Ace Cafe Reunion

The Ace Cafe Reunion returned to Brighton today, bringing thousands of bikers to Madeira Drive for a spectacle that has become one of the city’s most distinctive annual gatherings. The event began in 1994 when Ace Cafe London, a legendary biker hangout on the North Circular, marked its rebirth after decades of closure by organising a ride-out to the seafront. Since then, every September, the Ace Cafe Reunion has seen riders thunder down from the capital to the coast, recreating the Rocker spirit of the 1950s and 60s.

The Ace itself first opened in 1938 as a transport cafe serving lorry drivers, but its position beside a major arterial road made it a natural magnet for motorcyclists. After the war, it became synonymous with Rockers, leather jackets, jukeboxes and the rise of teenage rebellion. Racing from cafe to cafe along the North Circular became notorious, and when the Ace closed in 1969, it passed into legend. Its relaunching in 1994, and the annual Brighton ride-out, cemented its place in modern motorcycling culture. (The three Harley-Davidsons parked on the pavement in the photo above are: yellow on left - Street Glide/Electra Glide; green in middle - Softail Fat Bob; and red on right - Sportster trike conversion.)

Madeira Drive has long been associated with motor events, from the 1905 Brighton Speed Trials to Mods and Rockers in the 1960s - see Mods and Rockers clash in the 60s. The reunion has sometimes stirred memories of those rivalries, especially when police have warned about antisocial riding or unofficial late-night gatherings spilling over. But the day itself is now an organised celebration, complete with trade stands, live music, and bikes of every possible make and style lined up along the seafront.

Quirky traditions abound. It is said that the first year’s Brighton run ended with bikes parked so tightly on Madeira Drive that some riders couldn’t retrieve theirs until nightfall. Another year saw complaints about burnouts on the promenade leaving black scars on the tarmac. More recently, council restrictions and road closures have occasionally caused tension between organisers and the city, but the event remains a highlight in Brighton’s busy calendar, attracting international visitors as well as locals.

Today, as a band played from a truck stage and the sun lit up the line of machines stretching towards the Palace Pier, it was easy to see why the reunion endures. The Ace Cafe’s story is one of survival and reinvention, and each September in Brighton it finds fresh expression in the roar of engines on the seafront.

The Crazy Mouse

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

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

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

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

Rayner on the beach

Found on the beach: Angela Rayner! The Daily Mail has published photographs of Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, drinking wine on the beach at Hove and of the Victorian seafront street where she is said to own a flat. The paper described ‘the tawdry saga of Angela Rayner’s £40,000 Stamp Duty dodge over her luxury seaside apartment’ and suggested it deserved the nickname ‘Hovegate’. It claimed the story began when a café-goer spotted her distinctive red hair on the shingle, her appearance made all the more striking by a ‘camouflage’ coat with pink trim.

Rayner, born in Stockport in 1980, Rayner left school at sixteen while pregnant, trained as a care worker, and rose through the union movement before being elected MP for Ashton-under-Lyne in 2015. She became deputy leader of the Labour Party in 2020 and has since established herself as one of Westminster’s most recognisable and outspoken figures.

The Hove flat, bought for around £800,000 in May, drew controversy after Rayner admitted underpaying stamp duty by about £40,000. She said she had relied on legal advice that the property could be treated as her primary residence, having placed her share of a Manchester home into trust for her disabled son. Subsequent guidance showed the higher rate for second homes applied, and she has since contacted HMRC to settle the difference and referred herself to the independent ethics watchdog.

The row intensified yesterday when the Hove property was vandalised, with graffiti branding Rayner a ‘tax evader’ sprayed on walls and boards nearby (see Brighton and Hove News). The attack was condemned by both Downing Street and Labour as unacceptable and unjustifiable. 

For Brighton and Hove, the controversy adds another link between its seafront and national politicians. James Callaghan once kept a flat on the promenade, Norman Tebbit lived in Hove and was injured in the Grand Hotel bombing, and Caroline Lucas has long represented the city from her home nearby. And, of course, politicians of all colours come to the seafront regularly for their party conferences - indeed Rayner won’t have far to go next time the Labour Party Conference is held at the Brighton Centre.

Bandit at Two O’Clock

Here is the 15th 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. In this image, two small planes fly low over a bright green landscape beneath a sky of blue and white cloud. The larger, red-winged aircraft (possibly a Cessna) dominates the scene, its nose lifted as if coming in to land. Below it, a smaller pink plane (possibly a de Havilland Tiger Moth) tilts across the fields, wings angled in motion. To the right, a golden path curves towards a pool of deep blue water, catching the eye as it winds away toward the horizon. The whole picture brims with movement and colour, a vivid glimpse of flight above fields and shore.

A limerick starter

A jaunty red flyer on high

Saw a pink one come wobbling by.

They jostled for space

In a comical race,

And both nearly fell from the sky.

Bandit at Two O’Clock (in the style of the Biggles books by W. E. Johns)

The Channel lay calm as glass, Brighton Beach stretched in a golden strip, and the gaunt ribs of the old West Pier glinted in the sun. Biggles held the stick steady, his red-winged machine purring contentedly. Algy, perched in the observer’s seat behind, shaded his eyes with one hand and scanned the horizon.

‘Bandit at two o’clock!’ he barked suddenly.

Biggles banked hard, the aircraft flashing scarlet as it turned seaward. Out of a puff of white cloud came a pink biplane, nose down, engine snarling, its guns spitting spitefully.

Below, holidaymakers thought it part of a show. Children clapped from deckchairs as the two machines roared along the surf-line. Biggles dropped lower still, his wheels all but kissing the spray, the enemy reckless enough to follow.

‘He’s too green for this game,’ Algy shouted over the slipstream. ‘Give him the slip and he’ll tie himself in knots!’

Biggles grinned thinly, jerked the stick, and the red machine shot upwards in a steep climb. The pink biplane tried to match it, stalled, and floundered. In a flash Biggles was round on its tail, the Vickers gun chattering.

The intruder wavered, engine coughing. A plume of black smoke streamed back as it staggered over the Palace Pier. Moments later it flopped ignominiously onto the lawns behind the Metropole Hotel, wheels splayed, wings broken.

When they set down at Shoreham, the word was already through: a foreign agent, papers in his pocket and not a word of English, plucked from the wreckage.

Algy clambered down, brushing sand from his trousers. ‘Another spot of bother tidied up,’ he remarked.

Biggles lit a cigarette, his gaze on the fading light over Brighton.

‘Tidied, yes,’ he said. ‘But there’ll be more of them. Mark my words, Algy - Brighton’s a hotter spot than the holidaymakers ever guess.’

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.