green and yellow forms rise upward like a cliff or headland. Above, a large pale cloud dominates the sky, with smaller purple-tinged clouds drifting across. Cutting through the centre is a brown bird in flight, wings outstretched against the sky.

A limerick starter

Clouds of pale lavender hue,

A bird split the turquoise in two.

Where emerald cliffs lean,

On the foam’s shifting green,

The sky wrote its story in blue.

Where the sea has no memory (with apologies to Cormac McCarthy)

The sky above Brighton was broken with cloud. A bird cut through the wind and went on across the water, dark against the pale. The sea was restless. White spume drifted over the stones like smoke and the tide ran its slow iron rhythm, pushing the shingle, pulling it back.

A man stood at the rail of the pier. His coat was buttoned but the wind got in all the same and pressed the cloth against his body. He watched the bird, the curve of its wing, the small correction of its flight. He thought of how the sea had no memory and how the gull had no home but the wind. Behind him came the sound of coin machines, the bark of a stallholder, the scream of a ride, all faint in the distance like echoes in a dream.

He turned from the pier and went down to the beach. The stones rolled under his boots. He stooped and picked one up, dark and wet, and he held it in his hand. It was cold. He turned it over and over, looking at the way the water had smoothed it, how it had come to be like this from years beyond counting. He thought of his father and the silence of him. He thought of his mother’s warnings about the sea and how she feared it though she could not stay away from it.

He walked to the edge where the water reached. The foam curled white around his feet. The gull cried and turned inland. He looked at the horizon where the sea and sky were one. The thought came to him that a man could walk straight into that line and never come back and the world would not change for it.

A child’s voice rose up behind him and he turned. A boy was running along the beach, chasing another, both laughing. Their shouts carried in the wind. The man watched until they were gone. He dropped the stone and it fell among the others and vanished from him.

The sea kept on. The pier stood in its shadow of iron and wood. The bird wheeled once more above the headland, and then it too was gone. The man put his hands in his pockets and began to walk.

Aroe with divan

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

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

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

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

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

See Art Plugged and Helm for more on Aroe.

The Big Beach Café

The Big Beach Café has been putting music at the heart of environmental action this summer, joining forces with GEN R to host a ‘jukebox for nature’. Visitors could pick a track while donating to ocean restoration projects, turning everyday café culture into a playful act of climate activism. It was a typically inventive move from a venue that has always blurred the line between community hub and creative playground.

That sense of openness also drew Dad La Soul, the fatherhood collective tackling isolation and mental health, to pack up its crew and head to the café. No big plan - just music, mates and a jukebox that restores. It was an informal afternoon, but one that showed why the café has become a natural meeting point for groups who thrive on community and creativity.

The café’s modern story began in June 2013, when Norman Cook - better known as Fatboy Slim - teamed up with chef Daniel Stockland to take over a fading site on Hove Lagoon once run by Heather Mills. Cook, a long-time Brighton resident, said he wanted to give something back to the community, while Stockland brought the culinary experience of a classically trained chef with years spent catering for touring musicians. Their shared ambition was to create a relaxed, family-friendly spot with affordable food and a beach-side welcome.

Over the years the Big Beach Café has become a landmark on the seafront. Its dog-friendly policy, sandy-toes informality and hearty seaside staples - bacon sandwiches, burgers, cheesy chips - helped it thrive not as a celebrity project but as a genuine community hang-out. It has doubled as a stage for live sets, local art, charity events and the odd surprise appearance from Cook himself, reinforcing its identity as a space where the local and the playful come together.

Last October, however, the café hit a serious obstacle when inspectors found rodent droppings and unsafe food practices across the site, ordering an immediate closure and warning of an imminent risk to public health (see The Argus). The setback was sharp but temporary: deep cleaning and new food-safety systems quickly followed, and the café has since worked to restore both its standards and its reputation. Its survival owes much to the loyalty of regulars who see it as part of Hove life; and that bond was underlined this February when Zoe Ball quietly swapped her breakfast-show mic for a barista apron, working alongside her ex-husband in the café. The sight of the pair behind the counter offered a fresh, light-hearted reminder that the Big Beach Café’s story is as much about community and reinvention as it is about celebrity.

Meanwhile, the recent collaborations with GEN R and Dad La Soul capture what the Big Beach Café has always tried to be: accessible, quirky, creative and rooted in the rhythms of the community it serves.