Through Dammo’s eyes

Following on from the Brighton Mod Weekender, two exhibitions are giving Brighton a chance to look at Mod culture in fresh detail. On the beach front, beside the i360 and the Upside Down House, the photographer David Clarke - known to the Mod community as Dammo - is showing Through My Eyes, a free outdoor display of his work. 

The exhibition sits between the shingle and the traffic, where the promenade railings overlook the sea, so that anyone strolling past or pausing for an ice cream finds themselves drawn into the images. Running until the end of August, it charts twenty years of the Brighton Mod Weekender, from scooter ride-outs to sharply dressed gatherings, and captures how a once-fringe revival has matured into a fixture of the city’s summer. Clarke’s images are not posed studio portraits but candid records of Mods in their element, whether standing by the railings in the wind or reflected in the chrome of a Vespa.

Inside Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, a parallel exhibition takes a deeper dive into the roots of the movement. The In Crowd: Mod Fashion & Style 1958-66 brings together garments, photographs, ephemera and music that defined the original scene. From Italian-cut suits to miniskirts, from Motown singles to Lambretta brochures, the show aims to immerse visitors in the years when the Mod aesthetic was first forged. The curators emphasise that Mod was as much about attitude as appearance, with a spirit of youthful confidence shaping fashion choices and nightlife.

Although both exhibitions centre on Mod identity, their approaches differ. Clarke’s photography celebrates the Brighton revival, with an eye on the community that has kept scooters on Madeira Drive most Augusts since 2005. The museum’s survey looks back to an earlier moment, before Quadrophenia and before the myth-making, when Mod was still a modernist youth movement in the making. Together, they offer a conversation across sixty years: how a style born in late-1950s London became heritage on the south coast, and how today’s enthusiasts carry the look forward.

The contrast between the two is deliberate. Clarke’s work meets passers-by in the open air, integrated into the ebb and flow of promenade life, while the museum requires a step indoors into a curated, reflective space. One is part of the spectacle, the other a retrospective. For the Mod faithful, the seafront show is also a chance to find themselves in the pictures: Clarke has been a regular on the front line of ride-outs and has built up an archive unmatched in its scope. Meanwhile, the museum exhibition situates Mod within broader shifts in British design and music, drawing links with jazz clubs, Carnaby Street boutiques and the global rise of youth culture.

A boy, a yacht and a cat

On this day in 1951 the Daily Mirror published the tale of a boy, a yacht and a cat. ‘Shivering and soaked to the skin,’ it began, twelve-year-old Roger Maitland stood on the deck of his father’s topsail schooner Rustler as heavy seas drove her toward the shingle. When the anchor cable parted and a tow proved hopeless, Roger tucked the kitten inside his jacket and swam for the shore while holidaymakers cheered. ‘I was not afraid,’ he said afterwards; ‘The kitten got frightened and clawed my face.’ The Daily Mirror set out the scene in tight detail: the beach some sixty yards away; his father, Kenneth Maitland, and family friend Fred Austin also abandoning the vessel; and the Shoreham lifeboat with a hawser aboard but unable to pull her clear.

The Telegraph, the same day, added the practical coda: after failed attempts to refloat her that tide, Rustler was hauled higher up the beach by a lorry to await the next rise. A photograph in The Journal of the Royal National Life-boat Institution - captioned ‘Shoreham life-boat and the yacht Rustler - shows the schooner grinding in the surf with the lifeboat standing by.

A year later, the wreck was still a Brighton landmark. Ernie Charman’s diary places him on the promenade on Sunday 24 August 1952, photographing Rustler beached between the piers as crowds filed past. His note fixes the date; the memories it prompted show how fast the vessel became part of seafront life.

Local recollections found at My Brighton and Hove fill in what happened next. ‘The Rustler could not be refloated,’ one reader remembers; ‘dozens of volunteers shovelling stones away from the ship,’ recalls another. Several contributors say children were allowed aboard: ‘we climbed on board, I was eight years old,’ wrote Terry Hyde; ‘the man let us on board to play . . . it was fabulous,’ remembered Rosemary Brazill. As the fabric failed, accounts say the remains were eventually burned and beachcombers picked through the cooling timbers for copper and bronze.

