Guest: Brighton Beach, Adelaide, South Australia

At dawn, the concrete jetty at Brighton Beach reaches into the Gulf St Vincent, its pylons mirrored in a sheet of receding tide. Each February hundreds of swimmers dive from this same beach in the Brighton Jetty Classic, racing in a loop around the structure that replaced the storm-wrecked timber jetty of 1886. Children fish from the railings, paddle-boarders idle offshore, and in the mornings the Esplanade cafés fill with runners cooling down over flat whites. Brighton, thirteen kilometres south of Adelaide’s centre, has long balanced small-town charm with metropolitan reach. (NB: this is the last of BrightonBeach365’s 12 guest beaches.)

Before settlement this was Kaurna Country, known as Witu-wattingga - ‘in the midst of peppermint gums’. European settlers arrived in the 1840s, opening a post office in 1849 and a town hall twenty years later. The first jetty drew excursionists from Adelaide, and by the 1920s Brighton had become a tram-linked suburb. The dunes were reshaped for recreation, hotels multiplied, and the surf lifesaving club emerged from local swimmers’ patrols. In 1934 the Brighton Swimming Club joined with the St Vincent’s Life Saving Club to form what is now the Brighton Surf Life Saving Club, still patrolling the sands.

Each Jan/Feb, the shoreline becomes more than a place for sea and sun - it becomes a gallery. The Brighton Jetty Sculptures exhibition, launched in 2008, now displays more than 200 works along the foreshore and beneath marquees in the reserve. The sculptures range from large steel forms to delicate ceramics, their sales supporting both artists and the surf club. The event has become South Australia’s largest outdoor art show, drawing thousands of visitors to wander between beach and artwork, the Gulf providing a shifting blue backdrop.

Today the suburb’s wide beach is prized for its safety and its sunsets. The Esplanade has evolved from seaside cottages to modern apartments, and Brighton Road is undergoing a $30 million upgrade to ease the coastal traffic. Offshore, though, the environment has been unpredictable. A massive algal bloom in 2025 brought marine die-offs to Brighton and neighbouring beaches, prompting a state-funded clean-up and a $100 million resilience plan, including dining-cash-back vouchers to help coastal businesses recover. Yet the beach remains lively: dog-walkers at dawn, cafés spilling onto Jetty Road, the open-water race each summer. Behind the dunes, replanting schemes restore native grasses and peppermint gums to stabilise the sand.

Brighton has weathered storms before - the loss of its first jetty, years of erosion, suburban sprawl - and each time it rebuilds. Its concrete jetty, the sculptures on the shore, and the steady patrols of the surf club all speak to the same coastal endurance. On calm evenings, as the tide laps at the pylons and the last swimmers wade ashore, Brighton Beach still feels exactly what its founders imagined: a resilient stretch of sea-edge community on the southern fringe of Adelaide.

Other sources: Wikipedia, As We Travelled, City of Holdfast Bay.

Out and Along and Over

Here is the 22nd 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 three people riding in a small, bright red-trimmed speedboat skimming over rough stylised blue and green waves. The boat’s wooden decking is sharply angled, two passengers sit at the back, with a helmsman at the front. The sea curves beneath them in bold, flowing bands, and above them a wide expanse of blue sky is broken by big, rounded white clouds. Off to the left, a red sail or distant vessel adds a point of contrast on the horizon.

A limerick starter

A day-tripping trio left shore

In a boat that was really quite poor;

When it smacked through a swell

They all yelled, ‘Bloody hell!’

‘That’s an oath,’ they added, ‘not a port we’d aim for.’

Out and Along and Over (loosely inspired by the rhythms of James Joyce)

They shot out from the shingle as if the whole beach had given them a shove. A jerk, a cough of the engine, and then the little red prow lifting, nosing, finding its run along the bright-slap water. Tom felt it under him, the shudder and lift, the hard rattle in his knees, and he thought, yes, this is it now, this is the going, the real going, and not the standing and watching and saying one day, one day. Behind him the pier stretched its legs into the sea, iron and timber, rattling with music and gulls and the clank of rides starting up, and all along the shore the people like shells scattered, small and safe and stayed.

