The Pier first sees red - in neon

Exactly one hundred years ago, on 11 July 1925, The Brighton & Hove Herald reported a dazzling leap into modernity: the first brilliant neon sign blazed across the front of the Palace Pier. It was a spectacle the likes of which the town had never seen - a vivid red beacon spelling out Palace Pier, its letters edged in electric blue, visible from a considerable distance along the bustling seafront. This photo - courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove - is dated to 1925 (though I know not if it actually includes any neon illumination).

At the time, neon was still a novel wonder. Invented by French engineer Georges Claude and first unveiled to the public at the Paris Motor Show in 1910, neon signs were a marvel of engineering and chemistry, harnessing the glow of electrified gas to paint the night in colours more vivid than anything achieved by traditional incandescent bulbs. In Britain, neon advertising only truly began to catch on in the early 1920s. Londoners were awestruck by neon displays on places like Hammersmith Bridge, and Brighton was determined not to be left behind.

The Brighton & Hove Herald of 11 July 1925 was almost breathless in its report, explaining that the new Palace Pier sign was among the first uses of neon illumination in the town - part of a wider effort to give the seafront a ‘brighter aspect by night’. The paper described how ‘huge shaped glass tubes’, bent to form the letters, were filled with neon gas which glowed fiercely under electrical charge, producing a luminous red unlike anything seen before. Surrounding blue lamps heightened the effect, creating what the Herald called ‘a colour combination that was quite attractive.’

The article goes on to give more details; ‘The words of the sign are formed by vacuum tubes charged with neon gas and electricity, which produces the brilliant light. The sign on the Pier takes 8,000 volts (alternating current), but it is so cheap in consumption of current that it costs only 2 1/2 d. an hour to run; and after the sign has been lit for a month that amount will be reduced to 2d. With the aid of a little lunar limelight, a wonderful colour effect was obtained on Tuesday night, but this was for ‘one night only.’ A great orange-coloured moon rose out of the wall of dark over the sea, and the orange of the moon and the flaming ruby of the sign produced a colour combination that was quite impressive.’

This local marvel was part of a global neon boom that would come to define the visual culture of the 20th century. Within a few years, neon would spread to Blackpool’s promenades, Piccadilly Circus, and Times Square, becoming synonymous with nightlife, glamour, and the thrilling energy of modern cities. But on that July evening in 1925, Brighton stood proudly at the forefront of this new luminous age.

Cheese and Clarity

Here is the 11th 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 one is a vibrant and inviting still life scene. At the centre, there’s a tall green wine bottle labeled ‘WINE’ next to a filled glass of red wine. To the right, there’s a rustic loaf of bread and a large wedge of cheese adorned with a couple of red grapes. On the left, a plate overflows with colourful fruit - bananas, red apples, oranges, and dark grapes. The background features a bright blue sky with white clouds, visible through a window framed by stylised golden foliage, giving the whole scene a cheerful and leisurely atmosphere. 

A limerick starter

A bottle of red by the shore,

With brie, crusty bread, and much more - 

The waves kissed my feet,

The camembert sweet,

And I burped, ‘This is what life is for.’

Cheese and Clarity (in the manner of M. F. K. Fisher)

It was on Brighton Pier, one sunny morning in July a long time ago, that I tasted what I can only describe as a moment of suspended truth. The sea, more aquamarine than English Channel has any right to be, lapped beneath the boards with that sly, deceptive calm particular to days just before a storm. I had walked the length of the pier, past the thump of arcade machines and the shrillness of seagulls, until I found a place to consumer my picnic lunch, a place of improbable peace: a narrow table-for-one outside a shuttered café, laid not with linen, but possibility.

The meal had been packed by a friend in Hove, a woman with the kind of confidence in food that doesn’t require apology. In the small canvas tote, wrapped in wax paper and string, was a half-round of Sussex Slipcote - creamy, yielding, its curd scent as tender as memory. There was a baton of sourdough, still warm from an oven I imagined tiled and sunlit. And there was fruit: a fist of dark grapes, each like a polished bead; a plum so ripe it might have been holding its breath.

But it was the cheese that made everything still.

