Innocent circle?

Here is the 23rd 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 circular scene of rolling countryside rendered in bold, simplified shapes. Sweeping green hills overlap in layered bands, with deeper greens suggesting shaded folds in the land. Brighter yellow paths or fields cut diagonally through the slopes, adding movement and contrast. Above the landscape, large billowing clouds stretch across a clear, bright sky, their rounded forms outlined in dark contours. The whole composition has a stylised, almost mosaic-like quality giving the landscape a rhythmic, patterned feel.

A limerick starter

A rambler set out with great pride

Across hills rolling green, far and wide;

But each curving bright track

Led him cleanly off track -

Now he’s still in those fields, trying to decide.

Innocent circle? (after Thomas Pynchon)

On a Tuesday of no particular consequence - though the gulls claimed otherwise - Vasco found a circular picture half-buried in Brighton’s shingle, its colours too bright for English weather, its hills too neatly curved to be trusted. The thing gave off the faint chemical optimism of a 1970s educational poster, the sort issued by governments hoping children might one day become engineers instead of anarchists.

He picked it up. Warm. Suspiciously warm.

A woman in an orange raincoat, passing at speed as if pursued by minor debts, shouted, Don’t look at it directly! Then she vanished behind a windbreak plastered with QR codes and promotional offers which, if decoded, might or might not summon a free ice cream. Farther along the beach, a group of students were conducting what they called ‘an unauthorised topographical intervention’, which mostly involved pointing surveyor rods at the Palace Pier and arguing about the metaphysics of load-bearing structures.

Vasco had the distinct impression that the picture in his hand - this innocent circle of rolling hills and friendly clouds - was part of a much larger operation, though whether artistic, military, or merely bureaucratic he couldn’t yet tell. Brighton had always been like this: sunlit afternoons perforated by intrigue. Even the pebbles seemed to be signalling to one another, clicking out messages in some forgotten coastal Morse.

He turned the picture over. Nothing on the back but a faint smell of ozone and custard cream. Classic misdirection.

Somewhere beyond the West Pier’s skeletal remains, a low hum gathered - something between distant surf and an idling generator. Vasco couldn’t be sure, but it seemed the landscape in the picture was beginning, imperceptibly, to move.

When the big wave came

When the big wave came
I thought I was lost, I thought I was
No way to turn, neither this nor that
Lost in the ruptures of current
Lost in the labyrinth of seas

When the big wave came
I thought I was engulfed, I thought I was
For ever down, and further down
Engulfed in the foaming surge,
Engulfed by the choking of brine

When the big wave came
I thought it was a deluge, I thought it was
Poseidon calling, or was it Neptune
A deluge, yes, from the gods
A deluge more than biblical 

When the big wave came
I thought I was drowned, I thought I was
All that choking, all that despair
Drowned in the crashing of ocean
Drowned in the havoc of tidal roar

Yet here I am, wondering
Who to blame
Who to thank

Brighton-born Beardsley

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872, in his mother’s family home in Buckingham Road, just north of the seafront. He would become the late Victorian era’s most notorious black-and-white illustrator, a leading figure in the Aesthetic and Art Nouveau movements whose name now appears routinely in Brighton museum displays and heritage trails as one of the city’s most famous artistic sons.

Beardsley’s parents, Vincent and Ellen Beardsley, were from very different backgrounds: his father the son of a Clerkenwell jeweller with a fragile private income, his mother from the established Pitt family of Brighton. At the time of his birth the family lived at what was then 12 Buckingham Road, later renumbered 31, a mid-Victorian house that is now Grade II listed. He was baptised at St Nicholas Church and later attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School as a day boy, where he excelled in art and had early drawings, poems and cartoons printed in the school magazine Past and Present. 

In 1884 he appeared in public as an ‘infant musical phenomenon’, playing at concerts with his elder sister Mabel; the family then settled in London, and his working life began in clerical and architectural offices rather than on the seafront. On the advice of established artists, including Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Beardsley took up art as a profession in 1891 and studied at the Westminster School of Art. 

A visit to Paris exposed him to Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and Japanese prints, which reinforced the graphic, high-contrast style that would make him famous. His first major commission came in 1893, illustrating Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for the publisher J. M. Dent. The following year he became art editor of The Yellow Book, designing its covers and providing many of its illustrations. His drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salome and later for works such as The Rape of the Lock and Lysistrata established him as the most controversial illustrator of his generation, celebrated and condemned for grotesque, erotic and highly stylised images in black ink influenced by Japanese woodcuts. 

