Flint grotto still standing

Ten years ago today (5 October 2015) Brighton and Hove News reported that Rory McCormack, described as the city’s last beach fisherman, had been told to dismantle the unusual grotto of flint and shell sculptures he had built on his Kemp Town fishing plot. Council officials argued the structures, some rising more than six feet, were unsafe and had been erected without permission. McCormack, who had spent years creating the site, defended it as harmless and said it had become a point of fascination for people walking along the seafront.

McCormack, born in 1955 and raised in Brighton from childhood, spent much of his life fishing from the beach. He trained as a dry-stone waller and those skills later shaped the unconventional sculptures he built along his fishing plot, one of the last of its kind on the city’s shore. The grotto began in earnest during the winter of 2013 when rough seas curtailed fishing and McCormack built a flint and shell workbench. From there he started making free-standing figures inspired by ancient archetypes and art books, teaching himself techniques to bind and reinforce the works with salvaged materials.

Over several years he produced a sequence of large figures and features, including a Venus of Willendorf, Sumerian and Spartan figures, Cycladic harpists, a throne, a grave scene with a flint skeleton, and a shell-inlaid arch. His fishing boat was decorated with motifs taken from Greek ceramics. By 2015 the grotto was striking enough to draw council attention, but despite official threats of removal, no enforcement action was taken. A petition was even launched to save the site.

McCormack eventually declared the grotto complete in 2020, saying he had run out of space to expand, and turned his creativity to his allotment, where he made new works including Egyptian deities, a minotaur and a seated god repurposed as a bird table.

The grotto still stands today, weathered by wind and tide but recognisable from the promenade. Although little recent activity is evident, it remains both a remnant of Brighton’s fishing heritage and a rare example of outsider art created without permission or precedent, a private mythscape made permanent on the city’s public shore.

More information on McCormack and his grotto is available from Wikipedia, Ousider Environments Europe, The Keepers Project, and even The Economist.

Likely delays to arches work

Work to restore the first 27 arches of Madeira Terrace is now unlikely to finish by summer 2026, as originally hoped (see Progress on the Madeira arches), after testing revealed that a small number of cast-iron elements failed initial stress tests, prompting further investigation. J.T. Mackley & Co, the contractor appointed by Brighton & Hove City Council, began work last November, and the council had anticipated public use by summer 2026. 

Earlier this week Mackley’s contract manager, Mike Clegg, spoke at a public meeting (see Brighton and Hove News). There have been some issues with cast iron strengths not coming up to strength, he said, meaning ‘further testing and potentially strengthening up of those items’ is required. Although tests on two columns this week had been ‘very promising’, he admitted that the testing process is now currently out of sequence. He estimated that 10 to 20 percent of the cast-iron elements have been tested so far, and the team remains hopeful that all can be restored rather than replaced. 

The wall repairs, initially beset by a failed reattachment method, are concluding this week, he said, after the adoption of an alternative technique that proved quicker and cheaper. Meanwhile, work on the new lift is progressing smoothly: the ramp, part of its hydraulic mechanism, has been delivered to site, and piling work is underway. He added that the laundry room in the wall (see Return of the laundry arch), formerly used as a sound studio and once connected to a hotel, has been cleared, including the removal of asbestos, to permit safety inspections by highways.

In the weeks ahead, some cast-iron elements will be returned for reassembly. The restored stretch is being designed so that empty bays on either side act as buffers, in case adjacent unrestored sections collapse. Councillor Julie Cattell said that a stakeholder meeting will be held to decide future commercial use of the restored arches, which will be fitted with electricity. The council’s project manager Abigail Hone noted the next phase of restoration may depend on funding, and highlighted that the cost to restore the 27 bays now stands at £12.1 million, with the Royal Terrace steps and two adjacent bays already quoted at £2 million.

At the end of the Brighton and Hove News article, a commenter under the name ClareMac wrote: ‘Quelle surprise – delays! Councillor comments also make clear that commercialisation of the terraces is at the heart of the council’s plans, not heritage.’

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.

Brighton’s RNLI stars on TV

The volunteer crew of the Brighton branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) have just taken centre stage in the latest instalment of the BBC’s Saving Lives at Sea, broadcast on BBC Two and iPlayer last week. The episode highlighted the work of lifeboat stations around the country and included dramatic footage of Brighton’s inshore lifeboat launching into challenging seas.