I remember how the knife slid through it, a slow sigh of a cut. How it spread against the bread with the texture of late-summer longing. I bit in, and everything dissolved: the salt air, the pier’s old iron bones, the sound of a child crying for more coins. For a moment, it was just me, the Slipcote, and a glass of red pulled from a thermos flask and tasting improbably of the south of France. There may have been a crust of honeycomb too - my memory folds here - and a wedge of quince paste, amber and dignified like a grandmother’s brooch.

Brighton’s beach glinted distantly, pebbles fizzing in the sun like soda water. I could just make out the broken skeleton of the West Pier, its frame ghosted with rust. I wondered, not for the first time, what it means to love a place that is constantly eroding, and whether that same principle applies to people. Or cheese.

I stayed there a while. Long enough for the gulls to give up hope, and the sun to soften everything into shadow. The clarity of hunger had passed, but in its place: something softer, wiser. Not fullness, precisely, but a kind of peace.

If there is a meal worth remembering, it is never because it was perfect, but because something in the bread, or the cheese, or the view from a rickety pier told you a secret you didn’t know you needed to hear.

And the secret was this: You do not have to earn pleasure.

Not with labour, or loneliness, or a perfectly laid table. Not by pretending not to want it. You are allowed to sit on a salt-bitten bench above a bright and battered sea, and let a little wheel of cheese remind you that the good things - rich, ripe, sensuous - require no justification. They exist, like the sea and the sun, and so do you. That was enough.

Glitzy history of sunglasses

Sunglasses - such as these photographed on Brighton Beach - have a curious, winding history that stretches far beyond mere fashion. Long before glossy magazines or film stars, people sought ways to shield their eyes from the sun’s harsh glare. The Inuit crafted slitted goggles from walrus ivory to narrow the world into thin bands of light, protecting themselves against snow blindness. In ancient Rome, it’s said (but also disputed) that Nero watched gladiators through polished emeralds, delighting in both spectacle and subtle shade.

Centuries later, in twelfth-century China, smoky quartz lenses appeared not to protect eyes from sunlight but to conceal them. Judges wore these dark panes in court, their eyes unreadable behind flat stones, masking any flicker of bias. By the eighteenth century in Europe, tinted lenses gained a new reputation, believed to ease particular visual ailments - blue and green glass held out as hopeful remedies.

It was only in the modern age that sunglasses began their true march into everyday life. In the roaring 1920s and 30s, seaside holidays and open-top cars demanded tinted spectacles. Sam Foster seized the moment in 1929, selling mass-produced sunglasses on the Atlantic City boardwalk, delighting beachgoers who craved a touch of glamour with their sunburn. In 1936, Edwin H. Land introduced Polaroid filters, cutting glare with clever chemistry and forever changing how sunlight met the human eye.

War gave sunglasses another push. In the 1940s, Ray-Ban designed protective eyewear for American pilots, launching the aviator - a shape that would later slip from cockpits into cocktail bars with effortless ease. By the 1950s and 60s, sunglasses were not simply practical shields; they were signatures of style. Audrey Hepburn’s enormous frames, James Dean’s brooding lenses - they didn’t just hide eyes, they created mysteries.

Today, sunglasses straddle the line between science and seduction. They promise UV protection, polarisation, sharp optics. But they also whisper of disguise, of attitude, of watching the world from a place just out of reach. More on this from Wikipedia, Bauer & Clausen Optometry, and Google Arts and Culture.

Lens or no lens

The tortoiseshell glasses lie crooked on Brighton’s pebbles, one lens popped clean out, the other clouded by salt and tiny scratches. A careless loss, perhaps, or a deliberate abandonment. But pick them up, put them on, close one eye, and what do you see?

Close your right eye first, and your left eye is looking through the lens, a single murky pane. Brighton dissolves. The horizon bleeds into sea into sky, a soft bruise of grey and lavender. Pebbles lose their edges, merging into a gentle shingle fog. People drift past like half-remembered stories, voices muffled by distance or time. The gulls are mere pale smudges, their cries dulled to far-off keening. Somewhere, laughter unspools, slow and echoing, as though the beach is remembering a day long gone - a day of dancing on warm stones, of salt-sticky kisses under the boards of the pier. Colours fade into a tender hush. The world is no longer urgent; it sighs, lingers, closes its heavy eyes. Brighton becomes a place not quite here, not quite then - a beach caught halfway between waking and a kind, salt-scented sleep.

