Bombing the Grand

This day in 1984 Brighton endured its worst tragedy since the Second World War. In the early hours of 12 October, the Grand Hotel on the seafront was ripped apart by an IRA bomb planted with the intention of assassinating Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and members of her cabinet during the Conservative Party conference. Five people were killed, more than thirty injured, and the blast left one of the city’s great Victorian landmarks deeply.

The Grand, often described as a ‘palace by the sea’, had been one of Brighton’s most distinguished hotels for more than a century. Designed by John Whichcord Jr and opened in 1864, it was built for the wealthy visitors who flocked to the seaside and boasted innovations such as a hydraulically powered lift - the first of its kind outside London. Over the decades it had hosted royalty, politicians and celebrities, standing as a symbol of elegance and prosperity above the shingle beach - see more history at Wikipedia.

At 2:54 am on 12 October 1984, the device planted by Patrick Magee exploded behind the bath panel of room 629, three weeks after he had checked in under a false name. Thatcher and her husband Denis escaped unharmed, but Norman Tebbit and his wife were among those gravely injured, Margaret Tebbit left paralysed for life. The blast tore through several floors of the building, bringing down stairwells and a chimney stack weighing several tons, while police, fire crews and volunteers fought to pull survivors from the rubble.

Despite the devastation, Thatcher insisted that the conference continue. By morning she stood before delegates to declare that the government would not be deflected by terrorism. The Grand closed for two years of reconstruction and reopened in 1986, but the bombing has remained central to its story. For Brighton, it was the single darkest peacetime event since the Blitz, eclipsing any of the fires, accidents or local disasters the city had endured in the postwar decades. (See also an excerpt from Rory Carroll’s book, Killing Thatcher.)

As for the beach directly opposite, there is no evidence it was formally closed. Accounts recall onlookers gathering along the promenade and sea wall to witness the scene and the rescue effort. The beach itself, calm and indifferent beneath the autumn dawn, provided a stark contrast to the chaos above, a silent backdrop to one of the most shocking moments in Brighton’s modern history.

The 1907 postcard of The Grand is used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove; and the other two images are taken from Wikipedia.

Guest: Brighton Beach, Melbourne

Brighton Beach on the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, just 11km south of Melbourne, has been part of the city’s life for more than 150 years, its long sweep of sand framed by bathing boxes that have become as much a symbol of the city as Flinders Street Station. The Bunurong/Boon Wurrung people fished and gathered shellfish here for millennia, leaving behind middens along the bluffs. European settlement brought roads, the opening of Brighton Beach station in 1861, and an easy escape from the city once the line pushed through to Sandringham in 1887.

The first sea baths were built at Middle Brighton in the 1880s, grand timber structures enclosing a stretch of bay to allow men and women to bathe separately. After storms repeatedly wrecked them, a concrete-walled open-sea pool was built in 1936, still used daily by cold-water swimmers. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club had been formed earlier, in 1875, and grew with the marina into one of Victoria’s leading yachting centres. Just north, the bathing boxes began appearing in the 1860s, multiplying after the First World War and shifting higher up the sand in the 1930s as seawalls and promenades altered the foreshore.

By the mid-20th century the beach was already a magnet for popular culture. In 1959 Marilyn Monroe is said to have posed on the sand during her Australian visit (with husband Arthur Miller), the bathing boxes forming the backdrop to photographs (though I’ve not been able to find a source to confirm this). In recent times, there have been recurring seaweed invasions, with piles of rotting kelp and seagrass creating a stench along the foreshore, sometimes requiring heavy machinery to clear. Other summers have brought swarms of lion’s mane jellyfish, their metre-long tentacles driving swimmers from the water. Local councils experimented with booms and regular sand clearance, while health officers reassured residents the jellyfish were a nuisance more than a danger.

In 1930 Brighton Beach was the scene of one of the bay’s few fatal shark attacks, when 16-year-old Norman William Clark was seized near the Middle Brighton pier before horrified onlookers. Decades later a basking seal asleep on the sand led police to cordon off the beach until it swam away. Over the years, there have been fiercely contested council debates over whether the bathing boxes should remain. Public sentiment, though, and their growing heritage status have prevailed so they are now tightly controlled, passing between generations or fetching extraordinary prices on the private market. Reports in September 2025 of sales approaching one million dollars again underlined their status as coveted assets despite having no plumbing or power.

