If you seek his monument . . .

Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, in 1750, Richard Russell, not yet famous, published De Tabe Glandulari, the treatise that would change both his career and the fate of Brighton. Its argument - that seawater, taken internally and externally, could treat diseases of the glands - propelled a little-known Sussex physician into national prominence. More significantly for Brighton, it directed medical attention to a town then struggling with erosion, collapsing cliff lines and a declining fishing economy. Russell’s decision to base his cure specifically on Brighton’s beach gave the town its first sustained influx of visitors.

Born in 1687, Russell studied medicine at the University of Leyden. He returned to England, practising in his home town Lewes from the 1720s. By the 1740s he had become convinced of the therapeutic power of the sea. De Tabe Glandulari was the outcome: a detailed Latin defence of marine treatment that was swiftly translated into English and circulated well beyond Sussex. It was the first substantial medical work to promote both the drinking of seawater and immersion in it, and it was unusually pointed in praising Brighthelmstone’s marine environment over inland spa cures.

Demand for Russell’s regimen soon overwhelmed his Lewes practice. By 1753 he had moved permanently to Brighthelmstone, purchasing a marshy plot on the Steine for £40 and building the town’s largest house. It had direct access to the beach, dedicated rooms for convalescents and south-facing windows intended to maximise exposure to sea air. Around it grew Brighton’s first recognisable health quarter, complete with bathing attendants, suppliers of warm seawater and the earliest stirrings of fashionable patronage. Figures of rank began appearing among his patients, giving the town a social standing it had never previously enjoyed.

Russell’s reputation rose accordingly. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1752, he became one of the most prominent provincial physicians of his generation, and his treatise passed through multiple editions. His will later required his son William to assume the surname Kempe in order to inherit family property, an unusual stipulation noted at the time. Russell died in 1759 and was buried at South Malling near Lewes. His practice was taken over by Dr Anthony Relhan, and his large house on the Steine evolved into what is now the Royal Albion Hotel. 

This hotel was very badly damaged by a fire in 2023. Of what remains, part was demolished for safety reasons, and the rest remains closed off and covered in scaffolding, Nevertheless, it’s just possible to spy the commemorative plaque for Russell which says: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ Brighton’s identity as a centre for sea air, convalescence and coastal recreation began with Russell and remains to this day.

For more on Russell see Wikipedia (which is also the source of the portrait above), an entry in Tim Carder’s Encyclopaedia of Brighton which can viewed online at My Brighton & Hove, and Brighton Journal. 

Where have all the punters gone?

The Christmas season in Brighton is gathering pace: the Palace Pier tree is up (see yeterday’s post), the promenade lights are on, and this week three very different Santas have announced their festive plans - one greeting families high above the city, one in the heart of the pier, and one welcoming children beside the lifeboats. 

Brighton i360 has unveiled its full programme, with ‘Santa in the Sky’ returning from 11am on selected dates. Flights are scheduled hourly, and each visit promises a meeting with Santa in the clouds, a small gift, photographs, and the satisfaction of being, as the blurb puts it, on Santa’s nice list this year. Tickets for adults are £23.50, with the pod transformed into a mid-air grotto and Santa surrounded by elves and decorations.

For families wanting a longer experience, the i360 is also offering ‘Breakfast with Santa’, a one-hour event starting at 09.00 in the Drift restaurant. A full English breakfast comes with juice or a hot drink, and children can decorate their own bauble, write a letter to Santa, and post it via the ‘Northpole post box’. After breakfast the whole group takes a pod flight at 10.00 to meet Santa in the Sky, with gifts and photo opportunities included. Adult tickets are £32.50.

Down on the seafront the Palace Pier is running its own grotto in the Palm Court Restaurant, with Santa in residence on selected December dates. Families can book a traditional pier-side visit, complete with the arcade lights, deckchair colours and winter sea views that are part of Brighton’s festive backdrop. It offers a more classic, ground-level encounter for those who prefer Santa without the altitude.

Across town Santa will also be putting in a shift at Brighton RNLI, whose volunteers are once again running their own grotto experience inside the lifeboat station. The photographs used in their promotion - Santa in full costume, perched cheerfully beside the D-class inshore lifeboat, yellow wellies and all - underline the RNLI’s characteristically practical approach to Christmas. Families can book timed entry slots, meet Santa in a working coastal rescue environment, and support the lifeboat station’s fundraising at the same time.

Although the three events could not be more different in setting - one 450 feet in the air, one on the pier, and one at beach level beside the Atlantic 85 - all speak to the variety of Brighton’s seasonal offerings, and to how central the Santa visit has become to local December traditions. 

Between the i360’s cloud-level grotto, Palm Court’s pier-side classic, and the lifeboat station’s shoreline version, one might wonder if the place wasn’t over-run with Santas, and whether there are any actual punters left!

