Kitchener brings Tokyo to Hove

Earlier this year, a new slice of neon night appeared beside Hove Lagoon. On the seaward wall of Fatboy Slim’s Big Beach Cafe, London street artist Dan Kitchener has painted a vast rainy city scene, all umbrellas and headlights and reflections, so bright it seems to glow even on a flat grey Brighton afternoon. Walkers heading along the promenade towards the beach now pass what looks like a Tokyo crossroads in a storm, spread from pavement level almost to the eaves of the cafe building.

Kitchener’s mural shows a taxi edging through a crowded junction while pedestrians hurry across under clear plastic umbrellas. The buildings loom steeply upwards in forced perspective, their windows and signs rendered as streaks of cyan, magenta, yellow and white. The wet road is the real subject: a mirror of smeared colour where the city lights dissolve into the puddles. Up close you can see the quick, confident spray lines and splatters that create the sense of motion and rain. From a distance, the scene snaps into focus as a cinematic still, like a frame from a late night travel sequence.

The mural was commissioned and paid for by Norman Cook, Fatboy Slim, and donated to the city as a public artwork on his cafe. The Big Beach Cafe’s social media thanked him for having ‘commissioned and very generously donated this incredible piece by Dan Kitchener to the people of Brighton and Hove’, and Kitchener himself posted that he was ‘honoured to have a super colourful mural now permanently on show at the cafe’. The Argus covered the work, in late May and quoted Cook: ‘I persuaded Kitchener who was attending an event at the cafe] to stick around for a couple of days and paint a mural for us on the pristine wall of the newly refurbished toilets. Thanks to everyone who came and watched the painting of the piece, the council for giving us permission for public art, and most of all, the supremely talented Dan Kitchener for gracing our wall with his work. I think you will agree it beautifies the place.” ‘

Dan Kitchener, who signs his work ‘DANK’, was born in 1974 and grew up in Essex. He describes himself as an urban artist working mainly across London and the southeast, and has developed an instantly recognisable style of neon-lit, rain-soaked cityscapes, often based on late-night Tokyo streets. He works freehand, without projectors or stencils, building up layers of spray paint and acrylic to create the blur of headlights, reflections and crowds in motion. His murals now appear on walls in cities from Belfast and Brick Lane to Houston, Miami and Vaasa in Finland, usually at a scale that can dominate an entire building.

See also HOVE LAGOON in murals.

I thought I saw a figure

The sea had risen without warning, a white delirium of spray and roar. It came not in waves but in convulsions, as if the element itself were sick of containment and meant to unmake its boundaries. The wind pressed the foam flat, then tore it upward again, shredding it into a kind of blizzard. Somewhere in that confusion I thought I saw a figure.

It was no more than a dark suggestion in the cataract, a shifting form that seemed to heave forward and be dragged back in the same instant. Each time the sea struck, the human form appeared to resist; each time it fell away, the shape dissolved into whiteness. I could not be certain there was anyone there at all. Still, the mind insists on pattern - a head, an arm flung upward, a body twisted in the labour of survival.

I stood on the shingle, trying to avoid being overbalanced by the force of the waves, salt burning my lips, waiting for the form to resolve itself into fact. But the sea gave me nothing. The longer I watched, the more it seemed the apparition was not in the surf but in myself - a man conjured by exhaustion, guilt, memory. The old fear that the world was alive and would not have him.

When at last the tide receded, it left the beach furrowed and gleaming, the foam thinning into nothing. The figure was gone, if it had ever been. Yet I knew that part of me had been smashed out by the sea, had been taken - like a drowned man never found - the part of me that still believed there might be meaning in the tumult, a face in the water, a will behind the wave.

(After William Golding.)

The Town Beehive

Fifty years ago, in 1975, a modest paperback appeared under the imprint of QueenSpark Books - a fledgling community press run from Brighton’s Queen’s Park. Its title, The Town Beehive: A Young Girl’s Lot in Brighton 1910-1934, announced its subject with quiet pride. The author, Daisy Noakes, had been born in Princes Road in 1910 and lived almost her entire life within walking distance of the seafront whose hum and hustle she immortalised.

