Brighton Audio Tour: Below the Promenade

Brighton's seafront looks like a holiday but is a working town in disguise. This self-guided audio tour walks the engine-shed, the kitchen, the service stair and the shingle beach that built Britain's pleasure resort — from Brighton Station, where two thousand men once built the locomotives that brought the visitors in, through the Pavilion kitchen where Carême cooked thirty courses while servants moved invisibly through Dutch-tiled corridors, past the Hippodrome where Charlie Chaplin and Sarah Bernhardt did two shows a night, the Town Hall basement where the first English chief constable was murdered at his own desk, the Grand Hotel where a 1984 night porter dug himself out of rubble, the Birch piers where one-legged divers ate breakfast on the water, and finally the shingle where Brighton's eighty-boat fishing fleet once landed mackerel by capstan and sold it by Dutch auction. Walk slowly. The Brighton you came to see was built by people you never saw.