Just opened - Quarters

Brighton’s newest music venue - Quarters - opened on the last weekend of September, taking over a number of beach front arches below Kings Road, the same space, in fact, which had housed several incarnations over the years, from the legendary Zap Club in the 1980s, through Digital and finally The Arch (see Raving and misbehaving).

Quarters arrives under the control of A Man About A Dog, the London-based promoters behind Junction 2, LWE, Boundary Festival and The Prospect Building in Bristol. They have also partnered with Ghostwriter to programme live acts, ensuring that the new venue will not depend solely on DJs but will mix live music with electronic nights.

The Arch’s two main rooms have been reworked into one expansive dance floor, centred on a 360-degree DJ booth. A bespoke L-Acoustics A15 surround sound system has been installed, along with a fresh lighting philosophy that aims to support rather than distract. Seating and chill-out areas have been incorporated, while the promoters talk about a two-phase rebuild that will continue into 2026. In its own publicity, Quarters is not simply a rebrand but a transformation of the space, intended to put Brighton back on the national map for electronic and live music - see also its Facebook page. 

Quarters opened on Friday 26 September with Rossi  headlining and followed on the Saturday by Shy FX. In the weeks ahead names on the bill include DJ EZ, Jyoty, Laurent Garnier, Pendulum, Todd Terje, Andy C, Bou, D.O.D, Everything Everything, Neffa-T and Crazy P. The programme is deliberately broad, mixing house, techno and drum & bass with live bands, and setting out to build long sets, inclusivity and local collaboration into its identity. Tickets are being structured with some allocations as low as five pounds, another gesture towards building a new community around the arches.

The Brighton Behemoth

Found on Brighton Beach - Specimen BRB-2025-021: a weathered mass bearing uncanny zoological features, documented and classified under the provisional name Arboris behemothus. The initial field sketch depicts the living form as imagined by researchers: a hybrid organism with arboreal integument, pachydermal bulk, and a proboscis adapted for both foraging and respiration. While no living specimens have been observed, the morphology reconstructed from the find suggests an evolutionary convergence between megafaunal mammals and coastal flora, raising debate as to whether the remains represent fossilised biology or a natural artefact misinterpreted through pareidolia.

Specimen Data File – BRB-2025-021

Specimen Name: Arboris behemothus (colloquial: Brighton Behemoth)

Classification:

Kingdom: Animalia (disputed, hybrid traits with Plantae)

Phylum: Chordata (?)

Class: Mammalia (arboreal-adapted, extinct)

Order: Indeterminate

Family: Unknown

Discovery location: Brighton Beach, East Sussex, UK

Date of record: 13 October 2025

Collector: Anonymous beach observer

Condition: Semi-fossilised drift specimen, partially mineralised; internal cavities resembling pulmonary or ocular structures

Estimated size: 2.1 m length; 0.9 m maximum width

Surface characteristics:

External ridges resembling dermal armour

Hollow chambers suggesting respiratory or sensory function

Elongated protrusion consistent with feeding apparatus or proboscis

Proposed Origin:

        Arboreal megafauna species adapted to both woodland and coastal marsh environments, extinct c. 12,000 BP

Notable Features:

Cavities arranged in bilateral symmetry, resembling ocular sockets

Protruding snout-like structure

Evidence of prolonged exposure to saline and wave action

Remarks:

This specimen represents either the genuine fossil remains of an unknown taxon. Further study recommended. Or, an extreme case of pareidolia (human tendency to perceive creatures in natural forms). 

Bombing the Grand

This day in 1984 Brighton endured its worst tragedy since the Second World War. In the early hours of 12 October, the Grand Hotel on the seafront was ripped apart by an IRA bomb planted with the intention of assassinating Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and members of her cabinet during the Conservative Party conference. Five people were killed, more than thirty injured, and the blast left one of the city’s great Victorian landmarks deeply.

The Grand, often described as a ‘palace by the sea’, had been one of Brighton’s most distinguished hotels for more than a century. Designed by John Whichcord Jr and opened in 1864, it was built for the wealthy visitors who flocked to the seaside and boasted innovations such as a hydraulically powered lift - the first of its kind outside London. Over the decades it had hosted royalty, politicians and celebrities, standing as a symbol of elegance and prosperity above the shingle beach - see more history at Wikipedia.

At 2:54 am on 12 October 1984, the device planted by Patrick Magee exploded behind the bath panel of room 629, three weeks after he had checked in under a false name. Thatcher and her husband Denis escaped unharmed, but Norman Tebbit and his wife were among those gravely injured, Margaret Tebbit left paralysed for life. The blast tore through several floors of the building, bringing down stairwells and a chimney stack weighing several tons, while police, fire crews and volunteers fought to pull survivors from the rubble.