QueenSpark’s founders had set out to publish the voices of working people, and Noakes was among their first and most enduring discoveries. She wrote with humour, precision and memory unclouded by nostalgia. Her words carried the weight of a life lived in modest rooms, in domestic service, and later among the deckchairs and boarding houses of interwar Brighton.

 The Town Beehive was followed by two further volumes, The Faded Rainbow and Street Noises, as well as radio and television appearances. She became a familiar presence on BBC Southern Counties Radio, interviewing fishermen and stallholders with the same unvarnished curiosity that animated her writing. Later she appeared in the BBC’s Out of the Doll’s House, a landmark account of women’s history, and was honoured by Sussex University for her contribution to local culture.

Noakes’s style was direct and her recall extraordinary. The sea, for Daisy, was both backdrop and lifeblood - the edge of the world against which Brighton’s fortunes rose and fell. She remembered the beach not as a picturesque resort but as a working stage, crowded with buskers, vendors, families, and barefoot children chasing coins through the shingle. Few writers of her generation - and certainly none from her background - recorded the soundscape of the town so closely, from pier bands and concert parties to the black minstrel troupes who sang at low tide.

What gives The Town Beehive its lasting warmth is Noakes’s unpretentious humanity. Her Brighton is not the Brighton of postcards or pleasure palaces, but of aching legs, shared cups of tea, and the kindness of sisters. It is a Brighton of ordinary lives, played out within sight and sound of the surf. More about Noakes can be read at My Brighton and Hove and Writing Lives.

The Town Beehive is free to read online at the Queenspark website. Here are two extracts/

‘One of the times we were all together was Armistice Day of the First World War. With young George in the pram, we all walked to Brighton Sea Front and along to the West Pier. Everyone seemed to be singing and dancing, and I remember soldiers and sailors in uniform, the worse for drink, staggering around. We then walked back through the town to New England Hill, and all went in a cafe, where Dad bought a large jug of tea and one cup which we took turns in drinking out of. I still remember to this day how my legs ached with walking, and longed to have a ride in the pram if only someone would carry George, but no, it did not happen.’ (The image below is an illustration by ChatGPT.)

‘The seafront had plenty of attractions. There were bands that played on the Pier, two concert Parties, the one near Black Rock was called Jack Shepherd’s Entertainers, the one near the West Pier was Ellson’s Entertainers.

At this one, talent contests were held on Saturday afternoons, but one was only eligible to compete if one had a paid seat. The cheapest was 6d. I had earned 5d. that morning, and after a lot of persuasion my sister Emily gave me the other 1d. if I would sing her favourite song at that moment: “God send you back to me”. She had been friendly with a South African wounded soldier, and he had gone home. So we walked there and back but happy because I won a Teddy Bear for first prize.

Black minstrels played their banjos at low tide on the sands, and would get the children to join in the choruses, I remember “Oh Moana” and the actions. People on the Pier would throw pennies down to the sands, and the boys would scramble for them. All sorts of vendors were on the beach with newspapers, Brighton Rock and the Whelk Stalls where one could buy a small plate of whelks, cockles, mussels or winkles, and one could leave the plate on the beach to be collected.’

Raging with the greatest violence

‘A severe hurricane and occurring at the spring tide, the low tracts along the coast were inundated and considerable damage occasioned thereby. I drove to Brighton and arrived there between one and two, at the time the sea was raging with the greatest violence, the surf dashed over the pier and occasionally hid it from our view.’ This is from the remarkable diary of Gideon Algernon Mantell - doctor, geologist, and fossil collector - who died this day in 1852. Born in Lewes, he moved to Brighton where he lived in a house on Old Steine becoming something of a celebrity palaeontologist.

Mantell was born in Lewes in 1790, the son of a shoemaker. Apprenticed as a teenager to a local surgeon, he later trained at St Bartholomew’s in London before returning to Sussex to practice. His first fame came not from medicine but from geology: he was the discoverer of the Iguanodon, among the earliest of the creatures that would come to be called dinosaurs. His book The Fossils of the South Downs (1822) made his name, and within a decade he had identified a second great reptile. Yet his ambition remained medical: he longed to establish a prosperous practice among the aristocracy drawn to Brighton by the Pavilion court of George IV and William IV.

