Brighton’s media is all too aware of the mood of the city’s inhabitants
Longer-term correspondents will remember that several years ago, I departed my much-loved adopted home of Nottingham in an attempt to advance my career by moving to the city of Brighton. Never having been there before, and, indeed, resigning one job and accepting another before I had set foot in the place, I wondered, in the cold light of a murky morning in the Midlands, whether this had indeed been a wise decision. Letters of resignation sent and new contract signed, I decided that I might as well head off and investigate this place.
The sum of Brighton’s parts is not, on paper, a desperately notable inventory. A skyline of concrete hotels of one shade of mediocrity or another is not an auspicious start, and the architectural misadventures of the Odeon, the Conference Centre and the Marina will foster as fond a memory as acne for many. But Brighton is not a place remembered just for its physicality, such as we think of Bath, Edinburgh, or Lincoln. In the nearly two years in which I was privileged enough to experience it, I learned that Brighton was as much a state of mind amid the concrete, rather than the product of the grander visions that the nineteenth century bequeathed her.
And this faded grandeur – although not so faded in the case of the Hapsburg Yellow villas that guard the westward approaches to Hove – is the playground of a city which has the hint of the illicit, the shady, the slightly hidden in the winding narrowness of the Lanes, where the stench of the sea, salt and secrecy hangs on the mist which guards the modesty of the people who throng the passageways and alleyways of old Brighton. For the city which lays claim to inventing the concept of the ‘dirty weekend’ is somewhere where people seem less inhibited than the rest of Britain; a feeling of excess, exaggeration and excitement hangs in the air, strong as the stench of dark rum that wafts from the pubs which once watered sailors on shore, conducting some such nefarious business or another; and it can almost be heard above the soundtrack of squawking seagulls (many bigger than the handbag dogs so beloved of the denizens of North Laine), Bolero-esque swirling teacups and the exquisite oddness of a busker playing Lady Gaga on a saw.
The city in summertime glows and shines, the light reflecting off the sapphire coast and bouncing from the villas lining the front, as the city basks in its triumvirate of camp: the Pier, the Pavilion, and Pride. There’s an electric attitude of ‘anything goes’, and no-one seems to mind who or what or why or where or how. So as the unicyclists propel themselves along the promenade powered only by the wind catching the opened umbrella, as the miniscule art galleries of Continental Kemptown open up late in the afternoon, and as the crowd of ever-battier people rummage through the Tardis of junk that is Snooper’s, it’s a wonder and a joy to wander the streets and see so many people simply being.
thenathanthatis 