Fun at the hub

This Saturday, Brighton & Hove City Council is launching - with entertainment, games and giveaways - a new visitor information hub inside the Brighton i360. Meanwhile, today in fact, there are some kind of shenanigans happening in and on the i360’s iconic half-mirrored pod

The visitor information hub is situated in the i360’s gift shop area on the lower seafront level, it will operate daily between 10:30 am and 5:00 pm and will be officially opened at midday on 27 September by Mayor Amanda Grimshaw. To mark the occasion, a family fun day including entertainment, games and giveaways is planned from 11 am to 4 pm. The hub is a joint effort between the Brighton & Hove Tourism Alliance, the i360 itself, and Visit Brighton.

But what about these shenanigans? At first I noticed a lot of climbing equipment inside the resting pod, but a few minutes later the pod had risen to the upper terrace level where there were a dozen or more action men (I think they were all men) all wearing or holding climbing equipment and wearing ‘Secret Compass’ t-shirts. Some were climbing atop the pod, and fixing a long rope ladder, others were doing things inside the pod. The whole terrace was closed off, but I managed to stop one person on his way into terrace. 

I asked, ‘what’s going on?’ His response was short and sweet, ‘I can’t tell you.’ 

‘But what is going on is very public,’ I insisted, ‘is there some kind of event later?’

‘I can’t tell you a thing,’ he repeated. 

A secret company indeed.

My only clue was the company name on the t-shirts, and so I got googling. Secret Compass is an international company that specialises in expedition logistics, risk management and extreme filming support. Its presence could point to a number of possibilities: publicity stunts, installing equipment, or assisting with film work. But also it frequently supplies climbers, medics and technical riggers for work in hard-to-reach places, whether in remote mountains or on urban landmarks. In the past, for example, it has provided climbers and riggers for television shoots on London’s Shard and in the mountains of Afghanistan. Given its track record working with television and film crews, a media project seems the most likely explanation.

Brighton’s oldest pier

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

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

29 October 1836 - ‘A dreadful hurricane from the SSW at about eleven AM it was terrific - houses unroofed - trees torn up by the roots: chimney-pots and chimneys blown in every direction - sea mountains high. Went to the Pier, and was present when violent oscillations began to be produced by the hurricane: the whole lines of platforms and chains were thrown into undulations, and the suspension bridges appeared like an enormous serpent writing in agony - at length one of the bridges gave way, and planks, beams, iron rods - all were hurled instantaneously into the boiling surge! The tension of the bridge being thus set at liberty, the remaining bridges gradually became motionless; the damage done to this beautiful structure cannot be much less than £1,000. Some persons were killed by the falling of chimneys and lead blown off the houses.’ For more on Mantell, see Brighton in Diaries.

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

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

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

We gave it away to the crabs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Piers are stepping-stones

out of this world, a line of poetry

flung out to sea on a whim,

a dazzle of sea lights

glimpsed between floorboards.

For 50p you can study eternity

through a telescope

and never have to go there,

only promenade to nowhere and back

in an atmosphere of ice cream

We used to take the speedboat ride

between the two piers,

pulling the canvas up to our chins

when the spray flew in our faces.

Now we stand and stare

at the remains of our innocence,

twisted girders piled up

in a heap of dead holidays,

while Brighton limps out to sea

on its one good leg.

*

There it is over there,

a little rusty island moored off-shore,

the empty cage of its dome

lying lower in the water

every time I come down.

Where are the luminous dolphins

on the merry-go-round?

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West?

We could have saved the old pier,

but we gave it away to the crabs

and put up a giant pogo-stick

on the seafront,

a middle finger to its memory.

Now only seagulls cry

in what’s left of the concert hall,

only storms shift the scenery.

It sinks below the horizon,

a black and tangled sunset

surrounded by bubbles.

Madame Esmeralda, gypsy fortune-teller,

presses her lips to the glass

of her waterlogged cubicle

and gurgles her apologies

for getting it all so wrong.

Where a lamppost and the i360 compete for depth

Welcome to the zombie pool

Where you might like to cool

Welcome to the depth and down

Where illusions learn to frown

Welcome to the blinding light

Where you might like to write

Welcome to the grime and lies 

Where all exposure dies

Welcome to unbending poles

Where you might find our souls

Welcome to the rigid climb

Where there is but an anti-time 

Welcome people, come in, come in

You all might like to win

Welcome to the looking glass

Of dreams, that scream, en masse

Women bathing allowed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shingle Shoe

The tide was low and the Palace Pier lights scribbled crooked patterns on the water. DS Marlowe was off duty, collar open, killing time with the gulls when she walked up out of the dusk - tall, blonde, the kind of woman Brighton didn’t attract unless London had grown too hot.