In 1833 he finally moved his family to 20 The Steyne, at the heart of fashionable Brighton. To his frustration, he became less a physician than a celebrity geologist. Visitors besieged his home, eager to see his fossils. In 1838, the collection was purchased by the British Museum. That same year he bought a practice in Clapham Common, which soon became a success and allowed him frequent trips to London to attend institutional meetings. He moved again in 1844 to Pimlico, where he remained until his death on 10 November 1852. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia and Dinohunters.

A lifetime of diaries kept by Mantell were edited in 1940 by E. Cecil Curwen, whose father had lived in Hove. Extracts were first published that year in Sussex County Magazine under the title The Diaries of Gideon Mantell, F.R.S., based on Curwen’s fuller transcription now held at Barbican House, Lewes. Many of Mantell’s original notebooks and letters, however, were taken to New Zealand by his son Walter Baldock Durrant Mantell and are preserved today in the Alexander Turnbull Library and at Te Papa Tongarewa. 

Later editions have sought to complete Curwen’s partial selection: John A. Cooper’s The Unpublished Journal of Gideon Algernon Mantell, 1819–1852 (2010) makes available the sections omitted from Curwen’s edition and is freely accessible online, while  another volume covering June-November 1852 was separately published by R. Dell in 1983. It is Curwen’s typescript, together with these supplements, that remains the principal record of Mantell’s day-to-day observations of life in Brighton and Lewes. They reveal a man of abundant restless energy, fired with an ambition to become immortal in the realms of science, but also one who sought solace in the sea air and who described with striking immediacy the changing moods of Brighton’s coast.

Here are several diary extracts about Brighton Beach contained in Curwen’s original The Diaries of Gideon Mantell.

16 August 1823

‘Drove to Brighton; the sea very rough and magnificent. I walked along to the beach and seated myself on a rock, viewing with delight the tempestuous foaming of the billows around me: the hull of a vessel wrecked the preceding night was lying near me, and was hurled to and fro by the impetuosity of the waves. The foam from the surges dashing through the piles of the pier was fine and imposing.’

23 November 1824

‘A severe hurricane and occurring at the spring tide, the low tracts along the coast were inundated and considerable damage occasioned thereby. I drove to Brighton and arrived there between one and two, at the time the sea was raging with the greatest violence, the surf dashed over the pier and occasionally hid it from our view. So soon as the water was retired so as to allow of walking on the esplanade, we went to the Pier, which was much damaged by the waves; the railing in many places washed away, and the platform destroyed, so as to render access to the Pier-head difficult and dangerous: however we ventured to the farthest end although every now and then a sea dashed over us, and completely drenched us, but the awful grandeur of the scene more than compensated for the inconvenience of our situation.’

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.’

See also Brighton’s oldest pier.

Prof. Powsey’s West Pier feats

At the height of the Edwardian seaside boom, few spectacles drew a crowd like the high dives of ‘Professor’ Powsey. From a spindly wooden tower on Brighton’s West Pier he hurled himself into the Channel from 80 feet up, sometimes head first, sometimes astride a bicycle. His name appeared on countless postcards, his performances billed as ‘Professor Powsey’s Sensational High Dive of 81 feet’ or ‘The Great Cycle Dive’.

The most widespread image of his act shows him riding off a platform above the West Pier, still in the saddle. But other, less common photographs do still exist - such as the two on the left above that passed through Toovey’s auctioneers at one time or another.

Powsey’s Brighton Beach performances took place around 1905-08, part of a circuit of seaside stunts that included Margate, Blackpool and Scarborough. Yet Brighton became his signature setting. On clear afternoons he climbed the narrow frame above the pier, waved to the crowd, and dropped into a small patch of sea fenced off by boats. These were feats as much of nerve as of balance, undertaken in unpredictable tides and wind.