Despite the devastation, Thatcher insisted that the conference continue. By morning she stood before delegates to declare that the government would not be deflected by terrorism. The Grand closed for two years of reconstruction and reopened in 1986, but the bombing has remained central to its story. For Brighton, it was the single darkest peacetime event since the Blitz, eclipsing any of the fires, accidents or local disasters the city had endured in the postwar decades. (See also an excerpt from Rory Carroll’s book, Killing Thatcher.)

As for the beach directly opposite, there is no evidence it was formally closed. Accounts recall onlookers gathering along the promenade and sea wall to witness the scene and the rescue effort. The beach itself, calm and indifferent beneath the autumn dawn, provided a stark contrast to the chaos above, a silent backdrop to one of the most shocking moments in Brighton’s modern history.

The 1907 postcard of The Grand is used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove; and the other two images are taken from Wikipedia.

Guest: Brighton Beach, Melbourne

Brighton Beach on the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, just 11km south of Melbourne, has been part of the city’s life for more than 150 years, its long sweep of sand framed by bathing boxes that have become as much a symbol of the city as Flinders Street Station. The Bunurong/Boon Wurrung people fished and gathered shellfish here for millennia, leaving behind middens along the bluffs. European settlement brought roads, the opening of Brighton Beach station in 1861, and an easy escape from the city once the line pushed through to Sandringham in 1887.

The first sea baths were built at Middle Brighton in the 1880s, grand timber structures enclosing a stretch of bay to allow men and women to bathe separately. After storms repeatedly wrecked them, a concrete-walled open-sea pool was built in 1936, still used daily by cold-water swimmers. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club had been formed earlier, in 1875, and grew with the marina into one of Victoria’s leading yachting centres. Just north, the bathing boxes began appearing in the 1860s, multiplying after the First World War and shifting higher up the sand in the 1930s as seawalls and promenades altered the foreshore.

By the mid-20th century the beach was already a magnet for popular culture. In 1959 Marilyn Monroe is said to have posed on the sand during her Australian visit (with husband Arthur Miller), the bathing boxes forming the backdrop to photographs (though I’ve not been able to find a source to confirm this). In recent times, there have been recurring seaweed invasions, with piles of rotting kelp and seagrass creating a stench along the foreshore, sometimes requiring heavy machinery to clear. Other summers have brought swarms of lion’s mane jellyfish, their metre-long tentacles driving swimmers from the water. Local councils experimented with booms and regular sand clearance, while health officers reassured residents the jellyfish were a nuisance more than a danger.

In 1930 Brighton Beach was the scene of one of the bay’s few fatal shark attacks, when 16-year-old Norman William Clark was seized near the Middle Brighton pier before horrified onlookers. Decades later a basking seal asleep on the sand led police to cordon off the beach until it swam away. Over the years, there have been fiercely contested council debates over whether the bathing boxes should remain. Public sentiment, though, and their growing heritage status have prevailed so they are now tightly controlled, passing between generations or fetching extraordinary prices on the private market. Reports in September 2025 of sales approaching one million dollars again underlined their status as coveted assets despite having no plumbing or power.

Today Brighton Beach remains a blend of heritage and utility. The Dendy Street Beach pavilion, completed in 2025, houses the Brighton Life Saving Club along with a café, toilets and showers. The Middle Brighton Baths continue to offer enclosed swimming with boardwalks and changing areas. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club operates a busy marina and social rooms. The Bay Trail runs the length of the foreshore, with car parks, ramps and stair access from the Esplanade. Seasonal dog rules, CCTV proposals to combat break-ins at the boxes, and ongoing sand renourishment programmes show how the beach remains actively managed. (The images above have been taken from Wikipedia and Googlemaps.)

From Bing Crosby to feminism!

On the evening of this day in 1977, Bing Crosby, then 74 and one of the most famous entertainers of the twentieth century, stepped onto the stage of the brand-new Brighton Centre. He had sold hundreds of millions of records, starred in over 70 films, and his relaxed crooning voice had defined an era - indeed Wikipedia calls him the world’s first multimedia star. The Brighton concert, just days before his sudden death in Spain, turned out to be his final public performance.

The Brighton Centre had opened - in prime position opposite the beach - only three weeks earlier. Designed by Russell Diplock & Associates, it rose in raw concrete and glass on the seafront, part of the city’s drive to secure conference trade and off-season visitors. From the start, though, it divided opinion. Admirers pointed to the steady flow of business it brought and the way it kept hotels and restaurants busy year-round, while detractors complained bitterly about its bulk, its brutalist lines and the loss of the older buildings cleared to make way for it. 

Despite the controversy, the Brighton Centre quickly established itself as one of the country’s premier venues - Crosby was only one of many famous names who performed there: Queen played in 1979, The Who thundered through the same year, and Bob Marley brought the Uprising Tour in 1980. The Jam chose it for their farewell concert in December 1982. And it has been as prominent in the political world as it has been among musical artistes: for decades, the venue has welcomed party political conferences transforming the city into a temporary seat of national debate.