Today Brighton Beach remains a blend of heritage and utility. The Dendy Street Beach pavilion, completed in 2025, houses the Brighton Life Saving Club along with a café, toilets and showers. The Middle Brighton Baths continue to offer enclosed swimming with boardwalks and changing areas. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club operates a busy marina and social rooms. The Bay Trail runs the length of the foreshore, with car parks, ramps and stair access from the Esplanade. Seasonal dog rules, CCTV proposals to combat break-ins at the boxes, and ongoing sand renourishment programmes show how the beach remains actively managed. (The images above have been taken from Wikipedia and Googlemaps.)

From Bing Crosby to feminism!

On the evening of this day in 1977, Bing Crosby, then 74 and one of the most famous entertainers of the twentieth century, stepped onto the stage of the brand-new Brighton Centre. He had sold hundreds of millions of records, starred in over 70 films, and his relaxed crooning voice had defined an era - indeed Wikipedia calls him the world’s first multimedia star. The Brighton concert, just days before his sudden death in Spain, turned out to be his final public performance.

The Brighton Centre had opened - in prime position opposite the beach - only three weeks earlier. Designed by Russell Diplock & Associates, it rose in raw concrete and glass on the seafront, part of the city’s drive to secure conference trade and off-season visitors. From the start, though, it divided opinion. Admirers pointed to the steady flow of business it brought and the way it kept hotels and restaurants busy year-round, while detractors complained bitterly about its bulk, its brutalist lines and the loss of the older buildings cleared to make way for it. 

Despite the controversy, the Brighton Centre quickly established itself as one of the country’s premier venues - Crosby was only one of many famous names who performed there: Queen played in 1979, The Who thundered through the same year, and Bob Marley brought the Uprising Tour in 1980. The Jam chose it for their farewell concert in December 1982. And it has been as prominent in the political world as it has been among musical artistes: for decades, the venue has welcomed party political conferences transforming the city into a temporary seat of national debate.

Today, almost half a century on, the centre is hosting the FiLiA Women’s Rights Conference 2025. Some 2,400 delegates and more than 250 speakers are expected with the aim of discussing women’s rights, global feminism, violence against women, health, migration and related topics. Apparently some topics are controversial: outside, in the streets, there have been protests: a trans-led direct action group calling itself Bash Back claimed responsibility for smashing windows and spraying graffiti. It is accusing the conference of hosting ‘some of the most vicious transphobia in pop politics’. (See BBC News for more.)

Happy birthday Steve Ovett

Happy 70th birthday Steve Ovett. Born in Brighton on 9 October 1955, he was raised in Portslade and educated at Mile Oak School. He joined Brighton & Hove AC as a boy and trained regularly in Preston Park, but he switched to focus on athletics in his teens. By the age of 18 he was winning 800m medals at the  European level. Over the next decade he became one of the greatest names in athletics.

Ovett’s rivalry with Sebastian Coe defined British sport in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Coe was the meticulous planner, Ovett the instinctive competitor, but both set world records and pushed each other to the limits. Ovett won Olympic 800m gold in Moscow in 1980 and bronze in the 1500m, while Coe claimed the 1500m title. Between them they took the mile world record back and forth, Ovett’s best being 3:48.40 in Oslo in 1981. He also set records at 1500m and two miles, and won European and Commonwealth titles. His strong finish, upright style and ability to win from almost any position earned him a reputation as one of the sport’s most natural talents.

After retiring in 1991, Ovett moved abroad, living for long periods in Australia and Canada, but he continued to return to Brighton, where his reputation remained strong. He later worked in athletics commentary and coaching. In 2012 he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Brighton & Hove, a civic honour that underlined the pride his home city still takes in his achievements.