Pier Xmas tree is up

The Palace Pier Christmas tree is up. A tall Norway spruce now stands on the pier forecourt beside the clock tower, strung with oversized coloured bulbs that sway in the onshore wind. It seems that Brighton has no official record of when this seasonal marker first appeared, but photographs show a large decorated tree in this exact spot by 2013, and by 2014 it was already being treated as a familiar feature of the seafront in December. Images from 2017 onward confirm it as an annual fixture, always in the same position, always forming part of the pier’s festive display rather than the city’s wider Christmas lights scheme.

Although the space sits hard against the public promenade, the forecourt immediately in front of the gates is managed by the pier’s operators, now Brighton Palace Pier Group plc. Seasonal decorations placed there follow the pier’s own branding and schedules, and in 2019 the tree was given a formal ‘lights switch-on’ hosted by the pier and handed to local children’s charities, leaving little doubt about ownership. The tree has never appeared in council lighting budgets or BID-funded lists, and it has never been tied to a sponsor. Everything points to it being a privately installed and privately funded tradition maintained by the pier’s operators.

This year’s tree matches the pattern: a full-sized spruce brought in early, anchored on the forecourt and fitted with the pier’s preferred warm-coloured bulbs. For more than a decade, thus, it has acted as the seafront’s unofficial marker that Brighton’s festive season has begun, standing just long enough to see out the winter storms before disappearing, and the bulbs heading into storage.

Sources: Urban75, Latest TV, Alamy, and Ebay.

The Shingle That Waited

Here is the 21st 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 window - the only one of the 24 designs so muted, so unlit from behind - shows a semi-abstract landscape: a tall tree stands in the centre with a brown trunk and deep green canopy. Behind it, rolling hills sweep across the scene in bands of varied colours. To the left, a structure suggests the outline of a windmill. In the distance, layers of faded blue and purple evoke sea and sky, creating a sense of depth. (See below for an AI enhanced copy of the image.)

Limerick

A lone tree stood proud on the rise,

Where the hills blushed in patchwork disguise;

By a windmill’s red crown,

Colours drifted and wound,

As if landscape and daydream were allies.

The Shingle that Waited (with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez)

At first light on a morning without memory, a solitary tree stood on the Brighton Beach shingle where no tree had stood the day before. The tide had withdrawn in long blue breaths, and the stones around the tree seemed to have shifted to receive it, as if saving that space for longer than anyone had lived. Its leaves shone with a green so new the gulls wheeled in uneasy circles above it.

People approached quietly. They felt a warmth rising from the stones but did not lean close to confirm it. A boy of about ten pressed his ear to the trunk and later told his mother the tree was humming. He said it felt like a forgotten memory had entered him by mistake. When he stepped back, he stared at the horizon with the solemnity of someone recognising a distant call.

Days lengthened, and colours around the beach began to behave in unfamiliar ways. The sea deepened into shifting turquoises, the sky into purples without sunset, and the distant hills changed tone with the tide, warming as the water withdrew and cooling as it returned. Residents felt the changes but did not question them; they sensed the beach had entered a season beyond explanation.

Late in the month, a shape gathered itself on the horizon. Each dawn revealed more: a red-roofed windmill with long blue vanes turning steadily in air that held no wind. No one claimed to understand its arrival. The old ice-cream seller simply nodded, saying, ‘The sea keeps its stories. Sometimes it gives one back.’

One afternoon a young woman knelt beside the tree, drawn by a breath of warmth beneath her feet. When she parted the stones she saw, only for an instant, a faint radiance below the surface, colours laid out in careful layers like the remains of a celebration the earth still remembered. She withdrew her hands, and the glow vanished. Those who later dug in the same place found nothing but cold grey stones.

As the season shifted, the marvels retreated. The sky returned to its familiar greys, the sea to its disciplined blue, and the hills to their customary restraint. One morning, without any sign of their leaving, both tree and windmill were gone. The shingle showed only a slender arc of lighter stones tracing a path toward the water.

The boy who had heard the humming did not seem surprised. ‘They were waiting,’ he said. ‘And they heard what they needed.’

Sometimes at dusk, when the tide lies perfectly still, a tall, delicate shadow stretches across the stones, cast by nothing that stands there. Those who see it feel the shingle shift almost imperceptibly beneath their feet, as if making room again for what has not yet been forgotten.

Signal cannon relic

The small black-painted gun that sits on the Brighton Palace Pier today - now rather forlorn and out of place beside the men’s toilets and perhaps appropriately close to the thump of the funfair - is one of the surviving signal cannons from the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, which stood a few hundred metres to the east between 1823 and 1896. The Chain Pier operated as both a pleasure promenade and a working embarkation point for cross-Channel vessels, and its cannons played a practical role in that maritime life. They were fired to announce the departure or arrival of packet boats, to signal in thick weather, and occasionally to warn small craft off the pier’s immediate approaches. Contemporary guidebooks note that visitors often gathered to watch the gun being discharged before a steamer cast off, a brief spectacle folded into the pier’s daily rhythm.

