A monstrous tuna

On this day, nearly 250 years ago, an anonymous visitor to Brighthelmstone stood on the shingle and noted in his diary a ‘monstrous fish, called a Tunie,’ hauled ashore to the profit of curious onlookers. Those pages were later mislabelled as ‘Mr Bew’s diary,’ but the writer was in fact Peregrine Phillips, a solicitor from London whose 1778-1779 journal is among the earliest substantial first-person accounts of Brighton.

3 September 1778: ‘On the beach: A monstrous fish, called a Tunie, but not much unlike a shark, lays on the shore, wearing two double rows of large masticators: it has broke the net, and, towards mending same, the fishermen collect money of the curious. But is not this impolite, especially as such exhibitions happen very frequent? for might not such a voracious monster come, or be toss’d nearer in, and fish in its turn for human white-bait? Ask a fisherman about this, who, with an arch leer, assures me they are forbid coming nearer in shore than six or seven miles, which, without doubt, I swallow implicitly, “Mark, how the toe of the peasant doth kibe the heel - (I was going to say) of the courtier.” ’ The image here was made by ChatGPT.

Phillips was an eighteenth-century London solicitor with Whig sympathies whose name now rides on one of Brighton’s earliest printed first-person accounts. Contemporary catalogues attribute to him A Sentimental Diary, kept in an Excursion to Little Hampton, near Arundel and Brighthelmstone (London, 1778), a lively narrative (affected, perhaps, by Laurence Sterne’s digressive style) that opens with the editor’s conceit of ‘found papers’ in a coffee-house and then settles into day-by-day observations of Littlehampton, Arundel, and Brighthelmstone in the season. 

Two years later the material was reissued and expanded (with an alternative spelling!), as A Diary kept in an Excursion to Littlehampton, near Arundel and Brighthelmston in 1778; and also to the latter place in 1779 (London, 1780), in two volumes ‘printed for the author,’ recording a return visit the following year. Phillips writes as a sociable observer - curious about bathing machines and beach music, keen on playbills and libraries - so his Brighton pages preserve small but telling particulars of the Steine, the North Street theatre, raffles and ‘trinket auctions’, and the tempo of a growing resort. Beyond authorship he surfaces in theatre circles through his daughter, the celebrated Drury Lane singer Anna Maria Crouch (née Phillips), which helps explain his ear for stage life and his informed remarks on the Brighton companies. Read together, the 1778 and 1779 sequences form the oldest published diary-length account of real substance devoted to Brighton.

Victorian writers muddied the waters by calling it ‘Mr Bew’s diary’. This seems to have been because the 1780 edition was sold by the London bookseller J. Bew. John Ackerson Erredge, for example, mined the original diary for his History of Brighthelmston (1862), only he identified (wrongly again) a different Mr Bew! - a dentist and occasional theatre lessee. In summary: the diarist was Phillips; Bew sold the book; the dentist came later. 

A year after witnessing the tuna, Phillips was again on Brighton Beach (for this extract I have modernised the language)..  

20 September 1779: ‘On the Sands: I have been haggling over some fish and talking to two men by the seaside, whose boat the breakers have just thrown ashore. They say they dare not sell their fish on the beach. One of the poor men is deaf; and no wonder, considering the high winds, which blow for more than half the year almost incessantly. He says his partner, who is in the boat - poor man! - is lame, a perfect cripple: that they were, God help them, beneath the notice of the press-gang. I muttered, in a low tone, my indignation against the late midnight act, which took away the fishermen’s statute-right of exemption from the impress; when the deaf man, suddenly turning round, much to my surprise, thanked me for being the poor man’s friend, and bawled to his partner, the perfect cripple, to jump out of the boat and bring the fish ashore. “The gentleman was a gentleman, and should have his choice, God bless him, of the whole parcel.” At the same instant he fixed a quid of tobacco in his mouth, winked with his right eye, and told his comrade to “jaw no more; there was no danger.” The poor fellows are obliged to use a little craft; and who can blame them?’

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).

