Fallen stars in disguise?

Some 125 years ago, buskers were a familiar and thriving presence on Brighton’s seafront. Their popularity was such that The Era - a long-running theatrical weekly founded in 1838 - felt moved to puncture a persistent myth: that the musicians and singers scattered along the promenade were fallen stars in disguise, disgraced actors, or even incognito aristocrats turning a penny between scandals. On 1 September 1900, the paper published a faintly sardonic survey of seaside performers under the headline ‘Buskers on Brighton Beach’, written by a ‘special correspondent’.

‘Quite an interesting fallacy exists in the mind of the casual holiday maker,’ the writer begins, ‘as to the identity of many of the performers at the seaside, on sands and beach’. Brighton, like Margate and other resorts, was awash with rumours of ‘Mysterious Musicians’ and ‘Promenade Prowlers’, supposedly hiding ruined careers beneath false beards and cheap costumes. The correspondent treats this with amused scepticism, mocking the idea that royalty might secretly be busking ‘to meet the demands of uxorious creditors’.

The article’s first task is to insist that busking itself is not disreputable. On the contrary, it is presented as honest labour, particularly for performers between engagements: ‘There is nothing discreditable in “busking”, and when out of a shop we see no reason why an actor, if he thinks fit, should not turn his singing or reciting talents to account until the tide turns.’

But this defence is immediately followed by deflation. The correspondent claims that most stories of famous actors ‘buskerading’ on the beach belong ‘chiefly to the region of fiction’. Having taken the trouble to observe performers on the Brighton front, the writer reports that, with one or two exceptions, they were not fallen professionals at all but lifelong street entertainers, ‘to the manner born, and had been street entertainers since childhood’.

What follows is a brisk, sometimes sharp-eyed catalogue of Brighton’s beach entertainments at the turn of the century. Originality, the correspondent complains, is scarce. Music-hall songs dominate, endlessly recycled for undemanding holiday crowds. Even variety, once sampled, soon palls.

Yet Brighton still stands out. Among the many acts observed ‘down at London-on-Sea’, it is Brighton’s Pierrot band that earns unqualified praise: ‘At Brighton the Pierrot band is far and away the best, the selection and the execution being above the average.’

The Pierrots - already an established Brighton fixture by 1900 - represent, here, the high-water mark of beach performance: disciplined, musically competent, and recognisably professional. Other named troupes fare less well, dismissed as ‘customary’, misnamed, or only intermittently entertaining. Ballad singers are ‘most plentiful’, leaning heavily on the popular composers of the day - Tosti, Molloy, Maybrick - while jugglers are ‘scarce’.

The most striking passages are reserved for the marginal figures of beach performance: blind musicians, paralysed instrumentalists, labouring hard for meagre rewards. Their presence reminds the reader that the beach economy was not merely comic or picturesque, but precarious and often harsh. Alongside them, older forms of popular entertainment persist: Punch and Judy drawing ‘crowds of willing customers’, marionettes and fantoccini keeping pace with what a wag calls ‘the origin of the drama’.

The conclusion is deliberately sour. Whether through genuine decline or the jaundiced eye of the observer, the correspondent finds Brighton’s beach entertainments wanting: ‘On the whole, however, the beach entertainments are deteriorating; they are not what they were, or else we are not.’

Conversation with performers yields little insight. Questions are suspected of being veiled appeals for money. And the final judgement is blunt: ‘real “buskers” seem to be dying out, and, perhaps, ’tis well’.

Sources: Editions of The Era can be accessed online via the British Newspaper Archive and Internet Archive. The photograph above - dating from the summer of 1899 - is courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. See also Busking on the seafront - yes please and The Punch and Judy tradition.

Holocene peat and piddocks

Found on the beach: Holocene peat and piddocks. After winter storms, Brighton Beach occasionally reveals dark, rounded lumps scattered among the flint shingle. At first glance they resemble stone, but they break easily in the hand and crumble rather than fracture. They are not rock. They are fragments of Holocene peat, washed ashore from submerged deposits offshore.

These pieces are part of a prehistoric landscape that once lay above sea level. Between about 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, rising post-glacial sea levels flooded low-lying woodland and peat bogs across what is now the English Channel. Waterlogged, oxygen-poor conditions preserved the compressed remains of trees, roots and plant matter. Those peat beds still lie buried beneath sand and gravel offshore.

Strong seas periodically erode these deposits and release fragments, which are rolled smooth by waves before appearing on the beach. When dry, the peat is light and brittle; when wet, it is dense, dark brown to almost black, and easily mistaken for stone.