Tuberculosis, first diagnosed when he was seven, dominated his short life. In 1897 he converted to Catholicism and moved to the French Riviera in search of better health. He died in Menton in March 1898, aged but twenty-five, and was buried there after a requiem mass. Brighton remained his birthplace and school town rather than a subject in his drawings, but the city has increasingly claimed him: exhibitions such as ‘Aubrey Beardsley: A Brighton Boy’ at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, and displays like ‘Queer the Pier’, present his work, his Yellow Book covers and his Brighton Grammar School medal as part of the wider story of Brighton’s cultural and seaside history.

Sources: Sussex ArtBeat; Wikipedia; Epsom and Ewell History Explorer; images taken from The Collected Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley by Arthur Symons (Bounty Books, 1967). 

The Punch and Judy tradition

Punch and Judy arrived on Brighton Beach during the great 19th-century seaside boom and quickly became part of the town’s visual identity. The glove-puppet act that Samuel Pepys first recorded in his diary in 1662 had, by the 1840s, settled into the striped booth familiar from Brighton’s early tourist prints. Local collections hold mid-Victorian puppets explicitly labelled as part of a ‘Brighton Beach’ tradition, and by the Edwardian years a Punch and Judy booth pitched on the shingle with Palace Pier behind it was one of the resort’s standard postcard subjects.

Brighton’s own performers helped weld Mr Punch to the shoreline. A Punch and Judy was once performed by royal command for Queen Victoria at the Royal Pavilion. The West Pier and the promenade around it became the recognised pitch: oral histories, home movies and postcards consistently show a little theatre set up between the West Pier and the bandstand, children in the front row and parents watching from deckchairs. Well into the 20th century a Punch and Judy booth was as dependable a seafront sight as donkeys, kiosks or deckchairs.

Glyn Edwards (see this YouTube recording) became the modern custodian. First captivated by a show under the West Pier in the 1940s, he began performing his own Brighton show in the late 1950s and spent more than half a century working the front. His ‘Original World Famous Brighton Punch and Judy’ effectively made Brighton one of the tradition’s national centres; for decades his striped booth was a summer constant between the piers and later outside the West Pier Centre. Edwards gradually stepped back in the 2010s, giving only occasional performances for heritage events before retiring fully. He died in 2022.

Beginning in 1974, Mike Stone (often known as ‘Sergeant Stone’) operated a classic booth on the beach for around 25-30 seasons - see  My Brighton and Hove). Although he overlapped with Edwards, their roles were different: Edwards was considered the tradition’s public champion, museum/heritage presence, national advocate, long-term ‘brand’ figure. Stone, however, was the day-to-day beach showman, delivering regular summer performances to holiday crowds throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s.

Today the active public-facing Brighton Punch and Judy presence is carried by newer performers, notably Professor Dill, who presents traditional shows under the Brighton Punch and Judy name and keeps the craft visible on the seafront during events and summer bookings. Alongside him, the Brighton Fishing Museum maintains a permanent Punch and Judy display in the old fishing quarter, while the West Pier Trust continues to use Mr Punch as a lively ambassador for seafront heritage through exhibitions and occasional performances. The shows themselves are brisker and a shade gentler than their Victorian forebears, but the essentials - the swazzled voice, slapstick, crocodile and baby - still float out over the shingle.

See also: Brighton Toy and Model Museum; The Guardian; Mary Evans Picture Library; The Regency Society (b&w pic); West Pier Trust; Wikipedia.

Ghost fishing gear

A large mass of ghost fishing gear - i.e. any fishing equipment that has been lost, abandoned, or deliberately discarded at sea and continues to fish on its own! - was removed from Brighton beach Monday after washing ashore overnight. A member of the public alerted the council’s Seafront Office, prompting a rapid coordinated clean-up by staff and volunteers from the Brighton & Hove Seafront Team, Leave No Trace Brighton and the Anglers National Line Recycling Scheme (ANLRS).

The net was a dense tangle of green rope and floats, described by Leave No Trace Brighton as one of the most damaging forms of slow-degrading marine debris. Lost gear of this kind can take centuries to break down, continuing to catch wildlife, abrade seabed habitats, and fragment into microplastics. The team on site - including Abi from the Seafront Office, Coral from Leave No Trace Brighton, and Steve from ANLRS - estimated the haul at roughly 200 kg of plastic.

Once secured, the net was cut, lifted clear of the shingle, and transported off the beach for processing and recycling. Brighton has developed a recognised system for disposing of fishing line and netting since installing dedicated deposit points along the seafront, and the recovered gear will now enter that recycling stream rather than be consigned to landfill.

Removing ghost gear on land is considered critical: once the tide reclaims heavy netting, it can be lost for months or years, drifting through marine habitats and continuing to entangle animals. Yesterday’s operation prevented that cycle from beginning again. 

