The Social Science Association

150 years ago today the Social Science Association - a British reformist group founded in 1857 - opened its annual meeting, in Brighton for the only time in its 30 years history. The main events were hosted in the Pavilion estate, with plenary sessions in the Dome concert hall and, possibly, some events in the new aquarium’s Great Hall. The principal proceedings ran through Wednesday 13 October, with associated exhibitions on the estate continuing to Saturday 16 October. 

The choice of location was not incidental: Victorian medicine and social reform were already saturated with arguments about the health-giving qualities of sea air, sea breezes and the bracing effects of coastal climates. At Brighton in 1875, these beliefs surfaced directly in the Congress papers, providing a tangible link between the town’s beach and the themes under discussion.

The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science was founded in 1857 bringing together reformers, politicians, philanthropists and experts to debate public health, education, penal policy, political economy and social morality. Its annual congresses, held in major provincial centres, mixed presidential addresses with departmental sessions across law, health, education, economy and social morals, and became a recognised platform for introducing progressive ideas into public debate.

At Brighton in October 1875, the Association was presided over by Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare. Among the most notable contributions was Benjamin Ward Richardson’s presidential address to the health department, later published as Hygeia: a City of Health. In it he stressed free ventilation and exposure to natural breezes, a model that resonated with Brighton’s identity as a seaside health resort. A contemporary retrospective on Brighton as a Health Resort explicitly recalls a paper read before the Congress in 1875 that tied disease patterns to sea winds and the aspect of streets near the shore. The history of the Social Science Association is fully covered in Lawrence Goodman’s Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Although the Association never returned to Brighton, the 1875 meeting embedded the town within its reformist geography, and the proximity of the Dome and Corn Exchange to the seafront - alongside the prestige of the new Aquarium on Madeira Drive - gave the congress a clear Brighton Beach dimension.

The merriest place to love

 

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

This is the opening verse in Clement Scott’s poem Brighton Pier which, in fact, is about the Chain Pier. Born on this day in 1841 he was one of the best-known theatre critics and journalists of late-Victorian London. For two decades he wrote reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and his notices could make or break a play. He also wrote travel sketches, popular verses, and several sentimental lyrics that caught the public mood in the age of seaside holidays and parlour song. His reputation in his own time was mixed: admired for his fluent style and influence, but criticised for the sometimes moralising tone of his criticism.

Scott married Isabel Busson du Maurier, the sister of George du Maurier, and the couple had four children. She died in 1890, and he remarried Constance Margaret Brandon, an English journalist and actress, in San Francisco. After an ill-considered 1898 interview in Great Thoughts, Scott was forced to retire as a theatre critic and he moved to Biarritz where he wrote The Drama of Yesterday and Today. He then worked for a couple of years at the end of the century for the New York Herald, later returning to London. In 1900, he founded The Free Lance, a journal for writers who worked by the job, which he edited. He died in 1904, and is barely remembered today, but see Wikipedia for more biographical information.

The poem Brighton Pier was among his lighter works. It was first published in Lays of a Londoner (Davide Bogue, 1882) and is freely available to read online at Internet Archive (a ‘lay’ being a short narrative or lyric poem). Like much of Scott’s verse it was designed to be read aloud or set to music, sitting close to the tradition of the popular ballad. Today it survives less as a work of high poetry than as a cultural document: a window into how Brighton was imagined in the late nineteenth century, when its pier, promenade, and beach had become central to England’s holiday culture. (Painting of the pier is by John Fraser and used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. The portrait is sourced from Wikipedia)

Here is Clement Scott’s full poem.

Brighton Pier

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

Wandering waves on the shingle dash;
 The sky’s too blue for a thoughtless tear;
Danger is nothing but pessimist trash,
And the morning’s made for a healthy splash:
 Come for a header from Brighton Pier!

Filled with life, see the children race -
 Motherly hearts they quake with fear -
Meeting the breezes face to face!
Whether we’re steady, or ‘go the pace,’
 Let us be young upon Brighton Pier!

Here she comes with her love-lit eyes,
 Hearts will throb when a darling’s near;
Would it be well to avoid her - wise?
Every fool in the wide world tries,
 But love must win upon Brighton Pier!

Lazily lost in a dream we sit -
 Maidens’ eyes are a waveless mere -
There’s many a vow when seagulls flit,
And many a sigh when lamps are lit,
 And many a kiss, upon Brighton Pier.

Dear old friends of the days long fled,
 Why did you vanish and leave me here?
Girls are marrying, boys are wed,
Youth is living, but I seem dead,
 Kicking my heels upon Brighton Pier!

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.