Brighton Audio Tour: Below the Promenade

On your left, the West Pier looks like a rusted iron skeleton stretching in a straight line over the sea, ending in a broken lacework of metal.

Eugenius Birch designed this pier, and it opened in eighteen sixty-six as the West End Pier. At eleven hundred and fifteen feet long, it was a serious piece of Victorian ambition, and later it became the first pier in England to gain Grade One listing - the highest level of historic protection, which is a little grimly ironic given what you’re looking at now.

Brighton’s two great pleasure piers were not just ornaments on the horizon. They were workplaces: ticket-takers, concert-hall staff, deckchair attendants, fortune-tellers like Eva Petulengro on Palace Pier, Punch and Judy operators on the beach, and here on West Pier, even paid professional divers.

At first, Birch sold healthy sea air. Then entertainment took over. In eighteen ninety-three, Birch’s nephew Peregrine supervised an extension and added a pavilion at the pierhead. In nineteen sixteen, local architects Clayton and Black replaced the old bandstand with an eight-sided concert hall of cast-iron arches. It opened on the twentieth of April, nineteen sixteen, with the King’s Royal Rifles silver band, made up of war veterans. By the years after the First World War, the pier pulled in around two million visitors. Not bad for a structure standing on screwed-in iron columns over salt water.

And then there were the “Professors”... the pier’s star divers. Captain Camp, the one-legged swimmer, famously prepared and ate his breakfast on the water. There were Professor Reddish and Professor Cyril, Professor Powsey, Gladys Powsey diving in a Bovril costume, Zoe Brigden - a Brighton swimming champion turned professional in nineteen thirteen - and Walter Tong, born in Bolton in eighteen ninety-two, who performed the Moleberg Dive: a backward somersault from forty to fifty feet. Health and safety had not yet reached its full majestic bloom.

The danger was real. Professor Cyril, whose real name was Albert Huggins Heppell, died in May nineteen twelve while attempting a bicycle dive. He slipped, struck the deck, and fractured his skull.

If you glance at the before-and-after image, the change from a complete pleasure pier in nineteen seventy to this stripped frame is startling.

The end came in slow blows, then sudden ones. Brighton Corporation declined to buy the pier, and it closed in nineteen seventy-five. The West Pier Trust formed in nineteen seventy-eight and bought it from the Crown Commissioners for one hundred pounds in nineteen eighty-four. But the Great Storm of nineteen eighty-seven damaged it badly, and access from shore ended in nineteen ninety-one. Then came the final cruelty: arson fires. On the twenty-eighth of March, two thousand and three, fire destroyed the pavilion. On the eleventh of May, another fire tore through the concert hall, already weakened by storm damage.

Now the shoreline works differently. At the pier root stands the Brighton i-three-sixty, the one-hundred-and-sixty-two-meter tower by Marks Barfield, the same designers who gave London the Eye, opening in early August two thousand and sixteen. Different machinery, same old Brighton instinct: charge admission for a view.

Now turn back east along the seafront. Palace Pier is farther on - the long, lit-up pier with the helter-skelter at its end - but first, in about four minutes, we’ll stop at The Grand Brighton.

On your left, the Old Ship Hotel shows itself as a long pale-stucco seafront frontage, with orderly sash windows and a rounded corner block turning into Ship Street.

This place started small... very small. Around fifteen fifty-nine, Richard and John Gilham owned an unnamed house here, probably the seed of what became the Old Ship. The first clear record turns up in sixteen sixty-five, and that makes this Brighton’s oldest hotel. It did not even face the sea at first. Only in seventeen ninety-four did the inn gain its proper promenade presence, when the owners folded two seafront houses into the building and gave it the frontage you’re looking at now.

That changed everything, because the Old Ship became a machine for movement. For about a hundred years, coaches arrived and left from here for London and other major cities. One service carried the splendidly overconfident name The Flying Machine. It left at five thirty in the morning and reached London that same evening... which, in coaching terms, counted as blistering speed. Behind the respectable frontage, a whole workforce kept the show on the road: ostlers, the men who fed and watered horses; postilions, who rode and controlled the lead horses; chambermaids, hall-porters, and the head waiter trying to keep the dining room from becoming civilized chaos. Even the stable yard had a sideline in mischief: smugglers once spirited away thirty kegs of Dutch gin from here.