This fragment found on Brighton Beach shows a second stage in its history. One face is densely perforated by rounded holes of varying sizes. These are piddock borings, made by marine bivalves such as Pholas and Barnea. Piddocks rasp into soft substrates - chalk, clay and peat - to create permanent shelter. They cannot bore into flint or hard rock, which is why such holes appear only in the peat and not in the surrounding shingle.

The presence of these borings shows that the peat fragment lay exposed on the seabed for a prolonged period before being torn free and washed ashore. Most peat fragments lose this evidence through abrasion; only a few retain a clearly bored surface.

Together, the peat and the piddock holes record two deep timescales at once: the slow drowning of prehistoric land as sea levels rose, and the later colonisation of that drowned landscape by marine life. What reaches the beach is not just debris, but a small, durable remnant of Brighton’s submerged past.

Last of the Sea-swans

Beneath the pale autumn sun, where the shingle of Brighton meets the quieter waters of the Lagoon, there stood a marvel that few now remember and fewer still believe. For in those days the boundary between the Small Folk and the Elder Things was thinner, and the Sea had not yet forgotten its old alliances.

The swan rose from the water like a white hill newly lifted from the deep. Its neck curved in a noble arc, taller than the mast of any fisherman’s boat, and its beak shone gold as if hammered by forgotten smiths. Around it lay bright, broken craft - petty vessels of later days - clustered like driftwood at the feet of a king. The swan did not trouble itself with them. Its gaze was set westward, toward the long green slopes and the houses of men, as though it remembered an age when none of those things had been built.

This was Alquëmar, last of the Sea-swans, who had flown in ages past between the Grey Havens and lands beyond the sunset. Wounded by storms and wearied by the waning of magic, he had come at last to rest in the still waters beside the open sea, choosing the Lagoon as a final refuge. There he slept through long years, half stone, half dream, while Men forgot the old songs.

But on a morning of clear light, when gulls wheeled low and the tide lay quiet, Alquëmar stirred. The Sea had spoken in whispers during the night, telling him that its memory was failing, that iron and noise pressed ever closer to the shore. He rose then, water cascading from his flanks, and for a while his reflection trembled upon the surface, white upon grey, as if the world itself hesitated.

Those who passed nearby felt it, though they did not know why. A sudden stillness fell; the wind dropped; even the birds were hushed. Some later said they felt an unaccountable sorrow, others a strange hope, like the echo of a tale heard in childhood and nearly lost.

When the sun climbed higher, the swan lowered his head once more. His task was done. He did not fly, for that power had long departed, but he sank gently back into the water, becoming again a silent shape among the lesser boats. Yet something lingered. The Lagoon seemed deeper, the sea beyond it older and more watchful.

And it is said - though only by those who walk the beach at dusk and listen carefully - that if the water is calm and the light just right, you may glimpse a white curve rising from the surface, and hear, faint and far away, the sound of wings that once carried the world’s first dreams over the edge of the Sea.

With apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien.

No burning of the clocks

Brighton’s Burning the Clocks will not take place today, 21 December. Same Sky, the community arts charity that created and runs the event, says 2025 will be a ‘fallow year’ to concentrate resources and secure the organisation’s long-term future amid funding pressures, with a full return planned for 2026.

For three decades, Burning the Clocks has been Brighton’s distinctive winter-solstice ritual: a lantern procession through the city centre, ending with a ceremonial burning on the beach and a fireworks finale. It began in the early 1990s as an alternative to the commercial Christmas and as a secular, inclusive community celebration ‘regardless of faith or creed’. Lanterns are traditionally made from willow (withies) and tissue paper, and the parade’s costumes and imagery revolve around time - often with clockfaces - while changing theme year by year to keep the symbolism fresh.

In recent years, the event has embraced an idea of ritual: months of workshops, schools and families building lanterns; a massed, volunteer-led procession; then the moment on the shingle when hundreds of handmade lights are surrendered to flame as the year turns. Same Sky describes the burn as a collective letting-go - people investing lanterns with hopes, wishes and fears before passing them into the bonfire. 

The modern run of Burning the Clocks has also been shaped by disruption. Severe winter weather forced a cancellation in 2009, and the festival later lost two consecutive years to the pandemic era; in 2021, organisers cancelled again as the Omicron wave accelerated and national restrictions tightened. The returns that followed carried an added charge: the same streets and seafront route, but with an obvious emphasis on reconnection and participation after enforced gaps. 