Today, almost half a century on, the centre is hosting the FiLiA Women’s Rights Conference 2025. Some 2,400 delegates and more than 250 speakers are expected with the aim of discussing women’s rights, global feminism, violence against women, health, migration and related topics. Apparently some topics are controversial: outside, in the streets, there have been protests: a trans-led direct action group calling itself Bash Back claimed responsibility for smashing windows and spraying graffiti. It is accusing the conference of hosting ‘some of the most vicious transphobia in pop politics’. (See BBC News for more.)

Happy birthday Steve Ovett

Happy 70th birthday Steve Ovett. Born in Brighton on 9 October 1955, he was raised in Portslade and educated at Mile Oak School. He joined Brighton & Hove AC as a boy and trained regularly in Preston Park, but he switched to focus on athletics in his teens. By the age of 18 he was winning 800m medals at the  European level. Over the next decade he became one of the greatest names in athletics.

Ovett’s rivalry with Sebastian Coe defined British sport in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Coe was the meticulous planner, Ovett the instinctive competitor, but both set world records and pushed each other to the limits. Ovett won Olympic 800m gold in Moscow in 1980 and bronze in the 1500m, while Coe claimed the 1500m title. Between them they took the mile world record back and forth, Ovett’s best being 3:48.40 in Oslo in 1981. He also set records at 1500m and two miles, and won European and Commonwealth titles. His strong finish, upright style and ability to win from almost any position earned him a reputation as one of the sport’s most natural talents.

After retiring in 1991, Ovett moved abroad, living for long periods in Australia and Canada, but he continued to return to Brighton, where his reputation remained strong. He later worked in athletics commentary and coaching. In 2012 he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Brighton & Hove, a civic honour that underlined the pride his home city still takes in his achievements.

Brighton’s tribute came first with a bronze statue by Peter Webster unveiled in Preston Park on 31 May 1987. However in September 2007 the work was stolen, cut from its plinth at the ankle; police later recovered a leg and some fragments, but most was lost, leaving only the foot. That foot remains mounted in Preston Park as a curiosity for visitors. Webster produced a replacement statue, unveiled on 24 July 2012 on Madeira Drive near the Palace Pier, where it still stands today - see ArtUK and the BBC. Ovett himself attended the events around the unveiling, which also marked his Freedom of the City. The seafront figure has since become a landmark for runners and visitors alike.

Implicitly precarious

Graham Swift’s Here We Are - published in the UK five years ago today - is steeped in Brighton, with Brighton’s Palace Pier both setting and symbol in the summer of 1959, the heyday of seaside variety entertainment. Swift evokes the scene with precision: the stage ‘on a flimsy structure built over swirling water’, the pier boards beneath performers’ feet, the tang of salt air drifting into the theatre, and the nightly dispersal of audiences back onto the beach and prom. For him, the seaside is an ‘implicitly precarious’ place. 

The story circles around three performers: Jack Robinson, a gifted compère; Ronnie Deane, who takes the stage name ‘The Great Pablo’; and his assistant Evie White. The pier theatre is their world, a place of illusions, transformations, and betrayals, all played out above the restless sea. Ronnie, once a wartime evacuee lodged with a Brighton family, has made his identity anew as a magician. Evie, by day a shop worker in town, by night slips into sequins and vanishes nightly into Pablo’s illusions. Jack holds it all together with wit and warmth. But as the season that summer reaches its climax, Ronnie vanishes not just from the stage but from their lives. Swift then shifts the perspective to decades later, when Evie looks back on the Brighton summer that shaped everything. The pier, the gaudy lights, the endless stretch of pebbles, become bound up with memory, loss and the final trick that could never be undone.

Brighton is not only a backdrop here but a character in itself. Its beach is a place of impermanence, its pier a fragile platform where each night’s show disappears as soon as it is conjured. The book’s themes of illusion, disappearance and reinvention mirror the seaside town’s own rhythms, with its tides of visitors, its lights that glitter and fade, and its stages that once seemed to promise the world.

Swift, born in London in 1949, has always been a novelist of memory and what might be thought of as the ungraspable past. He read English at Cambridge and came to prominence with Waterland in 1983, a novel that blended history and personal inheritance, later adapted into film. His Last Orders won the Booker Prize in 1996, and across a dozen novels he has returned again and again to the mysteries of time, identity and loss.

Here is Swift in The Guardian writing about his book in 2021: ‘It seems I’m attracted to the seaside. It features in several of my books. A large part of my latest novel, Here We Are, is set not just in Brighton, but in a theatre on Brighton Pier. But then we are all, surely, drawn to the seaside. It’s a deeply compelling - and paradoxical - place. We go there for enjoyment, yet at the same time it is an elemental zone where land and water meet and thus, with or without the presence of cliffs, it is implicitly precarious. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.

Interestingly, the book’s cover - taken from a famous American natural history book, The Birds of America by John James Audubon - was given a bespoke billboard installation by the Buildhollywood agency. It features hundreds of individual feathers hand applied and said to create ‘a bold, textured display to match the dramatics of the novel’.