Then there were the Assembly Rooms behind the hotel, added in seventeen sixty-seven after the nearby Castle Inn raised the social stakes. Robert Golden designed them in the Adam style, inspired by Robert Adam, with a first-floor ballroom, plus card and tea rooms. That meant another army at work: orchestra musicians, wait staff weaving through crowds, and the master of ceremonies making sure the right people bowed to the right people. Those rooms later welcomed Niccolo Paganini for a violin recital on the ninth of December, eighteen thirty-one. In eighteen forty-one, Charles Dickens stayed here and read his own work aloud in the ballroom. William Makepeace Thackeray also stayed while working on Vanity Fair, and even sent a honeymooning couple from the novel to the Ship Inn.

If you like, have a look at the before-and-after image; this frontage has barely flinched while Brighton moved from horse-drawn coaches to modern traffic.

Today the hotel belongs to the Cairn Hotel Group, one of the ten historic hotels in the Cairn Collection, launched in June two thousand and seventeen, and fittingly, it still keeps inn hours: open twenty-four hours a day.

When you’re ready, head inland to Brighton Place. The Lanes are about a three-minute walk from here.

On your right, Brighton Town Hall stands out with its pale stucco façade, a strong row of classical columns, and a triangular pediment over the entrance.

This patch of ground has had three working lives... and none of them were dull. In the thirteenth century, St Bartholomew's Grange stood here, one of early Brighthelmstone's first buildings, founded by St Pancras Priory in Lewes. Monks farmed this site until June fifteen fourteen, when French raiders burned the grange down along with almost the whole town. One day's work ended in a night of fire.

Then came the civic version. Thomas Cooper designed this town hall in the Greek Revival style - all columns, symmetry, and a slightly stern face for public business. Thomas Read Kemp laid the foundation stone in April eighteen thirty, and the building opened in eighteen thirty-two. For years it hosted the quarter sessions, the local criminal court that met several times a year, until hearings moved to Edward Street in nineteen sixty-seven. If you glance at the app, image one shows that full civic swagger nicely.

Then the basement took over the story. Brighton formed its first police force in eighteen thirty-eight and put the station and cells down below. Its first Chief Constable, Henry Solomon, had originally been a London watchmaker... which feels oddly precise training for policing. On the thirteenth of March, eighteen forty-four, while questioning John Lawrence over a stolen roll of carpet, Lawrence struck Solomon on the temple with a poker. Solomon died the next morning, surrounded by his wife and nine children. Queen Victoria gave fifty pounds to the widow's appeal - about six thousand pounds today. The cells stayed in use until nineteen sixty-five, and opened as a museum on the fourth of May, two thousand and five. For a visual nudge toward the older streets around this site, have a look at image ten.

From here, Brighton Dome is about five minutes away. As a practical note, the town hall keeps weekday hours, roughly nine to five, and closes on weekends.

On your right, look for a pale stone-and-stucco frontage with a broad arched porch, a rounded dome rising behind it, and a silhouette borrowed from an Indian mosque.

Brighton Dome began life with a rather less glamorous job description than its name suggests. Between eighteen oh three and eighteen oh eight, William Porden designed this place for the Prince Regent, later George the Fourth, as a serious piece of royal horse management. The outside took its cue from Indian mosque architecture, while the inside worked like a stable yard on a grand, faintly absurd scale. Beneath that central dome - eighty feet across and sixty-five feet high - Porden arranged forty-four horse stalls, five coach houses, and living quarters for the stable staff.

So don’t picture a dreamy prince drifting through with a sugar cube and a riding crop. Picture a working community. Grooms slept in balcony quarters above the horses. Ostlers handled feeding and mucking out - the unglamorous but essential business end of horse care. Blacksmiths kept the ironwork right. Coachmen managed carriages and teams. All of that labor kept a household of saddle-horses and coaches ready for one prince who, frankly, did not live here all that often. Regency life had a talent for extravagance... especially when someone else was doing the sweeping.