Deluge on Brighton

If you’ve ever stood on the promenade and watched a squall gallop in from the west, you already know Brighton can be gloriously contrary. That mix of charm and cheek is exactly what an anonymous 1840s writer - hiding behind the classical pen-name ‘Arion’ - bottled for a Victorian magazine called Blackwood’s. No one now can say who ‘Arion’ really was; the signature was a wink, the voice the point. What matters is the mood: Brighton as a place that can blow your hat off one minute and have you laughing about it the next.

Half a century later, Lewis Saul Benjamin (pen name, Lewis Melville) gathered some of Brighton’s best tales and reprinted Arion’s verses in his 1909 book Brighton - Its History, its Follies, and its Fashion, keeping their quickstep rhythm and salt-spray humour intact. Read today (the book is freely available at Internet Archive), they feel like dispatches from any wet weekend here: gaslights won’t stay lit, the Downs shove you back to town, and everyone looks a bit drowned but somehow game for it. Below is the first half of Brighton in Storm as Benjamin preserved it - proof that our weather has always had a starring role. (This - unattributed - image is dated 1835 and has been used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.)

Brighton in Storm

So, this is your summer

To meet a new comer!

The sky’s black enough to benight one.

From Mondays to Mondays,

(Above all, on Sundays,)

It pours down its deluge on Brighton.

If I walk on the cliff,

From the sea comes a whiff,

That whirls off my hat, though a tight one;

If I stroll through the streets,

Every soul that one meets

Looks like a drown’d weasel, in Brighton.

If I stir in the day

I’m half-buried in clay,

And, ’twixt sand, salt, and chalk, I’m a white one;

If I slip out at night,

Not a glimpse of gas-light

The tempest will suffer, in Brighton.

If I ride on the Downs

A hurricane frowns—

I’m off, ’tis quite useless to fight one;

On one of those days

I fairly missed stays,

And came by the life-boat to Brighton.

For my dreams of gay gambols,

My waterside rambles,

Serenades, promenades, to delight one;

With an old telescope

In my window I mope,

From sunrise to sunset in Brighton.

Then, as for the shows,

I see none but wet clothes,

Umbrellas, and faces that fright one;

Fat squires with lean daughters,

By salt and spa waters

All come to be plump’d up in Brighton.

Brighton triathlon - no swim!

Brighton’s big swim-bike-run became a run-bike-run this morning after organisers cancelled the sea swim overnight on safety grounds. TriBourne Multisport Events said a review with the swim safety team and the latest forecast left ‘no doubt the swim conditions will be too rough’ as waves were set to build through the night. The decision turned all adult triathlons into duathlons and scrapped the standalone 1,500 m swim.

Racing still began on time off Hove Lawns with revised formats. Standard distance athletes started with a 5 km run before the 40 km closed-road bike and the usual 10 km finish; sprint athletes opened with a 2.5 km run before a 20 km bike and 5 km run (see photos); TriStar and super-sprint waves rolled straight out of transition on the bike; the aquathlons became 10 km and 5 km runs; and the 1,500 m swim was cancelled with refunds or deferrals promised. Duathlon waves were folded into the main beach starts at 9:30 for sprint and 9:40 for standard.

The event’s modern history dates from 2016 when, supported by the council, the city hosted its first Brighton & Hove Triathlon on Sunday 11 September, centred on Hove Lawns with a sea swim, closed-road bike laps and a promenade run. By 2019 the weekend drew more than 1,600 competitors across children’s and adult races and even hosted British Age-Group qualifying, cementing its place on the calendar. This year was billed as the biggest edition yet, with the familiar fast, flat, traffic-free loop on the seafront.

Conditions in the Channel have been a recurring talking point locally, but today’s change was about surf height rather than water quality. Previous concerns have included bathing water standards, with citizen-science testing of Hove seawater year-round reflecting the scrutiny on coastal bathing waters (see Brighton and Hove News). Nationally too, governing bodies from British Triathlon to Swim England have pressed for cleaner rivers and seas after high-profile pollution incidents disrupted events elsewhere (see The Guardian).

