Not a whopper in sight

Walk Brighton Beach often enough and a pattern emerges: miles of shingle, a working sea, and yet almost no sign of shore anglers at any hour of the year. This absence is striking not because fishermen avoid crowds - they always have - but because even in winter, at night, or on raw, empty mornings when the beach belongs only to dogs and weather, rods remain rare. The explanation lies less in human activity than in the character of the beach itself: a steep, exposed shingle shelf fronting an open Channel, offering little reason for fish to linger close in, and even less incentive for anglers to wait unless conditions are exactly right.

Brighton’s shoreline is dominated by a steep shingle shelf with shifting sand and shingle underfoot. Unlike classic surf beaches where fish school close to a recognisable break, the seabed just offshore in Brighton rarely provides stable structure or cover. That makes it less attractive to fish in daylight or calm conditions, and unless predators find food close in they tend to stay further out. The water can also appear deceptively shallow near the pebbles, leading many casual observers to assume an absence, when in fact deeper water lies just a few casts out.

Another big factor is visibility and timing. Most species - bass, plaice, whiting and others known from Brighton’s coast - are more active at dawn, dusk and night, and on solunar and tidal patterns. Local reports also show that reports from social or public forums are sparse - not because nothing is caught, but because many sessions result in blanks or modest catches and aren’t widely shared online. Even when catches do happen, they’re often subtle flatfish or small bass in the fading light, not the dramatised hook-and-battle many pictures and social posts favour. 

Contrast this with more visible fishing marks in the area, such as Brighton Marina’s sea walls, where deeper water, structure and bait concentrations attract more anglers and more reported catches. Apps like Fishbrain show a steady tally of bass, plaice and mackerel from the marina compared with the main beach.

Progress on Madeira Terrace

According to a press release from Brighton and Hove City Council, structural testing has confirmed that much of the original cast iron from Madeira Terrace can be repaired and reused, strengthening the heritage-first approach to restoring the seafront landmark. This will be BrightonBeach365’s last (and very wet) report on the famed but troubled arches - see Likely delays to arches work and Madeira Terrace restoration - hurrah!.

Restoration work began on site in November 2024 and is one of the most technically complex engineering projects undertaken on the seafront. A central aim is to repair rather than replace as much of the historic fabric as possible, including the cast iron structure, retained soil and the terrace’s retaining wall, in order to preserve authenticity and limit environmental impact.

Earlier this year, sections of cast iron removed during the first phase of works were sent to a specialist foundry for testing. An initial round of tests proved inconclusive, requiring further analysis. The latest results now confirm that the original structural cast iron can be successfully repaired and reused. Although the testing programme took longer than planned, the outcome has been welcomed by both the council and the Seafront Development Board, the independent body advising on the wider revitalisation of the seafront.

The findings mean that much of the century-old cast iron can be reinstated during the opening phase of restoration. The environmental savings are substantial: producing new cast iron typically generates around eight tonnes of CO₂ per tonne, while repair is expected to produce less than an eighth of that. Across the full structure, the difference is equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of powering more than 2,000 UK homes.

Alongside the testing results, visible progress is now expected on site. The first sections of steelwork for a new fully accessible lift have arrived, forming part of a new route from Marine Parade down to Madeira Drive. Most of the lift steels are due to be delivered by Christmas, allowing residents to see the structure taking shape. The lift is intended to open as part of the first phase of restoration, improving access to the seafront and to businesses along Madeira Drive.

Councillor Jacob Taylor said the project required patience because of its technical complexity and the age of the structure, but emphasised that funders and the council were committed to restoring rather than replacing wherever possible. Lord Bassam, chair of the Seafront Development Board, said the confirmation that the cast iron could be reused was crucial and added that the arrival of the lift steels marked an important moment in building momentum on site.

The Waltzer’s yaw and whip

The Waltzer on Brighton Palace Pier belongs to the modern era of the pier’s ‘funfair at the end’ identity. That shift began after the Noble Organisation bought the pier in 1984 and, two years later, removed the old theatre, freeing the seaward end to fill with rides and amusement structures rather than staged variety.