Next door, the Riding House - what we now call the Corn Exchange - stretched to one hundred and seventy-four feet long, fifty-eight feet wide, and thirty-four feet high. It, too, started as a practical machine for the royal estate.

Then the building changed jobs. In eighteen sixty-seven, architect and Borough Surveyor Phillip Lockwood converted the stables into a concert hall and assembly rooms. A year later, in October eighteen sixty-eight, the old Riding House became the town’s corn market. That is a very Brighton move: royal horses out, public culture and trade in. If you fancy it, have a quick look at the before-and-after image in the app - the frontage looks noticeably neater a few years on, part of the Dome’s steady habit of reinventing itself without losing its face.

Its most moving change came during the First World War. From the first of December, nineteen fourteen, to the fifteenth of February, nineteen sixteen, the Dome and Corn Exchange turned into wards for the Indian Military Hospital. More than four thousand wounded Indian soldiers recovered across this estate. Three operating theatres went in, and one of them stood inside the Dome itself. The complex also adapted its kitchens so Muslim soldiers could receive halal food - meat prepared under Islamic dietary rules. So yes... from horses to halal kitchens, this building covered some ground.

And then, because Brighton rarely resists a dramatic final act, the Dome helped stage one of pop history’s biggest nights. On the sixth of April, nineteen seventy-four, A-B-B-A won the Eurovision Song Contest here with “Waterloo,” while the venue’s technicians, riggers, orchestra players, and backstage crew pulled off a show seen by around five hundred million people.

When you’re ready, walk south out of the Pavilion Gardens onto the wide green Old Steine. Cross to the long lawned area in the centre, and we’ll continue at the Royal Pavilion.

Ahead of you is a pale stucco palace crowned with bulbous onion domes, thin minarets, and scalloped arches - John Nash’s Mughal-flavored fantasy in the middle of Brighton.

If you want the real story here, follow the Royal Pavilion household and hospital staff, not the silk waistcoats. This was George the Fourth’s pleasure palace, then, in the First World War, a six-hundred-bed Indian Military Hospital. In both lives, the real work happened out of sight.

Inside, Nash’s Great Kitchen, finished between eighteen fifteen and eighteen eighteen, was startlingly modern. Four cast-iron columns rose through the room, decorated with painted copper palm leaves, and at the center stood a steam table to keep dishes hot - Regency technology trying very hard to impress. For a brief, intense spell in eighteen sixteen to eighteen seventeen, the kitchen belonged to Marie-Antoine Carême, the most famous chef in Europe. His line to the Prince Regent was perfect: “Your Highness, my concern is to tempt your appetite; yours is to curb it.”

That did not happen often. On the eighteenth of January, eighteen seventeen, Carême’s team produced more than one hundred and twenty dishes across nine courses for Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia - later Tsar Nicholas the First. Forty entrées. Thirty-two desserts. As Pavilion keeper David Beevers puts it, dinner started at six o’clock and went on for several hours. If you check the dining room image on your screen, you can picture the sort of room built to receive that edible avalanche.

But the glamour sat on top of a hidden machine. Beneath the state rooms, builders created a large basement so servants could move from one end of the house to the other without being seen. The corridors were lined with Dutch tiles, hard-wearing and easy to clean, a seamless service world designed so George would never have to clap eyes on the people carrying the trays. One detail survives like a slap: one man spent all day in a windowless room shoveling coal in overwhelming heat.

Then the building changed its purpose completely. From December nineteen fourteen to January nineteen sixteen, this became the Royal Pavilion Indian Military Hospital. More than two thousand three hundred Indian soldiers were treated here in six hundred beds, and eighteen died. The Great Kitchen became one of two operating theatres. The hospital staff also reorganized food with extraordinary care: nine kitchens served Muslim patients, meat-eating Hindu and Sikh patients, and vegetarian Hindu and Sikh patients separately. Beef and pork were banned from the grounds. By June nineteen fifteen, the female nurses of Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service had been replaced by male orderlies. If you want a visual jolt, open the wartime theatre photo in the app.