Close your left eye, and your right eye is looking through no lens. The beach glares up at you, alive and unashamed. Each pebble is distinct - ochre, slate, coral pink - jostling for its moment in the sun. Gulls wheel overhead, white knives against a cobalt sky, their cries cutting clean through the warm hum of voices. Chips wrapped in paper steam on picnic rugs, vinegar spitting under bright fingers. A child’s shriek rings out, pure and startled, as a wave snaps at his ankles. The pier stretches out brazenly, strutting on iron legs, hung with lights like careless jewellery. Everything is immediate, urgent, shouting to be noticed: the salt on your lips, the warmth seeping into your soles, the wide-open promise of the afternoon. Brighton is a riot of small perfections, each clamouring for your eye - and nothing is softened, nothing spared.

Tomorrow? The history of sunglasses!

Brighton Beach as runway!

Brighton Beach has always been a place for spectacle, but few moments could have matched the astonishment of locals in 1911 when Sir Harry Preston, the flamboyant hotelier and sportsman, arranged for a monoplane to land on the wide shingle shore. Preston, keen to boost Brighton’s reputation as a fashionable playground, was a fervent supporter of early aviation. Eager to showcase the marvels of flight, he invited pioneering pilot Oscar Morison to make a dramatic landing on the beach. 

On 15 February, crowds gathered to watch as Morison brought his Blériot XI monoplane skimming over the waves and touched down on the shingle beach between the Palace and West Piers. Although the rough pebbled surface damaged the aircraft’s undercarriage and propeller, the landing was safe, with Preston himself among the delighted spectators. The event captured national headlines and cemented Brighton’s place in the glamorous story of early aviation. (See the Sir Harry Preston website for further details).

Preston’s enthusiasm for flying was not limited to publicity stunts. As proprietor of the Royal York and the Royal Albion Hotels, he entertained countless aviators, racing drivers and sportsmen, many of whom regarded Brighton as their sporting headquarters. Preston saw aviation as part of the modern allure of his beloved town - a symbol of speed, daring, and forward-looking spirit.

Meanwhile, the inventive Volk brothers - Magnus and George Herbert, sons of Magnus Volk of electric railway fame -were turning their mechanical skills to aviation. Their particular story was recently (May) uncovered by BBC News with photographs (as above) and a radio report. From around 1910, the brothers were producing engines and floats in a North Laine workshop (though George Herbert ‘Bert’ Volk was at the heart of these endeavours). Soon after, they were building full airframes and fitting them with lightweight engines. The parts for these curious craft were wheeled down to the seafront near Paston Place, where they were assembled and launched directly into the Channel from Brighton Beach. 

Bert Volk’s operation attracted other aviation enthusiasts and innovators. Among them was John Cyril Porte, later known for his significant contributions to flying boat design, who collaborated on ideas about hulls and floats. In 1912, the celebrated aviator Claude Grahame‑White arrived in Brighton and demonstrated flights from Volk’s beach station, adding a dash of celebrity to the venture and thrilling crowds who had never seen such machines take to the air from the waves.

This brief flowering of marine aviation in Brighton, however, was overtaken by larger forces. By 1913, Bert had departed for South Africa, and with the outbreak of the First World War, the government requisitioned the site for wartime needs.

Sea spaghetti for tea?

Found on the beach: spaghetti! Himanthalia elongata, more commonly known as thongweed or sea spaghetti, is a remarkable brown seaweed that often surprises beachcombers with its long, noodle-like fronds. This species is native to the rocky shores of the northeast Atlantic, from Scandinavia to Portugal, and is especially common around the coasts of Britain and Ireland. It can also be eaten raw or cooked, and is rich in dietary fibre and essential vitamins.

The life-cycle of Himanthalia elongata is both unique and fascinating. It begins as a tiny, olive-green button attached firmly to a rock. This button, only a few centimetres wide, is the vegetative stage and can persist for two to three years. In autumn or winter, the button produces one or more long, strap-like reproductive fronds, which can grow rapidly and reach up to two meters in length by the following summer. These straps, or receptacles, are where reproduction takes place. When mature, the straps become mottled with brown spots, each marking the opening to a reproductive chamber. Gametes are released from June through winter, and after this single reproductive event, the plant dies - a lifecycle known as semelparity or ‘big bang’ reproduction.

