David Arscott - Brighton

Title Page

BRIGHTON, A VERY PECULIAR HISTORY

With added Hove, actually

Written by

David Arscott

Created and designed by David Salariya

Publisher Information

First published in Great Britain in MMIX by Book House, an imprint of

The Salariya Book Company Ltd

25 Marlborough Place, Brighton BN1 1UB

www.salariya.com

www.book-house.co.uk

Digital edition converted and distributed in MMXII by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Editor: Jamie Pitman

Assistant editor: Jodie Leyman

Illustrated by Carolyn Franklin

Additional artwork: David Antram, Mark Bergin, John James, Nick Hewetson, Rob Walker

The Salariya Book Company Ltd MMIX

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for free electronic versions of:

You Wouldnt Want to be an Egyptian Mummy!

You Wouldnt Want to be a Roman Gladiator!

You Wouldnt Want to Join Shackletons Polar Expedition!

You Wouldnt Want to Sail on a 19th-Century Whaling Ship!

Quotes

A visit to Brighton comprised every possibility of earthly happiness.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

It is the fashion to run down George IV, but what myriads of Londoners ought to thank him for inventing Brighton! One of the best of physicians our city has ever known, is kind, cheerful, merry Doctor Brighton.

W. M. Thackeray, The Newcomes

Brighton looks like a town that is constantly helping the police with their enquiries.

Keith Waterhouse

Anyone who does not live in Brighton must be mad and ought to be locked up.

S. P. B. Mais

CHAPTER SIX: Modern Brighton

A common joke about the 1960s is that If you remember them you werent there. The idea is that people who really got the most out of that exciting decade were too befuddled to have the slightest memory of it.

Its nonsense, of course but theres no doubt that Brighton gradually grew more prosperous after the drab postwar years.

Teenagers in particular felt a new sense of freedom, partly because they had more money in their pockets and partly because this bright new world of coffee bars and rock music seemed to have been created especially for them. After all, they now had the Beatles, rather than the fuddy-duddy dance bands their parents listened to.

Mind you, some good things were lost:

The Regent Cinema

This was on the corner of Queens Road and North Street, where Boots is today. The upstairs ballroom was where hundreds of Brighton couples first met and danced the night away. The ballroom was turned into a bingo hall in 1967, and the cinema itself closed six years later.

SS Brighton

This popular sports stadium in West Street staged wrestling, judo, basketball and professional tennis, and was home to the Brighton Tigers ice-hockey team. It was closed down in 1965 by the company which developed the Kingswest centre next door.

Trolleybuses

These handsome creatures ran on rubber tyres like ordinary buses, but were powered by electricity from overhead cables. The trouble was that the two poles that drew the supply down to the motor kept coming off the wires. The buses were, in short, rather cumbersome and the last one ran in June 1961.

The Bedford Hotel

The original Bedford Hotel, built in 1835, was regarded as the finest late-Georgian building in Brighton after the Royal Pavilion. Charles Dickens wrote Dombey and Son while staying there. Destroyed by fire in 1964, it was replaced by the present 17-storey block which is just what some councillors had wanted all along. What the dickens do we want to preserve an out-of-date hotel for? one of them asked.

The Brighton Belle

This luxury Pullman train used to run three times a day between London and the coast. In 1970 British Rail decided to take kippers off the breakfast menu, and there was a huge protest by celebrities such as the actor Lord Olivier. The protesters won that battle, but two years later BR decided that the Brighton Belle was too expensive to run, and they withdrew it.

Churchill Square

Typical of this brave new world was the new Churchill Square shopping precinct, which opened in 1968. A lot of buildings had to be demolished to make way for it, including an early 19th-century street of cobble-fronted buildings, Grenville Place.

They liked obliterating the past during the 1960s. In 1961 Brighton Council decided to issue a compulsory purchase order so that they could knock down the Grand Hotel and turn it into an amusement centre. Thank goodness the Government slapped a listed building notice on it just in time!

The precinct was very ugly. They liked putting up what were known as brutal buildings in the 1960s usually of concrete, and the taller the better. Sussex Heights, behind the Hotel Metropole, is regarded by many as the very worst of them. It has 24 floors, rises to 112 metres (336 feet) and sticks out along the seafront like a sore and squared-off thumb.

Churchill Square also sported a large, ugly, jagged piece of sculpture (concrete, of course) called for some reason The Spirit of Brighton.

The whole complex was pulled down and refashioned in the late 1990s.

The universities

The first 52 students enrolled at the University of Sussexs Falmer campus in October 1961. It was the very first of a new crop of red-brick universities throughout Britain.

Sir Basil Spence designed the first buildings, but growth has continued ever since and the university now has more than 12,000 students.

Sussex Universitys (optimistic) motto is Be still and know.

The former polytechnic became the University of Brighton in 1992.

Mods and rockers

On May Bank Holiday 1964, running battles on Brighton seafront confirmed all the awful things that older people believed about youth today. These skirmishes were between Mods (who wore smart clothes and rode about on motor scooters) and Rockers (who looked tough, wore leathers and rode motorbikes).

Hundreds of deckchairs were broken and beach pebbles were thrown as thousands of spectators looked on. About 150 police officers (and one horse) eventually got things under control, and 26 young people were later given stiff sentences in the courts.

Built to last?

The architectural writer Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described Hoves Victorian Town Hall as so red, so Gothic, so hard, so imperishable. Unfortunately, on 9 January 1966 only a few weeks after he had written those words the building went up in flames. Firemen rescued six people trapped inside, but the Town Hall was in ruins. Alas, its modern replacement isnt as universally loved.