One wounded sepoy, Isar Singh, wrote home that “men in hospital are tended like flowers.” The same kitchen that once fed a tsar’s brother became a room for saving broken bodies. That is this place in a nutshell: extravagant above stairs, relentless below them.

If you want to come back inside later, the Pavilion usually opens daily from nine thirty in the morning to five forty-five in the afternoon. Walk west across the Pavilion gardens - about a minute. The big dome ahead of you, the one that looks like an Indian mosque, is the old Royal Stables; use that as your marker, then continue to Old Steine, about five minutes away.

On your left, look for a long white-stone frontage with arched entrances and a balustraded roofline, gathered around a sunken entrance court below the road.

Designed by the engineer Eugenius Birch, who also built the West Pier, this place began as a very Victorian idea: science, spectacle, and paid admission, all under one roof. Birch started work in eighteen sixty-nine and finished in eighteen seventy-two. Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, opened it on Easter Monday, the first of April that year, and then Brighton gave it the full civic treatment on the tenth of August, when Mayor John Cordy Burrows formally inaugurated Brighton Aquarium.

One small correction, because history likes a technicality: this is not the world’s first commercial aquarium. London Zoo’s Fish House beat it in eighteen fifty-three. But this is the oldest continuously operating aquarium in the world, which is a sturdier claim and, frankly, more impressive.

What you see outside mostly comes from the big rebuild in the nineteen twenties. David Edwards, the Brighton Borough Surveyor, led that work, and Brighton Corporation spent one hundred and seventeen thousand pounds on it - roughly eight million pounds in today’s money - using lots of white artificial stone in a Louis Sixteenth style. Not Art Deco, however often people try that label on for size. The Duke of York, later George the Sixth, ceremonially reopened it on the twelfth of June, nineteen twenty-nine. And because Brighton never really believed in doing things by halves, the rebuild added a miniature rifle range, public baths, a lift from Marine Parade, and the Princes Dance Hall upstairs. Fish below, dancing above... a practical arrangement only if everyone kept to their own floor.

If you glance at the before-and-after image in the app, you can see how the old Victorian frontage gave way to this smoother seafront face while the building kept its grand sense of arrival.

The real magic, though, is inside. Much of the original High Victorian Gothic interior survives: an aisled hall twenty-one bays long, with double aisles in the center, and deep quadripartite vaults - roof vaults divided into four ribbed sections - carried on polished granite columns. Visitors called it an “undersea cathedral” and a “vast underground extravaganza,” which sounds theatrical until you see it and realize they were actually being restrained. There’s an interior image on your screen if you want a preview of those vaults.

And this building created a new kind of seaside working life. One of its first scientific stars was Henry Lee, the aquarium’s naturalist from eighteen seventy-two, later also a director. He ran hands-on experiments on the migration of smelts and the habits of herring, whitebait, and crayfish. So alongside clerks, cooks, waiters, and musicians, you had a resident scientist trying to turn curiosity into knowledge. Lee died in Brixton on the thirty-first of October, eighteen eighty-eight, after years of poor health, but his job here had already helped define what an aquarium could be.

Sea Life took over in nineteen ninety-one and restored the place again. So the same vaulted hall that Henry Lee filled with crayfish in eighteen seventy-two now has Sea Life divers feeding fish in front of paying schoolchildren. Different uniforms, same basic bargain: wonder, organized by staff.

Walk a little further east on Madeira Drive. The narrow-gauge railway track running along the seafront is Volk’s Electric Railway - the small station and engine arch is ahead. If you plan to come back inside later, Sea Life usually opens daily from ten A-M to five P-M.

Look for the narrow steel rails, the low platform edge, and the modest station building marked for Volk's Electric Railway.