The Mod Weekender

Thousands of scooters and sharply dressed Mods descended on Brighton this Bank Holiday weekend, with Madeira Drive once again the focal point of the annual Mod Weekender. Lines of Vespas and Lambrettas, many lavishly customised with chrome, lights and Union Jacks, stretched along the promenade, while the beach and seafront filled with spectators and photographers. For many, the weekend has become a living tribute to the subculture that defined the 1960s and found one of its most enduring homes in Brighton.

The Brighton Mod Weekender was established in 2005 by The New Untouchables, a London-based collective of DJs, promoters and enthusiasts committed to keeping Mod culture alive. The group had long been organising club nights and events centred on Northern Soul, ska, rhythm and blues, and 1960s beat music. Bringing their efforts to Brighton in the mid-2000s was both symbolic and practical: the city was immortalised in the 1979 film Quadrophenia and already had a global reputation as the spiritual home of the Mods. (See also Mods and Rockers clash in the 60s.)

The inaugural event in 2005 drew hundreds of scooters and enthusiasts, with daytime meet-ups on the seafront and late-night parties at venues such as the Komedia. Over the years it has grown into one of the largest gatherings of its kind, attracting visitors from across Britain and Europe. Scooter ride-outs to Beachy Head and beyond became part of the ritual, as did competitions for the best customised bikes, while the weekend marketplace offered records, clothing and memorabilia. The event also helped shift Brighton’s civic stance: once a city that banned Mods from its pier in the 1960s, it has since embraced them as part of its heritage and tourist identity.

The Weekender has not been without its defining moments. In 2014, thousands of Mods marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous 1964 seaside clashes with Rockers, filling Brighton’s streets with scooters in what local media described as the largest gathering since those heady days. In 2019, the seaside saw record crowds again, just before the pandemic forced a pause in 2020. When the event returned, the emphasis on heritage was clearer than ever, with exhibitions, photographic retrospectives and fashion shows anchoring the programme alongside the music and scooters.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Brighton Mod Weekender, and the celebrations have been extensive. Yesterday and today Madeira Drive was packed with scooters, while crowds lined the seafront to watch the ride-outs and browse the stalls.

Intrepidly into the sea

This month marks 170 years since the final monthly number of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes appeared in August 1855, an anniversary that recalls the novelist’s life and his enduring ties with Brighton - above all the pages that put Brighton’s beach, pier and sea-air squarely into Victorian fiction. In Vanity Fair he sketches the resort as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’, while in The Newcomes he steps onto the Chain Pier and, in a few gleeful lines, all but lets the surf spray the page.

Thackeray was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811, sent to England as a child, and educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge (he left without taking a degree). After a short flirtation with art and a loss of much of his inheritance, he turned to journalism and illustration, writing for Fraser’s Magazine and later Punch, where The Book of Snobs made his name. He married Isabella Shawe in 1836; the marriage was shadowed by her severe mental illness, and he raised their daughters - Anne (later the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie) and Harriet Marian - largely on his own. His major novels followed in quick succession: Vanity Fair (1847-48), Pendennis (1848-50), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853-55) and The Virginians (1857-59). In 1860 he became the first editor of the Cornhill Magazine. He died in London on 24 December 1863 and was buried at Kensal Green. (See Wikipedia for more on Thackeray’s life and this sketched self-portrait.)

Brighton sits in the middle of both the life and the work. Thackeray knew the resort first-hand - letters mention him ‘sitting on the chain pier in a bath chair’, dosing himself with sea-breezes - and he was fond of calling the place ‘Doctor Brighton’, a quackish but kindly physician for overworked Londoners. In July 1859 Thackeray stayed at the Royal Crescent Hotel and produced a small watercolour titled Brighton from The Royal Crescent Hotel, July 17th 1859. Though best known as a novelist and satirist, he had trained as an artist and continued to sketch throughout his life, leaving behind drawings and painted vignettes of the places he visited.