Themes have become the event’s way of threading topical meaning into the fixed solstice format. In 2021, the announced theme was ‘All Animals’, inviting reflection on shared life and the time spent apart - though the parade itself was ultimately called off that year. In 2023, publicity around the event highlighted ‘Clocks’ explicitly as the organising motif, aligning the lantern-build with timekeeping imagery. In 2024, organisers announced ‘Voyager’, framing the procession around journeys and the city’s welcome to people on their own voyages, while keeping the traditional solstice structure. 

This year’s cancellation is different in tone: not a safety call made days ahead, but a planned pause. Same Sky is still marking the date with a public display in central Brighton today: a large lantern sculpture designed and built by associate artist Nikki Gunson. The organisation has already commissioned the 2026 effigy and named the theme ‘Magicada’, using the cicada idea - rest followed by a loud re-emergence - as a metaphor for the event’s return.

See Visit Brighton and Crowdfunder for pics.

Neighbour of the wave

Winter on the Sussex coast has long been associated with health, sea air and bracing walks along the shore. When Brighton was consolidating its reputation as a fashionable watering place in the early nineteenth century, those qualities were already being recorded in print. In 1809 Mary Lloyd published Brighton: A Poem, Descriptive of the Place and Parts Adjacent, an extended verse account of the town that set out to capture its setting, its visitors and its daily rhythms.

Little is known about Lloyd herself. The book appears to be her only published volume. It was issued by subscription rather than through a commercial publisher, a common Georgian practice that secured sales in advance and reduced financial risk. The volume runs to eighty-eight pages and includes a substantial list of subscribers, among them the Duke of Clarence and Mrs Fitzherbert, alongside military officers and members of Brighton society. The book was sold in London and locally, and its subscription list indicates a readership closely connected to the resort and its seasonal life.

The volume is more than a single poem. Alongside the long descriptive piece are miscellaneous shorter poems, including several written in Scottish dialect, suggesting personal connections beyond Sussex. The book is illustrated with two engraved plates: a frontispiece view looking west across Brighton, and a separate plate depicting the Royal Chain Pier (and a nameplate). These images anchor the poem in recognisable topography and align the work with the growing market for picturesque views of the town.

The title poem itself is written largely in rhyming couplets and adopts the voice of a strolling observer, moving between shore, cliff and town. Lloyd stated her intention was to delineate Brighton’s scenes at the seasons and hours when they appeared most striking, and the poem progresses from morning activity to evening calm. Fishermen, boats, bathers and promenaders populate the beach, while the sea provides both spectacle and sublimity. Contemporary reviewers were reserved about Lloyd’s poetic powers, but noted that her work excelled in accuracy of description and in capturing the characteristic features of the place.

The poem repeatedly returns to the meeting of land and water, where human activity gives way to the scale and movement of the sea. To close with Lloyd’s own words, here are unedited extracts describing Brighton’s shore and seaward outlook: (Sources: Googlebooks and Quaritch.

Brighton: A Poem

Extract 1 (opening)

‘BRIGHTON! thou loveliest neighbour of the wave,
Whose stately cliffs the rolling surges lave,
Where roseate health, amid the breezes play,
Whose gentle breathings cool the fervid ray
Of scorching summer; pleasing gay Retreat,
Beauty, and fashion’s ever favourite seat:
Where splendour lays its cumbrous pomp aside,
Content, in softer, simpler paths to glide;
Where in succession, various pastimes sport,
Where nature’s grand and simple beauties court,
Where every taste may find a charm to please,
If fond of the sublime; the surging seas
Their vast floods rolling on the sounding shores,
When the bold wind unfolds the billowy stores;
Will lift with solemn awe the wond’ring soul,
To Him! who bade those mighty waters roll.’

Extract 2 (early-morning shoreline and the beach)

‘How sweet the sea-girt shore to pace along,
What time the lark begins her matin song,
When the mild moon her regency declines,
And to the glorious sun the reign resigns;
While the blue waves rejoicing in the light,
Reflect the golden smiles that chase the night.’

Extract 3 (fishermen coming in)

‘How sweet to mark the vessels’ devious way,
Their white sails glittering in the morning ray;
What time the weary fisher ends his toil,
And homeward steers, exulting o’er the spoil:
See the bold youths, who snare the finny train,
Press every sail, and through the liquid plain,
Cheerly pursue their course, to gain the shore,
While joyous they survey their hard-earn’d store;
And ere the boat has clear’d the surging deep,
Advent’rous, in the waters see them leap,’

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.