His father had both hands on the wheel, knuckles yellow, grinning into the wind that peeled his cheeks back, and every now and then he’d glance to the side, to the left where the open ran out to France, to everything else, and to the right where Brighton curled round on itself with its terraces and hotels and its white-faced houses pretending not to look at the water. The boy watched his father’s eyes and thought of how they looked at the kitchen table, grey then, and how they looked now, lit from below by the jump of the waves and the fat high sun.

‘Hold on there, Tommy boy,’ he shouted, and the sound was whipped away, cut to bits by the speed and the salt. Tom laughed but the laugh stayed in his chest, a rising bubble, and he dug his fingers into the warm rail, feeling every bolt, every scar where the paint had run or been scraped back by someone else’s summer.

Beside him Mum sat forward, one hand on the side, one hand in the air pointing at nothing in particular - a buoy, a line of foam, a flash of glass in the west where the drowned pier lay flat as a drawing on the water. Her hair flew back and slapped her face and she pushed it away and laughed, a proper laugh, not the small kitchen laugh, and in her eyes he saw the beach as it had been before him, before Dad, Brighton before Brighton, a strip of stones and a strip of sea and the old idea of going, always going, out and along and over.

And the boat ran on, skimming the chopped blue, throwing its own white script behind it, a long curling sentence on the water that said: we were here, we passed, we were going, we went.

The Fortune of War

Tucked into the Kings Road Arches between the piers, the Fortune of War has traded in some form on the beach since the 1870s, when Louis Pagani ran a refreshment bar on the lower esplanade, serving beer straight onto the shingle. By 1882 it was firmly established as a licensed beer house in one of the new arches, part of the council’s effort to let out the lower promenade to traders who could serve Brighton’s booming excursion crowds. Early accounts describe a simple open-fronted bar with drinkers spilling across the pebbles.

The pub’s nautical identity came later. The present upturned-boat interior - the curved ribs, heavy timber and rope rails - emerged gradually through twentieth-century refits. By the post-war years the ‘ship’s-hull bar’ was already a Brighton curiosity, sitting amid fishermen’s craft, deckchair concessions and the daily bustle of the working beach. In the 1950s and 1960s it became part of a busy strip of seafront music bars remembered for accordions, drums and early rock and roll played almost on the tide line.

The pub survived later waves of nightclub competition by trading on its eccentricity and location. By the 1990s it was often described as the last true beach-side pub in Brighton, a below-deck refuge outlasting themed neighbours along Kings Road. Ownership had by then settled with the company now known as Laine Pub Company, the major local operator whose Brighton portfolio also includes several of the city’s best-known venues. Day-to-day management has been handled on site, most notably by Laurence Hill, who by 2015 had run the pub for more than six years and publicly aligned it with the local Living Wage campaign.

In 2014 the Fortune of War was forced to close temporarily after structural issues in the arches above prompted emergency engineering works to the road and promenade. It reopened with renewed emphasis on DJs, live music and seasonal outdoor service, strengthening its long-standing claim to being Brighton’s oldest beach-level pub. Its ‘beer garden’ remains the central stretch of shingle, animated from midday to late night through the summer.

As for the name Fortune of War, this comes from an old seafaring and military phrase capturing the sheer luck that governed life on campaign or at sea, a fatalistic acceptance that storms, battles, wrecks, or windfalls could change a man’s prospects overnight. Pubs with the name clustered in port towns and garrison districts from the 18th century onwards, and Brighton’s own beach-level version long traded on that heritage, its arches and terraces nodding to the hazards and hopes bound up with Channel fishing, merchant crews, and the town’s maritime identity.

Sources: Camra, The Guardian, My Brighton and Hove, Living Wage (source of the portrait above), Restaurants Brighton, and Wikipedia.

If you seek his monument . . .

Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, in 1750, Richard Russell, not yet famous, published De Tabe Glandulari, the treatise that would change both his career and the fate of Brighton. Its argument - that seawater, taken internally and externally, could treat diseases of the glands - propelled a little-known Sussex physician into national prominence. More significantly for Brighton, it directed medical attention to a town then struggling with erosion, collapsing cliff lines and a declining fishing economy. Russell’s decision to base his cure specifically on Brighton’s beach gave the town its first sustained influx of visitors.