The guns themselves were small muzzle-loading pieces mounted on simple timber beds, never intended for defence but for audible reach along the seafront and out to sea. Contemporary accounts confirm that a signal gun was kept on the Chain Pier and fired on ceremonial occasions. John George Bishop’s The Brighton Chain Pier: in memoriam describes how, during the celebrations for King William IV and Queen Adelaide’s arrival in 1830, ‘a signal gun was fired from the Chain Pier, as well as from the Battery, to indicate the welcome intelligence that their Majesties had arrived.’ Moreover, surviving pier toll records are said to indicate routine maintenance costs for ‘signals’ or ‘signal guns’, suggesting they were kept in regular working order through the pier’s lifetime. By the late nineteenth century, as the Chain Pier aged and cross-Channel services shifted west to the Palace Pier landing stages and to Newhaven, the signal guns fell gradually out of use.

The storm of 4-5 December 1896 destroyed the Chain Pier completely (see Brighton’s oldest pier), scattering its timbers along the beach. Some fittings were salvaged by the Palace Pier Company, including ironwork, lamps and at least one of the old signal cannons. It remained in storage for decades before being brought onto the Palace Pier as a heritage object. The weathered wooden carriage now visible beneath it is a modern reconstruction, but the barrel is original to the Chain Pier era. The small plaque on the pier deck dates it to the operational life of the Royal Suspension Chain Pier, 1822–1896, and stands as one of the last tangible artefacts from Brighton’s first great pier.

Sources: Wikipedia, Brighton & Hove Museums. PS: The full original name of the pier was the Brighton Marine Palace & Pier Company which explains the BM and PP initials on the wall behind the cannon. 

Do go see See the Sea

Do go See the Sea, a focused display at Brighton Museum which brings together more than three centuries of coastal art showing how the shoreline has been imagined since Brighton was a tiny 16th-century fishing village. The museum describes it as a family-friendly selection of dramatic seascapes and beachside scenes, inviting visitors to ‘sail through romantic seas and skies to views of today’s vibrant seafront.’ Within that sweep of changing light and tide, one image stands out for its sheer rarity: Adrian Hill’s rain-soaked view of the beach and front - Rain at Brighton (pictured).

Hill’s painting records a wet Brighton afternoon in tones almost never chosen by earlier artists. The roadway glistens like beaten metal, lampposts stretch doubled in puddles, and the pier seems suspended in a vapour of cloud and sea-mist. At a time when most painters presented Brighton as a place of perpetual sunshine, Hill shows the beach under the weather that so often shapes it, capturing how the whole seafront alters when rain flattens colour and rhythm.

The contrast with earlier panoramas in the gallery is marked. James Webb and George Earl’s Brighton from the West Pier presents a regatta day in crystalline light, the beach crowded and the new pier drawn with architectural pride. A related view from the pier-head shows the same coast alive with promenade fashion and small boats inching close to shore, mirroring the Victorian belief that the seaside was both spectacle and cure. The beach is tidy, public, and bright - a deliberate image of a rising resort.

Other works preserve the working coastline that preceded this leisure era. The early view - Kemp Town from the Sea by John Wilson Carmichael - shows a foreshore of fishing craft, winches and drying nets, with fresh-built terraces climbing behind the shingle. It records a landscape still half-rural, half-ambitious, caught just before Brighton’s speculative growth overwhelmed its maritime past. In stark opposition, Floating Breakwaters off Brighton (pictured) shows a rough Channel hammering the long timber groynes, the town barely visible through blown spray.

Queen Victoria in town

Queen Victoria, born in 1819 and reigning for more than 63 years, became the symbolic centre of a rapidly industrialising and expanding Britain. Her long rule reshaped the monarchy into a constitutional institution defined by ceremony, duty, and public visibility. Although she, famously, disliked the Royal Pavilion and sold it to Brighton Council, she did visit the town very often - the name is mentioned over 200 times in her diaries. Moreover, three different artworks connected lightly with Brighton Beach can be see as Albert and Victoria’s legacy in the town.

Victoria’s relationship with Brighton was shaped by the overhang of the Regency. She disliked the extravagant Royal Pavilion, with its fantastical onion domes and lack of privacy, and her early visits in the 1830s and early 1840s were intermittent. Yet the court’s presence nonetheless produced moments now central to Brighton’s cultural memory. On 8 March 1842 she left the town reluctantly, recording in her diary that ‘the walks & drives near the sea, were delightful… & it did my dearest Albert & the Children so much good.’ 

The same year, Albert made photographic history in Brighton when William Constable, the Marine Parade daguerreotypist, took what is believed to be the first photographic portrait of a British royal. That small, sharp likeness, made while the family was staying at the Pavilion, still survives in the Royal Collection.

Victoria’s visits also generated images that fixed Brighton in the public imagination. The best known is the illustrated scene from early 1845 showing Albert driving Victoria and the Princess Royal in a sledge across the snow-blanketed Pavilion grounds, a view reproduced widely in the illustrated press (here copied from the Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove). Such episodes helped counterbalance her general unease with the town’s bustle and its lingering association with George IV’s indulgence.

Today the most explicit marker of Victoria’s relationship with Brighton stands just above the shingle: the 1897 statue near the Peace Statue, where Victoria’s bronze figure faces the water she once admired briefly but never embraced fully, binding her story - almost despite herself - into the fabric of Brighton Beach.