In the sequence filmed off the Sussex coast, the Brighton team were tasked with going to the aid of a sailing yacht that had run into difficulties. Viewers saw the orange Atlantic 85 lifeboat pounding through heavy swell as the crew closed in on the vessel, securing a line to steady it and bringing its skipper safely back towards shore.

Ahead of transmission, Brighton Lifeboat Station posted on social media (inc. Facebook) urging supporters not to miss the broadcast, with a photograph of four of its crew standing beneath the Palace Pier. The post underlined the pride local volunteers felt in being featured: ‘Tonight’s the night! Don’t miss our crew on Saving Lives at Sea, 8pm, BBC Two.’

The series, now in its tenth year, is produced in partnership with the RNLI to showcase the lifesaving efforts of lifeboat stations across the UK and Ireland. For the Brighton team, the primetime exposure was a chance to demonstrate not just the risks they face but also the importance of community support in keeping the station operational.

Saving Lives at Sea, Series 10, Episode 9

Leave No Trace

On Brighton Beach, just east of the Palace Pier, a bright collage of a seagull stands watch above the pebbles. Its blue feathers are layered over a city street map, and alongside it the words shout: Leave No Trace. The paste-up is by The Postman, a Brighton-based street art collective whose work has become part of the city’s visual fabric.

The Postman began appearing on Brighton’s walls around 2018, pasting up portraits of pop icons and local heroes in a vivid, pop-art style. Their pieces are instantly recognisable for their saturated colours, collage textures and playful humour. Over time they have moved from backstreet paste-ups to high-profile murals and commissions, but they continue to paste work directly into the public realm, where anyone might stumble across it on a morning walk.

The seagull piece feels especially at home by the beach. For Brighton, the gull is both nuisance and mascot, scavenger and sentinel. Its presence here, paired with the slogan, links directly to the council’s long-running campaigns to reduce litter left on the stones after busy weekends. Leave No Trace is an outdoor ethic borrowed from hikers and campers, urging visitors to take their rubbish with them and protect the natural setting. Seen from the shingle, it works as both a warning and a piece of local character.

Street art along the seafront is often fleeting - battered by wind, rain, and human hands. But for as long as it lasts, The Postman’s gull hammers home a simple seaside truth: the beach belongs to everyone, and what we leave behind becomes part of it.

Remembering the Old Lady

Half a century ago today, Brighton’s West Pier, affectionately known as the Old Lady, closed to the public for ever - and quite possibly she has become more famous and loved since then. Opened in October 1866, the 1,115-foot iron promenade designed by Eugenius Birch was built on screw-piled columns and laced with a light lattice so seas could run through it rather than break it. Early visitors paid at paired toll houses and strolled past octagonal kiosks and serpent-entwined gas lamp standards whose motif echoed the Royal Pavilion’s interiors. 

By the mid-1870s a central bandstand helped turn air-taking into entertainment, and in the 1880s weather screens and a substantial pier-head pavilion arrived. Steamers berthed on the south side from the 1890s, and on one peak summer’s day in 1898 nine vessels were alongside at once. Eugenius’s son Peregrine Birch oversaw an 1893 pier-head enlargement and pavilion, and Clayton & Black’s grand concert hall of 1916 completed a half-century of building. 

Attendance surged after the First World War with more than two million paying visitors recorded in 1919, a high-water mark for the resort economy. The pier also carried a bathing station at the north-east corner of the head, a detail often missed in later photographs. In April 1900 tragedy struck close inshore when a naval boat swamped near the pier and seven bluejackets from HMS Desperate were drowned; the men are buried locally.

The West Pier was the first pleasure pier to be protected at the highest level: listed in 1969 and upgraded to Grade I in 1982. It doubled as a film set, notably for Oh! What a Lovely War! in 1968. Ownership changes and post-war decline brought tight finances; a local company failed in the mid-1970s as repair orders loomed. The city declined to buy the asset and on 30 September 1975 the pier closed completely to the public. The company went into liquidation and the structure vested in the Crown before the newly formed West Pier Trust later acquired it for a peppercorn £100, beginning decades of advocacy and plans.

Exposure then accelerated the damage. A section fell in 1984 and the Great Storm of 1987 shook more loose. For safety the shore link was removed in 1991, isolating the seaward buildings. National Lottery support of £14m in 1998 raised hopes of full restoration with a commercial partner, but storms in late 2002 brought partial collapses, and two separate fires in March and May 2003 devastated both pavilion and concert hall. Further winter losses followed in 2013-14. Limited demolition around the root cleared the way for the i360 project in 2010, while the offshore ironwork gradually separated into the familiar twin rust-red islands.