Born in 1687, Russell studied medicine at the University of Leyden. He returned to England, practising in his home town Lewes from the 1720s. By the 1740s he had become convinced of the therapeutic power of the sea. De Tabe Glandulari was the outcome: a detailed Latin defence of marine treatment that was swiftly translated into English and circulated well beyond Sussex. It was the first substantial medical work to promote both the drinking of seawater and immersion in it, and it was unusually pointed in praising Brighthelmstone’s marine environment over inland spa cures.

Demand for Russell’s regimen soon overwhelmed his Lewes practice. By 1753 he had moved permanently to Brighthelmstone, purchasing a marshy plot on the Steine for £40 and building the town’s largest house. It had direct access to the beach, dedicated rooms for convalescents and south-facing windows intended to maximise exposure to sea air. Around it grew Brighton’s first recognisable health quarter, complete with bathing attendants, suppliers of warm seawater and the earliest stirrings of fashionable patronage. Figures of rank began appearing among his patients, giving the town a social standing it had never previously enjoyed.

Russell’s reputation rose accordingly. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752, he became one of the most prominent provincial physicians of his generation, and his treatise passed through multiple editions. His will later required his son William to assume the surname Kempe in order to inherit family property, an unusual stipulation noted at the time. Russell died in 1759 and was buried at South Malling near Lewes. His practice was taken over by Dr Anthony Relhan, and his large house on the Steine evolved into what is now the Royal Albion Hotel. 

This hotel was very badly damaged by a fire in 2023. Of what remains, part was demolished for safety reasons, and the rest remains closed off and covered in scaffolding, Nevertheless, it’s just possible to spy the commemorative plaque for Russell which says: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ Brighton’s identity as a centre for sea air, convalescence and coastal recreation began with Russell and remains to this day.

For more on Russell see Wikipedia (which is also the source of the portrait above), an entry in Tim Carder’s Encyclopaedia of Brighton which can viewed online at My Brighton & Hove, and Brighton Journal. 

Where have all the punters gone?

The Christmas season in Brighton is gathering pace: the Palace Pier tree is up (see yeterday’s post), the promenade lights are on, and this week three very different Santas have announced their festive plans - one greeting families high above the city, one in the heart of the pier, and one welcoming children beside the lifeboats. 

Brighton i360 has unveiled its full programme, with ‘Santa in the Sky’ returning from 11am on selected dates. Flights are scheduled hourly, and each visit promises a meeting with Santa in the clouds, a small gift, photographs, and the satisfaction of being, as the blurb puts it, on Santa’s nice list this year. Tickets for adults are £23.50, with the pod transformed into a mid-air grotto and Santa surrounded by elves and decorations.

For families wanting a longer experience, the i360 is also offering ‘Breakfast with Santa’, a one-hour event starting at 09.00 in the Drift restaurant. A full English breakfast comes with juice or a hot drink, and children can decorate their own bauble, write a letter to Santa, and post it via the ‘Northpole post box’. After breakfast the whole group takes a pod flight at 10.00 to meet Santa in the Sky, with gifts and photo opportunities included. Adult tickets are £32.50.

Down on the seafront the Palace Pier is running its own grotto in the Palm Court Restaurant, with Santa in residence on selected December dates. Families can book a traditional pier-side visit, complete with the arcade lights, deckchair colours and winter sea views that are part of Brighton’s festive backdrop. It offers a more classic, ground-level encounter for those who prefer Santa without the altitude.

Across town Santa will also be putting in a shift at Brighton RNLI, whose volunteers are once again running their own grotto experience inside the lifeboat station. The photographs used in their promotion - Santa in full costume, perched cheerfully beside the D-class inshore lifeboat, yellow wellies and all - underline the RNLI’s characteristically practical approach to Christmas. Families can book timed entry slots, meet Santa in a working coastal rescue environment, and support the lifeboat station’s fundraising at the same time.

Although the three events could not be more different in setting - one 450 feet in the air, one on the pier, and one at beach level beside the Atlantic 85 - all speak to the variety of Brighton’s seasonal offerings, and to how central the Santa visit has become to local December traditions. 

Between the i360’s cloud-level grotto, Palm Court’s pier-side classic, and the lifeboat station’s shoreline version, one might wonder if the place wasn’t over-run with Santas, and whether there are any actual punters left!