Brighton’s triathlon now sits alongside the city’s other mass-participation fixtures that bookend the year: the Brighton Marathon Weekend each spring, the long-running Brighton Half Marathon, and the British Heart Foundation’s London to Brighton Bike Ride that empties thousands onto Madeira Drive each June. Those events, together with today’s reworked duathlon, underscore Brighton Beach’s role as a year-round arena for large, closed-road endurance sport.

Goodwyn’s Rental and The Old Ship

Three hundred and sixty years ago today, a surveyor named Goodwyn compiled a rental for the town of Brighthelmstone. Known ever since as Goodwyn’s Rental, it is the earliest surviving document to give a detailed account of property ownership along the seafront. Most significantly, it records the Old Ship, a tavern that stood directly on the beach and would later become Brighton’s first great hotel. Owned then by Richard Gilham, the Ship was already well established enough to be recognised in this roll of holdings.

Goodwyn’s Rental rental, dated 30 August 1665, lists some two hundred and twenty properties, covering the length of the town from east to west, but it is those facing the sea that now seem the most evocative. The shingle was not yet hemmed in by groynes or promenades, but the Ship looked south across open water much as it does today, and its mention shows how the town’s fortunes were already tied to the beach. By setting down ownerships and tenancies, Goodwyn’s Rental provides a snapshot of Brighton before the later century’s storms and rebuilding, an early record of the way houses and taverns clustered against the cliff line.

The document is also remarkable for what it says about leisure. Among the listings is reference to a bowling green, providing rare evidence of organised recreation in seventeenth-century Brighton. This was no rustic farming village but a town where visitors and townspeople alike could spend their hours in play. The inclusion of such a facility underlines the breadth of life the surveyor was attempting to capture, not only houses and yards but amenities that gave the town its character.

Read today, Goodwyn’s Rental is more than an account of land and rent. It fixes Brighton’s early connection to its shoreline, records the first great beachfront inn, and reveals that even in 1665 entertainment was part of the town’s appeal. The Old Ship would grow in renown, the bowling green would have successors, and the beachfront would become the defining edge of the town. In its dry listings of tenants and properties, Goodwyn’s Rental holds within it the beginnings of Brighton’s story as a place shaped by the sea and enjoyed for its pleasures.

I’ve used the earliest image of The Old Ship I can find, from A Peep into the Past: Brighton in Olden Time with Glances at the Present by John George Bishop, freely available to read online at Internet Archive. And the image of Goodwyn’s Rental comes from The Keep’s Facebook page.

The Hotel Avocado

On this day a year ago, the comedian Bob Mortimer published his second novel The Hotel Avocado. The book is rooted firmly in Brighton, with much of the action revolving around a fictional seafront hotel in Hove distinguished by a giant avocado sculpture outside its doors. Mortimer’s Brighton is a place of seaside hotels, bus stops, eccentric neighbours and surreal detail, a backdrop that frames his off-beat comic sensibility.

Robert Renwick Mortimer, born in 1959, is best known as one half of the comedy duo Vic and Bob. Raised in Middlesbrough, he studied law before turning to performance, eventually creating Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Shooting Stars and Gone Fishing. Though he lives in Kent, Mortimer has long used Brighton as a location in his fiction, and in The Hotel Avocado it becomes the centre of his comic universe.

The novel - published by Gallery Books and a sequel to his debut The Satsuma Complex - follows Gary Thorn, a diffident solicitor from Peckham. His girlfriend Emily has inherited and is attempting to renovate a Brighton hotel. Gary is caught between his safe but dull life in London - sharing pies and walks with his elderly neighbour Grace and her dog Lassoo - and the pull of Emily’s Brighton Beach project. Matters become more fraught when he crosses paths with the threatening Mr (or Clive) Sequence, who is intent on silencing Gary in a corruption trial. Meanwhile, Emily wrestles with planners over the proposed avocado statue, Gary’s friends embark on ever stranger schemes, and Mortimer shifts the narration through multiple unlikely voices, from Emily to a pigeon.

From the opening chapter of The Hotel Avocado; picture above is by ChatGPT.