Even as a ruin the pier gathered new life. In winter months vast starling murmurations began to wheel between the Palace Pier and the West Pier’s skeleton before carpeting the lower chords at dusk, turning the wreck into a wildlife stage. The Trust shifted to conservation-education: rescuing an original octagonal kiosk in 1996, seeking funds to restore it as a seafront learning centre, mounting exhibitions from historic archives, and occasionally auctioning recovered fragments to support its work. The ruin remains on Historic England’s At Risk register, with official advice long concluding that full restoration of the original structure is now beyond practical means.

Fifty years to the day since the gates were finally shut, the West Pier’s story still reads as a précis of Britain’s seaside age: engineering bravura, civic showmanship, mass leisure, precarious economics, and an afterlife as cultural memory and accidental sculpture. The serpent lamps are gone, the concert hall is sea-room for cormorants, but the outline still sketches Brighton’s horizon and the city’s abiding argument with the sea.

Here is a very brief list of some of the shows and acts that appeared over her 109 years open to the public.

1870s-1920s

Marie Lloyd, one of the most famous music-hall stars of her day; touring orchestras and conductors such as Sir Henry Wood; summer seasons of operetta, Gilbert & Sullivan productions, pantomimes; notable aquatic acts like daredevil divers and novelty acts including James Doughty and his performing dogs

1930s-1950s

Popular light entertainment, seaside variety and dance bands. Big names in British comedy such as George Robey and Stanley Holloway

1960s-1970s

Pink Floyd in 1972, The Who in 1964, Jimi Hendrix in 1966, The Rolling Stones in the early 1960s, Genesis, Deep Purple, and The Kinks.

Selected sources and links; West Pier Trust, My Brighton and Hove, Wikipedia. Images courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.

Brighton beach tragedy

 Published this day, 29 September, in 1908 in the Mid-Sussex Times:

‘The Brighton Borough Coroner held an inquest on Saturday on the body of Charles Robert Wearne, aged 18, who was found shot on the beach on Friday night. According to the evidence given by Mr. Hammond Wearne, of Fourth Avenue, Hove, and Mr. Cecil Henry Croft, tutor, of Maude House, Tonbridge, the deceased lad was the son of Mr. Harry Wearne, a paper manufacturer, of Alsace, and received a liberal allowance. 

After three years’ tuition under Mr. Croft, young Wearne was sent to a German University to complete his education. In August last he came to England for brief stay with Mr. Croft. At the termination of this short stay at Tonbridge he went to London, where he was met by his father, who was making arrangements for him to start business in the establishment of a London agent. On Monday, however, the father received a letter from his son saying he had left London for ever, and threatening to blow out his brains if he were followed. 

It was supposed he sent his boxes to West Worthing and inquiries were at once instituted, but without avail. Information obtained revealed that he came to Brighton, putting up at an hotel in the Queen’s Road. He seemed to be perfectly happy, and on Thursday purchased a bicycle. It was known he had £20 in his pocket when he left London. When the body was removed to the mortuary the following letter was found in the clothing:

“Whoever finds this would be doing a great favour to me, and I know he will be repaid some day, if it be not before he gets to heaven. I have committed suicide because I could not live, although it was terribly hard to leave my parents and friends I loved so deeply. If they knew the truth, I know they would almost die, so I beg you to have it put in the papers that I died accidentally. 

I am residing at Queen’s Road, where I have all my belongings, including a beautiful new bicycle. I want all my belongings sent to H. F. Wearne, Manor House, Tonbridge, Kent. There is £1 in the left drawer of the wardrobe or chest of drawers, which will pay for the luggage to be sent. If you desire money or anything, I beg you, in my name, to go to E. S. Theobald, Esq., 22 Oxford Street, Newman Street, London, who is my father’s agent, and you will get all you want, I guarantee. . . . For reimbursement of all money apply to E. S. Theobald, Esq. Yours truly (signed) O. Wearne.” 

The Coroner questioned Mr. Hammond Wearne and Mr. Croft as to whether they could offer any reason for the suicide, but both said they were quite unable to account for it. Certainly he was not in want of money, and they knew of no romantic attachment. The father was said to be on his way to America. The jury returned a verdict of suicide, adding that there was no evidence to show the state of the deceased lad’s mind.’