Brighton’s tribute came first with a bronze statue by Peter Webster unveiled in Preston Park on 31 May 1987. However in September 2007 the work was stolen, cut from its plinth at the ankle; police later recovered a leg and some fragments, but most was lost, leaving only the foot. That foot remains mounted in Preston Park as a curiosity for visitors. Webster produced a replacement statue, unveiled on 24 July 2012 on Madeira Drive near the Palace Pier, where it still stands today - see ArtUK and the BBC. Ovett himself attended the events around the unveiling, which also marked his Freedom of the City. The seafront figure has since become a landmark for runners and visitors alike.

Implicitly precarious

Graham Swift’s Here We Are - published in the UK five years ago today - is steeped in Brighton, with Brighton’s Palace Pier both setting and symbol in the summer of 1959, the heyday of seaside variety entertainment. Swift evokes the scene with precision: the stage ‘on a flimsy structure built over swirling water’, the pier boards beneath performers’ feet, the tang of salt air drifting into the theatre, and the nightly dispersal of audiences back onto the beach and prom. For him, the seaside is an ‘implicitly precarious’ place. 

The story circles around three performers: Jack Robinson, a gifted compère; Ronnie Deane, who takes the stage name ‘The Great Pablo’; and his assistant Evie White. The pier theatre is their world, a place of illusions, transformations, and betrayals, all played out above the restless sea. Ronnie, once a wartime evacuee lodged with a Brighton family, has made his identity anew as a magician. Evie, by day a shop worker in town, by night slips into sequins and vanishes nightly into Pablo’s illusions. Jack holds it all together with wit and warmth. But as the season that summer reaches its climax, Ronnie vanishes not just from the stage but from their lives. Swift then shifts the perspective to decades later, when Evie looks back on the Brighton summer that shaped everything. The pier, the gaudy lights, the endless stretch of pebbles, become bound up with memory, loss and the final trick that could never be undone.

Brighton is not only a backdrop here but a character in itself. Its beach is a place of impermanence, its pier a fragile platform where each night’s show disappears as soon as it is conjured. The book’s themes of illusion, disappearance and reinvention mirror the seaside town’s own rhythms, with its tides of visitors, its lights that glitter and fade, and its stages that once seemed to promise the world.

Swift, born in London in 1949, has always been a novelist of memory and what might be thought of as the ungraspable past. He read English at Cambridge and came to prominence with Waterland in 1983, a novel that blended history and personal inheritance, later adapted into film. His Last Orders won the Booker Prize in 1996, and across a dozen novels he has returned again and again to the mysteries of time, identity and loss.

Here is Swift in The Guardian writing about his book in 2021: ‘It seems I’m attracted to the seaside. It features in several of my books. A large part of my latest novel, Here We Are, is set not just in Brighton, but in a theatre on Brighton Pier. But then we are all, surely, drawn to the seaside. It’s a deeply compelling - and paradoxical - place. We go there for enjoyment, yet at the same time it is an elemental zone where land and water meet and thus, with or without the presence of cliffs, it is implicitly precarious. Nothing could more embody this than the seaside pier – a flimsy-looking structure dedicated to fun and frivolity, deliberately constructed over the crashing waves.

Interestingly, the book’s cover - taken from a famous American natural history book, The Birds of America by John James Audubon - was given a bespoke billboard installation by the Buildhollywood agency. It features hundreds of individual feathers hand applied and said to create ‘a bold, textured display to match the dramatics of the novel’.

The Social Science Association

150 years ago today the Social Science Association - a British reformist group founded in 1857 - opened its annual meeting, in Brighton for the only time in its 30 years history. The main events were hosted in the Pavilion estate, with plenary sessions in the Dome concert hall and, possibly, some events in the new aquarium’s Great Hall. The principal proceedings ran through Wednesday 13 October, with associated exhibitions on the estate continuing to Saturday 16 October. 

The choice of location was not incidental: Victorian medicine and social reform were already saturated with arguments about the health-giving qualities of sea air, sea breezes and the bracing effects of coastal climates. At Brighton in 1875, these beliefs surfaced directly in the Congress papers, providing a tangible link between the town’s beach and the themes under discussion.