The zygotes of Himanthalia elongata are unusually large and heavy for seaweeds, measuring about 0.2 mm across. This size helps them settle quickly onto the substrate, but it also means they are less likely to disperse far from the parent plant. After fertilisation, there is a delay of several days before the young plant develops anchoring structures, and the presence of adult plants nearby can help protect these vulnerable germlings from harsh environmental conditions. For more on this unique seaweed see Wikipedia or The Marine Life Information Network (which is also the source of the photograph below by Paul Newland).

Himanthalia elongata is not just a curiosity for naturalists - it has a range of uses, both traditional and modern. The fronds are edible and have a mild flavour, making them popular in coastal cuisines. They can be eaten raw in salads, boiled, steamed, or even deep-fried, and are sometimes used as a grain-free alternative to pasta. In addition to their culinary uses, the fronds can be dried and powdered to thicken soups and stews, or marinated for use in various dishes.

Nutritionally, sea spaghetti is rich in dietary fibre, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and bioactive compounds such as phlorotannins and carotenoids. It has been shown to lower sodium content and improve the nutritional profile of meat products, and is being studied for its potential health benefits, including anti-hyperglycaemic and neuroprotective effects. For more information on this see The National Library of Medicine.

There are several unusual aspects to Himanthalia elongata. For one, it invests almost all its biomass in reproduction, with up to 98 percent of its tissue dedicated to the long, strap-like fronds. The species is also the only member of its genus and family, making it a true oddity among seaweeds. Its large, heavy zygotes are adapted to settle quickly, but this limits their ability to colonise new areas, so populations tend to be quite localised. The fronds can grow at rates of up to 16 mm per day in optimal spring conditions, and the plant’s lifecycle is so tightly linked to environmental cues that the timing of reproduction can vary significantly from place to place.

Our hopes spin with her

The Argus - 5 July 2125

Brighton Space Centre stands proud on the Brighton seafront this evening, its slender tower catching the reflections in a sky tinged faintly by dust from the Martian frontier. At precisely 23:00, MarsBright - that now-familiar mirrored sphere - launched on its third mission to Mars.

From the beach it seemed to hover impossibly still, balanced atop the old i360 column, now transformed into a humming magnetic launch spine that pierces the skyline like a futuristic needle. The promenade fell silent as countdown lights winked along the tower’s ribs. At the final mark, a deep harmonic vibration rolled through the shingle, rattling faraway deckchairs and drawing startled cries from gulls overhead. Then, with a sudden controlled fury, electromagnetic forces surged through the spine, hurling the pod skyward in a smooth, corkscrewing ascent.

Inside MarsBright, the six-person crew are floating in a stabilised magnetic cradle, insulated from the crushing G-forces that once defined the early days of spaceflight. External cameras are beaming back breathtaking footage of Brighton slipping away in fragmented flashes of myriad lights, of the Palace Pier shrinking to a spindly ghost against the surf, and of the entire coastline curling into a bright seam on the edge of the world before vanishing behind the curvature of Earth.

It was only two decades ago that a handful of newly minted Sussex University physicists, armed with grant money and audacity, discovered the tower’s hollow steel core could be adapted into a vertical electro-magnetic accelerator. Their early tests - pinging lumps of iron skyward at modest velocities - were reported almost as an oddity by this very newspaper, tucked beside stories of seafront bandstands and municipal parking rows. Who then would have imagined that these playful experiments would one day give Brighton a front-row seat in humanity’s reach for the stars?

The city’s first Mars mission in 2115 was a triumph of daring engineering, delivering five astronauts into a fast transit orbit around the red planet and returning them home in a time once thought impossible. By 2121, MarsBright’s second venture established a semi-permanent outpost on Arcadia Planitia, where automated rigs began drilling for ice and testing on-site oxygen production, sketching the first practical outlines of a human habitat.

Now this third expedition will press further still, aiming to lay the groundwork for longer-term habitation - greenhouses seeded with engineered microbes, larger habitats to shield settlers from radiation, and new systems to tap Martian brines for water. MarsBright carries not only fresh crews and equipment, but also the weight of hope from a small seaside city whose name is now quietly etched alongside Houston and Baikonur in the chronicles of exploration.

As the gleaming pod dwindled into the night sky, the launch teams at Brighton Space Centre stood watching in shared, almost reverent silence. Then someone let out a breathless cheer, quickly joined by others, a fragile human sound carried down the wind to the waiting crowds on the beach. Another chapter begins - and as MarsBright spins toward that distant rust-red world, our hopes spin with her.