The diving tradition continued with his daughter, Miss G. Powsey, who performed on the same pier a few years later. A postcard from the Royal Pavilion & Museums collection shows her captured in mid-dive before the domed concert hall, continuing the family’s blend of danger and elegance that had thrilled the seaside crowds. See also Powsey Family History.

Picture credits: Top left - Toovey’s; top right - Wikipedia; bottom left - Toovey’s; bottom right - Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove.

The Thruster Buster

Found on the beach: a Thruster Buster single-shot firework, its casing damp and salt-streaked among the Brighton pebbles. The label still legible - ‘Shooting Direction’ helpfully printed for whoever last took aim - links it to Kimbolton Fireworks, one of the best-known British brands. Each tube launches a single 30 mm shell, a quick pulse of lift and colour before silence returns. 

Kimbolton began life in Cambridgeshire in the 1960s, its founder Reverend Ron Lancaster combining chemistry teaching with pyrotechnics. The company became a by-word for organised displays, providing fireworks for royal jubilees, university celebrations, and village fêtes alike. Though the business was sold after Lancaster’s retirement, the brand endures in the retail market - its modest ‘single shots’ now scattered through supermarket shelves and, it seems, Brighton’s shingle.

The Thruster Buster is a small and simple firework: one lift charge, one burst, a few seconds of applause in the sky. Retailers describe it as a low-cost alternative to a rocket, designed to minimise debris (an ‘eco-alternative’ to a stick rocket because there’s no wooden stick to litter the ground). On Guy Fawkes Night it might have soared high over Madeira Drive, blossoming briefly above the Palace Pier before falling unseen into the sea or onto the pebbles.

Domes Beneath the Waves

Here is the 19th 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. This image shows a stylised architectural scene dominated by domes and towers. The largest dome rises centrally, flanked by smaller ones, all with bulbous, onion-like shapes that evoke an exotic, palatial skyline. Vertical pillars and arch-shaped windows support the structure, while the sky behind is rendered in soft blue tones that contrast with the golden and amber hues of the domes. The whole composition has a rhythmic balance, with repeating ovals and arches giving it a sense of harmony and grandeur.

A limerick starter

A palace of domes in the sky,

Seemed built for a dream passing by;

Its minarets gleamed,

As if Brighton had dreamed

Of being a Sultan’s Versailles.

Domes Beneath the Waves (with apologies to Salmon Rushdie)

On certain evenings, when the tide withdraws like a curtain from a stage, the domes of the sea begin to rise. Tourists do not see them, of course - their eyes are fixed on the Pavilion up the road, that grand, improbable wedding cake of empire. But the locals, the old strollers of Brighton Beach, know: when the light dips and the gulls turn black against the sun, the reflection in the shallows is not a reflection at all. It is memory - architecture dreaming itself back to the sea.

A boy named Karim sells shells from an upturned ice-cream tub near the Palace Pier. He has heard his grandmother’s stories of domes that float like lanterns under the Channel, relics of the Prince’s folly that slipped from land into myth. One evening, as the beach empties and the gulls fall silent, he wades out where the surf softens into glass. The water trembles with colour - amber, sapphire, milk-white - and beneath his toes he sees, for a heartbeat, a city of gold and glass, breathing.

The domes pulse, as if the Pavilion itself is exhaling through the seabed, sending bubbles that smell faintly of cardamom and salt. Within them swirl voices - Indian servants gossiping about the mad English prince, sea-bathers laughing in the cold, a band tuning for a ball that never quite ends. Karim reaches down; the glow flickers like a lantern in wind.

Then a voice speaks - not to his ears but through his bones. We are the domes that England dreamed, it says. Half built from desire, half from guilt. When you look at us, boy, you look at both.

He blinks, and the light collapses. Only the Pavilion remains behind him, ridiculous and beautiful against the dusk - its turrets dark with evening, its minarets poking holes in the last of the sun. The sea lies flat and grey again, as if nothing has happened. But in the shallows his footprints still glow faintly, like a script written in a language the tide refuses to erase.