Latest on the King Alfred

After two BrightonBeach365 stories this year charting King Alfred Leisure Centre’s long journey from feasible idea to firm scheme - first in January as the council appointed a delivery partner and cabinet backed the principle of replacement, and then in September when detailed £65 million plans and a preferred contractor were unveiled - the council’s latest update on the project offers a strikingly different tone.

Where previous announcements focused on vision, design and appointments, the most recent release is unmistakably about keeping the project on track against a backdrop of public scrutiny - see Brighton and Hove News. The council has turned explicitly to clarifying what is and isn’t happening on the ground, amid rumours and social-media disputes about demolition having already begun and about the site’s future. That alone is a sign of how high-profile this project has become locally: residents are engaging closely with the plans, offering feedback on facility mixes, and some groups have even sought to block progress through attempts to list the 1939 building. 

The practical works now underway - asbestos removal and the clearing of interiors - are not glamorous, but they signal the real beginning of physical change on site. And now the council has taken the unusual step of addressing misinformation and calling out hostile behaviour toward workers. Indeed in the press release Councillor Alan Robins, Cabinet Member for Sports and Recreation, is quoted as saying: ‘While most residents are sharing their views through appropriate channels, there are a small minority spreading misinformation and creating a hostile environment for people doing their jobs. I want to make it clear, abuse or harassment of staff and contractors working on any of our projects will not be tolerated. Everyone on site is doing their job to keep the project moving forward safely and efficiently, and they deserve respect.’

For local users of the pools and halls who have endured decades of talk but little action, the situation is clear: the old King Alfred will continue in everyday use through winter, even as the beginnings of its successor take shape behind closed doors; formal demolition still awaits planning permission. Consultation feedback will continue to shape the final layouts and facilities, with another round of formal opportunity for comment expected when the planning application is lodged in early 2026.

Brighton’s Xmas swim

Hundreds of people took part in the traditional Brighton Christmas Day swim this morning, braving the weather, the shingle beach and a brisk sea. Participants, many wearing Santa hats or other festive gear, gathered on the beach from mid-morning as anticipation built. At 11 am the excitement peaked, with shouts of pain and delight as swimmers charged into the sea - around 11°C - before dashing back out almost as quickly!

Brighton and Hove City Council had issued strong safety warnings ahead of the swim, stressing that people should exercise extreme caution if they chose to enter the water. Officers advised checking weather and sea conditions and highlighted the risks of cold water, strong currents and the steep shingle slope on Brighton’s beaches (which can make entry and exit awkward). The council’s guidance stressed that only very experienced swimmers with suitable equipment should consider entering the sea, and it warned there would be no lifeguard cover at this time of year. Nevertheless, there was some lifeguard presence. 

The Brighton Christmas Day swim is an informal tradition with deep local roots. It forms part of a wider pattern of festive sea dips around the UK. Community swims in Brighton have been noted since at least the late 19th century and have usually taken place on Christmas morning at around 11 a.m., even without formal organisation. There are many other such festive swims across the country, but this year several in the West Country have been cancelled due to weather conditions - see the BBC.

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,’