When looking at his fiction, Brighton is less a backdrop than a mood: brisk, gaudy, restorative, faintly satirical. Vanity Fair uses Brighton as a stage where masks slip. Newly married George Osborne and Amelia Sedley take the air on the front; Becky Sharp and Rawdon Crawley work their separate hustles in lodgings, billiard rooms and on the cliff; and as the Waterloo campaign gathers, ‘all the principal personages’ decamp. Thackeray’s aside - Brighton as ‘a clean Naples with genteel lazzaroni’ - is both postcard and pin-prick.

The Newcomes (available to borrow digitally at Internet Archive) brings its readers to the seafront with a panoramic relish, the narrator Arthur Pendennis surveying the parade of bath-chairs, schoolgirls and telescope-wielding day-trippers. The scene catches the democratic sprawl of the beach long before cameras made it commonplace.

‘In Steyne Gardens, Brighton, the lodging-houses are among the most frequented in that city of lodging-houses. These mansions have bow-windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences, and ornamented with neat verandahs, from which you can behold the tide of human-kind as it flows up and down the Steyne, and that blue ocean over which Britannia is said to rule, stretching brightly away eastward and westward. The chain-pier, as everybody knows, runs intrepidly into the sea, which sometimes, in fine weather, bathes its feet with laughing wavelets, and anon, on stormy days, dashes over its sides with roaring foam. Here, for the sum of twopence, you can go out to sea and pace this vast deck without need of a steward with a basin. You can watch the sun setting in splendour over Worthing, or illuminating with its rising glories the ups and downs of Rottingdean. You see the citizen with his family inveigled into the shallops of the mercenary native mariner, and fancy that the motion cannot be pleasant; and how the hirer of the boat, otium et oppidi laudi et rura sui, haply sighs for ease, and prefers Richmond or Hampstead. You behold a hundred bathing-machines put to sea; and your naughty fancy depicts the beauteous splashing under their white awnings. Beneath the rippled sands (stay, are they rippled sands or shingly beach?) the prawn-boy seeks the delicious material of your breakfast. Breakfast - meal in London almost unknown, greedily devoured in Brighton! In ten vessels now near the shore the sleepless mariner has ventured forth to seize the delicate whiting, the greedy and foolish mackerel, and the homely sole. Hark to the twanging horn! it is the early coach going out to London.’

Little ol’ me

Hmm… these green buses aren’t very tasty. All showy paint, no chips inside. Crunchy, yes, but not the good kind. Not like a battered sausage. Or even one of those flapjack cubes from the café with the seafront awning. I miss those. Oh crumbs, literal crumbs - I miss crumbs. These days, crumbs wouldn’t keep me alive for five minutes, not since I’ve grown to the size of an SUV.

People screaming. I don’t want to hurt them. I thought maybe this time one of them would drop something hot and greasy and perfect. I don’t want phones; they taste almost as bad as beach pebbles.

Why did I peck the bus? Why do I keep pecking buses?

Oh no . . . someone’s filming again. Look at them, tiny hands raised like they’re trying to tame me. I’m not a monster. I’m just big. And starving.

That mixer thing, ahead of the green buses. It smells odd. Kind of like eggs? Hot pavement? A building site in summer? Maybe it’s got gravy inside. Maybe it’s a giant sausage roll for machines. Maybe - just one peck. One nibble. Ugh.

I didn’t ask to grow this big. One minute I’m arguing over a churro with Kevin, the next I’ve outgrown the bandstand and I’m scaring toddlers, and their parents are calling 999. I don’t even fit under the pier anymore. I used to roost there. It was cosy. It was safe. Now all I want is food.