A Waltzer is a classic British flat ride: cars sit on a rotating platform and spin as they run over an undulating track; the rider’s weight shifts and the ride’s motion combine to make each car yaw and whip. Operators traditionally add to the chaos by giving cars an extra shove as they pass. That basic mechanics-and-showmanship mix is why the Waltzer has stayed so closely tied to British and Irish fairground culture, even as safety rules and fixed-site queuing have changed how it is run.

The pier’s own ride page bills the Waltzer as a ‘true fairground classic’, warns that ‘this ride spins’ and you should be ‘ready to get dizzy’, and sets the published height rules: 1.2m to ride, and 1.4m to ride unaccompanied (with riders between those heights needing a ‘responsible adult’ who also has a ticket). The same page lists the practicalities that shape the ride experience on a busy, windy pier: no loose items, hats and scarves off, phones forbidden, and closure possible in adverse weather.

As for this specific machine, ride databases record the current installation as an A.R.M.-built Waltzer that was ‘new to the pier’ in 1991, replacing an earlier Waltzer listing. These photos underline why it works so well in a compact pier-head funfair: the canopy’s stars-and-moons, the bulb runs, and the big lettering do half the job before the motors even start.

A.R.M. is usually expanded as ‘Amusement Refurbishment & Manufacture’, and the company is recorded as having previously traded from Oxford, after earlier trading as ‘Turnagain’. That lineage places Brighton’s Waltzer in a very particular strand of late-20th-century British ride-building: firms that didn’t just import new concepts, but modernised, rebuilt and re-engineered established crowd-pleasers. An example survives in an archive note on Turnagain/ARM’s work manufacturing the Trabant ride from the late 1970s, describing an Oxford-based engineering outfit producing updated machines and iterating designs for greater visual impact. Brighton’s 1991 Waltzer sits neatly in that same world: a classic form, built for heavy use, engineered to be maintained, and designed to shout ‘fairground’ in lights

Public feedback on the pier’s Waltzer tends to cluster around three themes: intensity, operator-led ‘extra spin’, and nostalgia. The pier promotional text urges visitors to ‘be daring’ and ‘scream to go faster’. In visitor reviews of Brighton Palace Pier, the Waltzer is regularly singled out as the ride people go on to feel properly flung about, the one that still delivers that unpredictable, stomach-lurching swing between laughter and mild panic. And on nostalgia threads and comments, ‘the fastest waltzer’ is often the hook people use when they talk about Brighton’s seafront amusements and the rites-of-passage of teenage summers.

Waltzers also remain a staple beyond Brighton in static seaside parks (not just travelling fairs), which is one reason the ride reads as ‘traditional’ even when the machine itself is relatively modern. Dreamland in Margate keeps a Waltzer as part of its retro mix. Skegness Pleasure Beach lists ‘Waltzer’ among its core line-up. Clarence Pier in Southsea is another long-running seaside setting where a Waltzer is treated as part of the expected soundtrack of lights, music and spin.

Sources include Wikipedia, the Fairground Heritage Trust, and Dreamland. 

Austen’s unseen Brighton

Today marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, the great chronicler of English places and manners. One of her books above all - Pride and Prejudice - has a direct and consequential link to Brighton and its beach, even though they are never once described.

The novel, first published in 1813, centres on the Bennet family, a middle-class household with five unmarried daughters and a precarious financial future. The story follows the growing relationship between Elizabeth Bennet, the second eldest daughter, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a wealthy landowner whose pride and reserve initially offend her. Alongside this central courtship runs a series of secondary plots involving reputation, marriage, and social judgement.

One of these concerns Lydia Bennet, the youngest sister, who is impulsive, flirtatious, and largely uncontrolled by her parents. When a militia regiment is stationed near the Bennet home in Hertfordshire, Lydia becomes infatuated with the officers. Among them is George Wickham, a charming but unprincipled soldier who forms a brief attachment to Elizabeth before revealing himself to be unreliable and deeply in debt. Wickham later transfers with the regiment to Brighton, then a fashionable seaside and military town.

Lydia is allowed to accompany the wife of the regiment’s commanding officer to Brighton for the summer. There, free from family restraint, she renews her acquaintance with Wickham. The two run away together, first to London, with no intention of marrying. Their disappearance threatens to disgrace not only Lydia but the entire Bennet family, whose daughters’ chances of respectable marriage depend on female reputation.