Here you’re standing beside a small miracle of workshop thinking. On the fourth of August, eighteen eighty-three, Magnus Volk, a self-taught engineer and the son of a German clockmaker, opened the world’s oldest operating electric railway. Not bad for a tradesman’s son with a restless mind. Before this line, he had already lit his own house with electricity, helped create Brighton’s first telephone system, and fitted electric lighting in the Royal Pavilion.

The first stretch ran only a quarter of a mile. Then Volk pushed it farther in eighteen eighty-four to Paston Place, now called Halfway, where an arch built into the cliff became the power plant and has served as the depot since eighteen eighty-four. In nineteen oh-one, he extended the line to Black Rock. If you like, have a glance at the before-and-after image; it shows how this end of the line tidied itself up between nineteen eighty and twenty eleven without losing its character.

Volk also invented Pioneer, better known as Daddy Long Legs: a carriage like a tiny pier building on four twenty-three-foot legs that ran through shallow sea water from eighteen ninety-six to nineteen oh-one. The sea did not finish it off; council beach-protection works did, and Volk could not afford the diversion.

Today, V-E-R-A, the Volk's Electric Railway Association, formed in nineteen ninety-five, keeps the track, cars, and electrical systems going, and even trains volunteer drivers. Magnus Volk drove the first train out of the new Black Rock station in May nineteen thirty-seven, then died peacefully thirteen days later. If you want a ride, services usually start around ten fifteen or eleven fifteen and run until about five fifteen, or six fifteen on weekends.

Ahead of you is a long cast-iron pier with a straight timber deck, an ornate entrance building, and the distinctive clock tower added in the nineteen twenties.

Building began on this one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-sixty-foot pier in eighteen ninety-one, and it opened on the twentieth of May, eighteen ninety-nine. R. St George Moore designed it, and he meant it to replace the old Chain Pier from eighteen twenty-three, after storms destroyed that earlier pier in December of eighteen ninety-six. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see just how far this structure runs into the sea... less a jetty than a full-time business district on stilts.

That working life started early. At the far end, a fifteen-hundred-seat theatre opened on the third of April, nineteen oh-one. By nineteen eleven, the pier had become a serious entertainment address; even Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin performed here before Hollywood got hold of them. Then came October of nineteen seventy-three, when a barge used during demolition of the unused landing stage drifted into the pier and caused one-hundred-thousand pounds of damage. The theatre never recovered. In nineteen eighty-six, owners removed it and put in a domed amusement arcade instead. Brighton chose slot machines over Shakespeare... and, commercially speaking, Brighton probably knew its audience.

Today, this place still runs as a workplace first and a postcard second. The company says the pier welcomes some four million visitors a year. It operates two arcades with over three hundred machines, nineteen funfair rides, plus food and drink outlets all along the deck. In twenty twenty-three, the average headcount was six-hundred-and-eighty-four staff: six-hundred-and-fifty-two operational, thirty-two administration. One ticket office, hundreds of workers, millions of customers... that is not nostalgia, that is payroll.

If you want a closer look at the pier’s modern character, check the app image of the arcade interior. It shows what the old theatre gave way to: a louder, brighter kind of stage.

And then there were the people who gave the place its face. Eva Petulengro, the Romany fortune-teller, worked from a booth on the Palace Pier and later the seafront arches. She spent more than fifty years predicting fortunes here, for clients ranging from the Beatles to politicians and members of the royal family, before her death in twenty twenty-four at the age of eighty-five. Down on the beach beneath the pier, Punch and Judy professors kept another old trade alive. Sergeant Mike Stone, called Britain’s longest-serving Punch and Judy man, worked Brighton for thirty years and did two seasons on the pier. Professor Glyn Edwards has performed for more than fifty years, starting on Brighton beach in the nineteen sixties.

So this pier is still doing the job it took on in eighteen ninety-nine: a cast-iron deck carrying Brighton’s pleasure economy, almost without interruption, for one-hundred-and-twenty-seven years. For practical purposes, it generally opens from ten in the morning, closing around seven or eight in the evening depending on the day.

Walk back off the pier and head east along Madeira Drive. Keep going for the Brighton Fishing Museum, about ten minutes away.