There’s another bus. I’m getting a sense that I need to do more, work a bit harder to feed myself . . . The people inside, they’re looking very tasty. Oh look, some of them are getting off at the bus stop. I’ve grown too hungry to control myself, now I see the answer perfectly: this may be a bus stop for people, but it’s a food stop for little ol’ me.

KRS‑2519CRGB‑1

Found on the beach: a custom or OEM RGB seven‑segment display module, tailored for a specific device or manufacturer. One side of the object features a digital display with a three-digit readout, the letters ‘L’ and ‘R’ in blue and green respectively, a lightning bolt icon, and a distinctive logo composed of multi-coloured fan-like blades. The reverse side shows a printed circuit board marked ‘KRS‑2519CRGB‑1’ and ‘2520’, alongside gold-plated contacts and through-holes indicative of surface mounting.

The part number, ChatGPT, advises does not appear in public electronics catalogs or databases, suggesting the component was produced either for internal use by a specific brand or as part of a mass-produced but undocumented consumer device. The inclusion of ‘CRGB’ implies RGB lighting capability, meaning the segment display can change colour, possibly to indicate power levels, warnings, or operational states. The number ‘2520’ may refer to a production batch or date code, such as week 20 of the year 2025.

Such displays are commonly used in e‑bikes, electric scooters, children’s ride-on vehicles, smart sports gear, or small remote-controlled electronics. The L/R notation may signify directional indicators, balance sensors, or audio channel outputs. The lightning bolt icon, a near-universal symbol for electricity or charge, hints at a function related to battery monitoring. The visible wear and absence of surrounding components suggest the item was once embedded in a plastic housing, likely waterproof or weather-resistant, before being separated and washed ashore.

Despite the lack of direct identification, other modules with similar codes, such as KRS‑2351AW, are listed on electronics supplier sites as LED or RGB seven‑segment displays, used in meters, control panels, or dashboard-style readouts. 

Sources: Amax Technologies and Bossgoo

Where the sea has no memory

Here is the 14th of 25 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 coastal landscape. In the foreground, rounded white shapes suggest foamy waves breaking onto the shore, with different shades of blue indicating the sea. To the right, green and yellow forms rise upward like a cliff or headland. Above, a large pale cloud dominates the sky, with smaller purple-tinged clouds drifting across. Cutting through the centre is a brown bird in flight, wings outstretched against the sky.

A limerick starter

Clouds of pale lavender hue,

A bird split the turquoise in two.

Where emerald cliffs lean,

On the foam’s shifting green,

The sky wrote its story in blue.

Where the sea has no memory (with apologies to Cormac McCarthy)

The sky above Brighton was broken with cloud. A bird cut through the wind and went on across the water, dark against the pale. The sea was restless. White spume drifted over the stones like smoke and the tide ran its slow iron rhythm, pushing the shingle, pulling it back.

A man stood at the rail of the pier. His coat was buttoned but the wind got in all the same and pressed the cloth against his body. He watched the bird, the curve of its wing, the small correction of its flight. He thought of how the sea had no memory and how the gull had no home but the wind. Behind him came the sound of coin machines, the bark of a stallholder, the scream of a ride, all faint in the distance like echoes in a dream.

He turned from the pier and went down to the beach. The stones rolled under his boots. He stooped and picked one up, dark and wet, and he held it in his hand. It was cold. He turned it over and over, looking at the way the water had smoothed it, how it had come to be like this from years beyond counting. He thought of his father and the silence of him. He thought of his mother’s warnings about the sea and how she feared it though she could not stay away from it.

He walked to the edge where the water reached. The foam curled white around his feet. The gull cried and turned inland. He looked at the horizon where the sea and sky were one. The thought came to him that a man could walk straight into that line and never come back and the world would not change for it.

A child’s voice rose up behind him and he turned. A boy was running along the beach, chasing another, both laughing. Their shouts carried in the wind. The man watched until they were gone. He dropped the stone and it fell among the others and vanished from him.

The sea kept on. The pier stood in its shadow of iron and wood. The bird wheeled once more above the headland, and then it too was gone. The man put his hands in his pockets and began to walk.