‘If you’ve never heard of the Hotel Avocado, then you are way behind me. Miles back, in fact. If you have heard of it, then well done you, but don’t go getting all pumped up about it because I’ve actually seen it. I see it most days. Sometimes from the pavement as I walk past, sometimes from the bus stop opposite when I’m having my lunch. To be honest, I’ll take any vantage point I can. I’m not fussy like some people. There is a chance that you’re someone that has seen it for yourself, in which case we are #equals. Better still, of course, you might be someone who has been inside or even stayed at the hotel. If that’s the case, then I have to concede that you are an Avocado scholar compared to me. Yes, I’ve glanced through the front door and some of its windows (so I’d want credit for that), but I’ve never set a foot over its threshold. That would be the dream. Maybe one day.

For those who are coming to it all ignorant and innocent, let me add some paint to the picture. The hotel is second from the end of a long terrace of hotels and apartment buildings directly facing the sea on the promenade of my town called Brighton on the south coast of England.

It’s a big five-storey Victorian stuccoed building painted a yellowy magnolia and nestled between two identically designed buildings: the Royal Hotel to the left and the Hove View Apartments on the end plot to the right . . . You can forget those two places as far as I’m concerned; it’s the Avocado that steals the show. For one, its windows are always clean, but listen to this (and apologies if you are one of the people who has seen the place): on the front of the hotel is a huge (five metres tall), sliced in half, avocado sculpture.’

Brighton’s grand dame

One hundred and thirty-five years ago this summer, on 26 July 1890, the grand Hotel Metropole swung open its doors. It was the largest and most prestigious hotel outside London, with over 700 bedrooms and a 500-seat dining hall. The opening was so spectacular that a luxury train carried 1,500 visitors from Victoria and Brighton’s King’s Road was carpeted with red Hassocks sand. In the run-up, rumour had run riot - some said the Metropole would boast 4,000 bedrooms, others that its electric lighting could illuminate the entire town.

The Metropole was the vision of hotel magnate Frederick Gordon, known as the ‘Napoleon of the Hotel World’, who wanted a showpiece to crown his chain. He turned to Alfred Waterhouse, the celebrated architect of the Natural History Museum, whose use of red brick and terracotta gave Brighton’s seafront a startling contrast to the familiar white stucco. Together they created a building that was both vast and imposing, a statement of modern luxury that set out to eclipse anything the resort had seen before.

In its early years, the Metropole was a glittering hub for stage-struck society: Julia James and the Dare sisters, Zena and Phyllis; Vesta Tilley, the famed male impersonator (see The St Aubyns performers); Lillie Langtry, the Jersey Lily; Countess Poulett in her sumptuous finery - all taking tea under chandeliers and whispering success, scandal, and style. And in August 1917, Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s artistic daughter, stayed for ten days, blending royal grace with genuine empathy as she comforted wounded soldiers.

During the Second World War, the hotel pivoted from luxury to service. It housed RAF aircrew and Australian and New Zealand forces, becoming a wartime hub with hospitality leagues, chaplains, dentists, thousands of grateful servicemen, and fresh New Zealand tinned oysters. In July 1945, it even became a Red Cross centre to repatriate POWs, offering warm baths, clean uniforms, de-briefings and tender reunions.

Post-war, the Metropole staged a glamorous revival: in 1947 Winston Churchill and Clementine dined there after he received the Freedom of Brighton, and that signed menu remains in the hotel’s library. The 1950s and 60s saw it flourish as a VIP hotspot - Shirley Bassey, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret, Margot Fonteyn, Ian Fleming - graced its casino which once hosted 800 guests a night.

From today’s vantage - 135 years down the line - the Metropole still stands as Brighton’s grand dame. Its original façade remains unmistakable; the building’s integrity continues despite 1960s extensions. The south-facing bedrooms still look out over the beach, offering views that have changed little since 1890, apart from the line of wind turbines on the horizon and the melancholy remains of the West Pier slowly crumbling into the sea. It remains the largest residential conference hotel in the South of England, with 340 bedrooms, now operating under the DoubleTree by Hilton brand since 2023.

More on the hotel can be found at Wikipedia, or at Judy Middleton’s excellent Hove in the past website.