Although I did not witness this personally, Facebook and Instagram video stills capture the scale of the recovery - a sprawling, buoy-studded mass on the shingle - and the effort required to deal with it quickly. It marks another example of the growing collaboration between council teams, volunteer groups and national schemes to keep Brighton’s coastline clear of harmful debris. This is far from an isolated incident - some four years ago, Brighton and Hove News reported on divers, off the Brighton coast, recovering 400 lb of ghost fishing gear. 

See also Leave No Trace.

The Seaford Chalk Formation

Found on the beach: a lump of wave-worn chalk cracked open to reveal the dark, honeycombed core of a Cretaceous burrow network. The white outer shell is soft Upper Cretaceous chalk, the familiar coccolith-rich limestone that forms the cliffs east of Brighton. Inside lies its harder counterpart, flint, formed when silica gel precipitated around voids in the ancient seabed. Over time the chalk eroded faster than the flint, leaving the interior exposed like a miniature cavern.

The tubes and chambers belong to Thalassinoides, the dominant burrow system of the Seaford Chalk Formation. Created by small crustaceans on a warm Cretaceous sea floor some 85 million years ago, Thalassinoides form semi-ordered meshes of uniform cylindrical tunnels. In life these burrows aerated the soft carbonate mud; in death they provided ready-made moulds for the silica that later hardened into flint. The network here is unusually clear: a continuous dark core threaded with branching passages, visible from several angles where the chalk shell has been scoured away.

Nothing in the piece is modern. The perforations are not the work of piddocks or contemporary worms but the preserved architecture of Cretaceous seabed life, frozen in flint and released again by the waves. What looks at first like an odd skull-shaped pebble is in fact a three-dimensional cross-section through an ancient ecosystem - a Brighton Beach fossil in miniature, shaped by crustaceans, lithification and the long slow abrasion of the Channel.

Sources: The British Geological Survey; Wikipedia; Earthwise

Dying days for roundabout

These are the last days for Brighton’s very own - and rather puny - aquarium roundabout. In early January the city will begin dismantling the small circular traffic island that has shaped movement between Old Steine, Madeira Drive, Marine Parade and Grand Junction Road for more than a century. Indeed, the junction’s roots go back to the 1870s, when Brighton first turned this stretch of shoreline into a grand engineered gateway - now its removal marks the latest phase of the remodelling of Valley Gardens.

The roundabout exists because the Brighton Aquarium, designed by Eugenius Birch, required a new lower promenade, widened sea wall and reconfigured approach roads during construction in 1869-1872. Where the upper Old Steine route dropped to meet the new lower seafront road, a broad, open junction formed at the foot of Marine Parade. At first it was little more than a multi-arm meeting of roads beside the sunken aquarium building and the Chain Pier site, but it quickly became a busy node for cabs, omnibuses and, later, electric trams terminating at the Old Steine stops.

By the 1920s and 1930s rising motor traffic demanded a more formal layout. Photographs from around 1940 already show a functioning roundabout with a central island and circulating flow in front of the Royal Albion Hotel and the aquarium façade, making it one of Brighton’s earliest purpose-built gyratories. After the war it grew into a critical traffic device: the A23 arrived directly into it from London, the A259 wrapped around it along the seafront, and a further arm fed Madeira Drive. Through the 1960s and 1970s engineers widened the circle, added splitter islands, marked lanes, and eventually installed pedestrian crossings and a left-turn bypass, giving the junction the busy, vehicle-dominated form familiar for decades.

By the early 21st century it was handling buses, taxis, cyclists, heavy pedestrian flows to the Palace Pier and large volumes of seafront traffic - a complex, sometimes congested environment often cited as difficult for pedestrians and cyclists (myself included). Its future became tied to the Valley Gardens project, approved in principle in 2013 and written into the 2016 City Plan as a key site needing safer, clearer links between the Royal Pavilion, Old Steine and the beach. Phase 1 and 2 reshaped the roads north of the Steine; Phase 3, underway since late 2024, advances to the seafront itself.

The adopted design replaces the roundabout with a signal-controlled crossroads using linked ‘smart’ lights, wider pavements, continuous cycle tracks and a more legible pedestrian route to the pier. January 2026 was chosen as the quietest time of year, with overnight closures planned for roughly two weeks while the circular island and the approaches are physically removed. On site, preparatory works and signage now cover the old cobbled verge - the first visible steps in dismantling a junction that has stood since the early motor age and which has, over 150 years, evolved from a Victorian civil-engineering by-product into Brighton’s primary seafront gateway.

Sources include My Brighton and Hove.