Pier Xmas tree is up

The Palace Pier Christmas tree is up. A tall Norway spruce now stands on the pier forecourt beside the clock tower, strung with oversized coloured bulbs that sway in the onshore wind. It seems that Brighton has no official record of when this seasonal marker first appeared, but photographs show a large decorated tree in this exact spot by 2013, and by 2014 it was already being treated as a familiar feature of the seafront in December. Images from 2017 onward confirm it as an annual fixture, always in the same position, always forming part of the pier’s festive display rather than the city’s wider Christmas lights scheme.

Although the space sits hard against the public promenade, the forecourt immediately in front of the gates is managed by the pier’s operators, now Brighton Palace Pier Group plc. Seasonal decorations placed there follow the pier’s own branding and schedules, and in 2019 the tree was given a formal ‘lights switch-on’ hosted by the pier and handed to local children’s charities, leaving little doubt about ownership. The tree has never appeared in council lighting budgets or BID-funded lists, and it has never been tied to a sponsor. Everything points to it being a privately installed and privately funded tradition maintained by the pier’s operators.

This year’s tree matches the pattern: a full-sized spruce brought in early, anchored on the forecourt and fitted with the pier’s preferred warm-coloured bulbs. For more than a decade, thus, it has acted as the seafront’s unofficial marker that Brighton’s festive season has begun, standing just long enough to see out the winter storms before disappearing, and the bulbs heading into storage.

Sources: Urban75, Latest TV, Alamy, and Ebay.

The Shingle That Waited

Here is the 21st 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 window - the only one of the 24 designs so muted, so unlit from behind - shows a semi-abstract landscape: a tall tree stands in the centre with a brown trunk and deep green canopy. Behind it, rolling hills sweep across the scene in bands of varied colours. To the left, a structure suggests the outline of a windmill. In the distance, layers of faded blue and purple evoke sea and sky, creating a sense of depth. (See below for an AI enhanced copy of the image.)

Limerick

A lone tree stood proud on the rise,

Where the hills blushed in patchwork disguise;

By a windmill’s red crown,

Colours drifted and wound,

As if landscape and daydream were allies.

The Shingle that Waited (with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez)

At first light on a morning without memory, a solitary tree stood on the Brighton Beach shingle where no tree had stood the day before. The tide had withdrawn in long blue breaths, and the stones around the tree seemed to have shifted to receive it, as if saving that space for longer than anyone had lived. Its leaves shone with a green so new the gulls wheeled in uneasy circles above it.

People approached quietly. They felt a warmth rising from the stones but did not lean close to confirm it. A boy of about ten pressed his ear to the trunk and later told his mother the tree was humming. He said it felt like a forgotten memory had entered him by mistake. When he stepped back, he stared at the horizon with the solemnity of someone recognising a distant call.

Days lengthened, and colours around the beach began to behave in unfamiliar ways. The sea deepened into shifting turquoises, the sky into purples without sunset, and the distant hills changed tone with the tide, warming as the water withdrew and cooling as it returned. Residents felt the changes but did not question them; they sensed the beach had entered a season beyond explanation.

Late in the month, a shape gathered itself on the horizon. Each dawn revealed more: a red-roofed windmill with long blue vanes turning steadily in air that held no wind. No one claimed to understand its arrival. The old ice-cream seller simply nodded, saying, ‘The sea keeps its stories. Sometimes it gives one back.’

One afternoon a young woman knelt beside the tree, drawn by a breath of warmth beneath her feet. When she parted the stones she saw, only for an instant, a faint radiance below the surface, colours laid out in careful layers like the remains of a celebration the earth still remembered. She withdrew her hands, and the glow vanished. Those who later dug in the same place found nothing but cold grey stones.

As the season shifted, the marvels retreated. The sky returned to its familiar greys, the sea to its disciplined blue, and the hills to their customary restraint. One morning, without any sign of their leaving, both tree and windmill were gone. The shingle showed only a slender arc of lighter stones tracing a path toward the water.

The boy who had heard the humming did not seem surprised. ‘They were waiting,’ he said. ‘And they heard what they needed.’

Sometimes at dusk, when the tide lies perfectly still, a tall, delicate shadow stretches across the stones, cast by nothing that stands there. Those who see it feel the shingle shift almost imperceptibly beneath their feet, as if making room again for what has not yet been forgotten.