The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science was founded in 1857 bringing together reformers, politicians, philanthropists and experts to debate public health, education, penal policy, political economy and social morality. Its annual congresses, held in major provincial centres, mixed presidential addresses with departmental sessions across law, health, education, economy and social morals, and became a recognised platform for introducing progressive ideas into public debate.

At Brighton in October 1875, the Association was presided over by Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare. Among the most notable contributions was Benjamin Ward Richardson’s presidential address to the health department, later published as Hygeia: a City of Health. In it he stressed free ventilation and exposure to natural breezes, a model that resonated with Brighton’s identity as a seaside health resort. A contemporary retrospective on Brighton as a Health Resort explicitly recalls a paper read before the Congress in 1875 that tied disease patterns to sea winds and the aspect of streets near the shore. The history of the Social Science Association is fully covered in Lawrence Goodman’s Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Although the Association never returned to Brighton, the 1875 meeting embedded the town within its reformist geography, and the proximity of the Dome and Corn Exchange to the seafront - alongside the prestige of the new Aquarium on Madeira Drive - gave the congress a clear Brighton Beach dimension.

The merriest place to love

 

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

This is the opening verse in Clement Scott’s poem Brighton Pier which, in fact, is about the Chain Pier. Born on this day in 1841 he was one of the best-known theatre critics and journalists of late-Victorian London. For two decades he wrote reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and his notices could make or break a play. He also wrote travel sketches, popular verses, and several sentimental lyrics that caught the public mood in the age of seaside holidays and parlour song. His reputation in his own time was mixed: admired for his fluent style and influence, but criticised for the sometimes moralising tone of his criticism.

Scott married Isabel Busson du Maurier, the sister of George du Maurier, and the couple had four children. She died in 1890, and he remarried Constance Margaret Brandon, an English journalist and actress, in San Francisco. After an ill-considered 1898 interview in Great Thoughts, Scott was forced to retire as a theatre critic and he moved to Biarritz where he wrote The Drama of Yesterday and Today. He then worked for a couple of years at the end of the century for the New York Herald, later returning to London. In 1900, he founded The Free Lance, a journal for writers who worked by the job, which he edited. He died in 1904, and is barely remembered today, but see Wikipedia for more biographical information.

The poem Brighton Pier was among his lighter works. It was first published in Lays of a Londoner (Davide Bogue, 1882) and is freely available to read online at Internet Archive (a ‘lay’ being a short narrative or lyric poem). Like much of Scott’s verse it was designed to be read aloud or set to music, sitting close to the tradition of the popular ballad. Today it survives less as a work of high poetry than as a cultural document: a window into how Brighton was imagined in the late nineteenth century, when its pier, promenade, and beach had become central to England’s holiday culture. (Painting of the pier is by John Fraser and used courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove. The portrait is sourced from Wikipedia)

Here is Clement Scott’s full poem.

Brighton Pier

Which is the merriest place to love,
Whether it be for a day or year,
Where we can slip, like a cast-off glove,
The care that hovers our world above?
 Come, and be taught upon Brighton Pier!

Wandering waves on the shingle dash;
 The sky’s too blue for a thoughtless tear;
Danger is nothing but pessimist trash,
And the morning’s made for a healthy splash:
 Come for a header from Brighton Pier!

Filled with life, see the children race -
 Motherly hearts they quake with fear -
Meeting the breezes face to face!
Whether we’re steady, or ‘go the pace,’
 Let us be young upon Brighton Pier!

Here she comes with her love-lit eyes,
 Hearts will throb when a darling’s near;
Would it be well to avoid her - wise?
Every fool in the wide world tries,
 But love must win upon Brighton Pier!

Lazily lost in a dream we sit -
 Maidens’ eyes are a waveless mere -
There’s many a vow when seagulls flit,
And many a sigh when lamps are lit,
 And many a kiss, upon Brighton Pier.

Dear old friends of the days long fled,
 Why did you vanish and leave me here?
Girls are marrying, boys are wed,
Youth is living, but I seem dead,
 Kicking my heels upon Brighton Pier!