She carried a shoe. Not a heel, not a pump, but a mesh beach shoe, damp with salt. She held it out like an exhibit.

‘You’re a detective,’ she said, cool as a gin at half-past midnight. ‘Then you’ll know this isn’t just lost property.’

Marlowe took it. Light as air, but wrong. A seam bulged in the sole. He split it open and felt metal: a key, old, salt-stained.

‘Found it under the pier,’ she said. ‘Thought you might make sense of it.’

By the time he looked up, she was walking away along the promenade, heels striking sparks. He should have dropped the shoe in the nearest bin. Instead, he turned the key over all night, seeing her face in the smoke of his cigarette.

Next morning he prowled the arches and under the pier. The key fitted a rust-eaten locker, waiting like a mouth half-open. Inside was the twin shoe, heavy. Out spilled a bundle of banknotes, banded and damp, and tucked in the mesh a photograph: the blonde, younger, smiling beside Harry Klyne - the local conman who twenty years earlier had bled three bookies dry before vanishing with half a fortune.

Marlowe barely had time to curse before the cosh landed and the world went black, blacker. The beach hit him in the teeth. When he came round, the notes and the photo were gone. Only the empty shoe sat grinning at him.

She’d set him up, sure. But why show her face? Why drop a detective into Harry’s pocket? His head rang with answers he didn’t like.

Klyne had once held court at The Blue Parrot, a smoky dive on Middle Street where the piano never stayed in tune and the gin was cheaper than the women’s perfume. Marlowe pushed through the door, the band hammering something half-jazz, half-dirge.

She was there. Alone at a table, whisky glass sweating in her hand. The blonde looked up and gave him a smile that could cut Brighton in two.

‘So you found the locker,’ she said.

‘And the cosh,’ Marlowe growled, sliding into the chair opposite. ‘Neat play. You use detectives often, or just when Harry’s on your heels?’

Her laugh was low, bitter. ‘Harry’s always on my heels. I stole the key from him, thought I could buy myself a way out. But Harry’s coming, I couldn’t stop him, and when he walks through that door I need to be three streets gone.’

Marlowe lit a cigarette, watched the smoke curl. ‘And the money?’

She leaned close, breath hot with whisky. ‘Long gone, darling. Like me.’

Then she was up, coat over her arm, heels clicking through the blue haze. Marlowe sat there with the smoke and the piano and the empty chair, knowing the only thing he’d earned was the echo of her perfume.

On Brighton Beach, you don’t find shoes. They find you. 

(With apologies, of course, to Raymond Chandler.)

Sussex Diving Club

September is when Sussex Diving Club begins its autumn training cycle - a handy peg to look back at nearly half a century of local scuba. The club was founded in 1979 as BSAC Branch 1016 and today counts roughly fifty active members who split their year between winter socials and planning, spring pool work, and summer evenings or weekends on the wrecks and reefs off Brighton. The rhythm hasn’t changed much since the early years: trainees start in autumn and aim to be ocean-ready by early summer, while the old hands mentor, skipper, and keep the calendar moving.

Brighton Beach is not just a backdrop. Shore dives happen right off the Palace Pier in 5-9 metres with crabs, blennies and shoaling bass weaving through the pier’s tangle; on the right tides it’s an easy there-and-back swim from the shingle. Offshore, the club’s own site list shows ‘Palace Pier Reef’ ridges a short run from Brighton, plus a spread of novice-to-technical wrecks.

Among them is the Miown, a French steam trawler lost in 1914. Its cargo of cement bags set hard on the seabed, and today those solidified stacks resemble reef blocks, colonised by conger and lobster. Closer to Brighton lies the Inverclyde, a merchantman sunk by German aircraft in 1942. Sitting in thirty metres, its boilers, hull plates and steering gear are still visible, a reminder of wartime losses within sight of the Palace Pier. See also the Brighton-based Channel Diving website.

In 1979, the club formalised under BSAC and began running member-led trips off the Sussex coast. Through the 1980s and 1990s the local repertoire settled into a Brighton-Shoreham-Newhaven triangle, mixing evening reef dips with weekend wreck runs. By the 2000s the pattern of an annual UK club holiday and occasional expeditions further afield was established, while training broadened to include boat handling, oxygen administration and marine-conservation add-ons. In the 2010s, social media made the undersea Sussex more visible, but the core remained stubbornly clubby: volunteer-run dives, autumn intakes, and a summer diary pinned to tides and visibility. There are plenty of photos and videos on the club's Facebook page.