The crisis is resolved only through the private intervention of Fitzwilliam Darcy, who tracks the couple down, pays Wickham’s debts, and secures a marriage settlement. The family is saved from public scandal, but the damage narrowly avoided leaves a lasting impression. Reflecting on events, Elizabeth Bennet later observes that ‘Had Lydia never been at Brighton, she had never met Wickham.’

It is at this point that Brighton’s peculiar role in the novel becomes clear. Although it is named repeatedly, Austen never describes the town itself. There is no account of the beach, the sea, the buildings, or the daily life of the resort. Brighton exists entirely as a place of reputation rather than observation, a setting defined by what it permits rather than what it looks like.

For Austen’s contemporary readers, that would have been enough. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Brighton was already firmly established as a fashionable seaside resort and military centre, associated with sociability, display, and a loosening of ordinary moral restraints. To send Lydia there is to remove her from domestic supervision and place her in a setting where temptation lurks. Austen needs only to name Brighton for its implications to be understood.

This reticence is striking because Austen was perfectly capable of writing about the seaside when she wished. In Persuasion, Lyme Regis is vividly rendered, its Cobb forming the setting for a pivotal accident. In Sanditon, her unfinished final novel, she turns her attention to a speculative seaside resort, analysing promenades, bathing machines, health claims, and commercial optimism. These places are described and judged. Brighton is not.

Biographies say there is no firm evidence that Jane Austen ever visited Brighton. Her surviving letters place her instead at coastal towns such as Lyme Regis, Sidmouth, Dawlish, and Worthing, where she stayed for several months in 1805-1806. Worthing, a quieter and less conspicuous rival to Brighton, appears in her correspondence as a place of walks, mild society, illness, and boredom - the kind of lived experience she habitually transformed into fiction. Brighton remained known to her largely by reputation.

That reputation was sufficient. In Pride and Prejudice, Brighton functions not as landscape but as catalyst. It is the place where supervision weakens and consequences begin. Austen’s refusal to describe the beach or the town turns Brighton into an abstract moral space rather than a physical one.

Sources include Project Gutenberg, Brighton Museums, Jane Austen - A Life by Claire Tomalin and Wikipedia. The imagined book cover above was created by ChatGPT. 

Sporty sporty Hove

The long stretch of Brighton Beach west of the King Alfred Leisure Centre has undergone a huge transformation this year - into what might best be described as sporty sporty Hove. Where this part of the seafront was once defined by open grass, informal play and the slow rituals of bowls and croquet, it is now marked by a dense cluster of formal sports facilities laid out in sequence between the promenade and the sea.

New padel courts have been completed, their bright surfaces and tall perimeter fencing marking a fixed, competitive presence on the beachside. Adjacent, a set of tennis courts has been laid out and is already in use, extending opportunities for racket sport at scale. Moreover, purpose-built beach volleyball courts have been installed and are drawing regular play, further reinforcing a trend toward formalised sporting activity on what was once largely informal terrain.

These additions sit alongside the longstanding croquet lawn and a few traditional green bowls facilities that remain in place. However, the croquet and bowls areas, still carefully maintained and signed, now form part of the broader sequence of structured recreation.

The expansion of sport along this western end resonates with developments noted further toward the lagoon, where watersports culture has been gaining momentum. Windsurfing, paddleboarding and other lagoon activities have drawn new users to the Hove shore, reinforcing a shift in how the coast is used: not just for walking or passive viewing, but for sustained physical engagement.

Taken together, the new courts and the increased watersports activity paint a coherent picture of Brighton Beach as a multi-faceted sporting landscape. From the padel and tennis courts immediately west of the King Alfred, along to the sands and open water at the lagoon, organised sport now chains these spaces in a way that is bringing a new character to the Hove end of Brighton Beach - an increasingly active seafront where fixed facilities and waterborne pursuits bookend a continuous corridor of play.

See also: Sand between their toes; Hove Beach Park opens; Not the Mary Clarke Park; Hove Lagoon watersports.

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