The Brighton Road: The Classic Highway to the South

by Charles G. Harper

The Pavilion is of course the very hub of Brighton. The pilgrim from London comes to it past the great church of St. Peter, built in 1824, in a curious Gothic, and thence past the Level to the Old Steyne. The names of the terraces and rows of houses on either side proclaim their period, even if those characteristic semicircular bayed fronts did not: they are York Place, Hanover Terrace, Gloucester Place, Adelaide this, Caroline that, and Brunswick t’other: all names associated with the late Georgian period.

The Old Steyne was in Florizel’s time the rendezvous of fashion. The “front” and the lawns of Hove have long since usurped that distinction, but the gardens and the old trees of the Old Steyne are more beautiful than ever. They are the only few the town itself can boast.

BRIGHTON

Treeless Brighton has been the derision alike of Doctor Johnson and Tom Hood, to name no others. Johnson, who first visited Brighton in 1770 in the company of the Thrales and Fanny Burney, declared the neighbourhood to be so desolate that “if one had a mind to hang one’s self for desperation at being obliged to live there, it would be difficult to find a tree on which to fasten a rope.” At any rate it would have needed a particularly stout tree to serve Johnson’s turn, had he a mind to it. Johnson was an ingrate, and not worthy of the good that Doctor Brighton wrought upon him.

Hood, on the other hand, is jocular in an airier and lighter-hearted fashion. His punning humour (a kind of witticism which Johnson hated with the hatred of a man who delved deep after Greek and Latin roots) is to Johnson’s as the footfall of a cat to the earth-shaking tread of the elephant. His, too, is a manner of gibe that is susceptible of being construed into praise by the townsfolk. “Of all the trees,” says he, “I ever saw, none could be mentioned in the same breath with the magnificent beach at Brighton.”

But though these trees of the Pavilion give a grateful shelter from the glare of the sun and the roughness of the wind, they hide little of the tawdriness of that architectural enormity. The gilding has faded, the tinsel become tarnished, and the whole pile of cupolas and minarets is reduced to one even tint, that is not white nor grey, nor any distinctive shade of any colour. How the preposterous building could ever have been admired (as it undoubtedly was at one time) surpasses belief. Its cost, one shrewdly suspects—it is supposed to have cost over £1,000,000—was what appealed to the imagination.

That reptile Croker, the creature of that Lord Hertford whom one recognises as the “Marquis of Steyne” in “Vanity Fair,” admired it, as assuredly did not rough and ready Cobbett, who opines, “A good idea of the building may be formed by placing the pointed half of a large turnip upon the middle of a board, with four smaller ones at the corners.”

That is no bad description of this monument of extravagance and bad taste. Begun so early as 1784, it was, after many alterations, pullings-down and rebuildings, completed in 1818, with the exception of the north gate, the work of William the Fourth in 1832.

The Pavilion was, in fact, the product of an ill-informed enthusiasm for Chinese architecture, mingled with that of India and Constantinople, and was built as a Marine Palace, to combine the glories of the Summer Palace at Pekin with those of the Alhambra. It suffers nowadays, much more than it need do, from the utter absence of exterior colouring. A judicious scheme of brilliant colour and gilding, in accordance with its style, would not only relieve the dull drab monotone, but would go some way to justify the Prince’s taste.

But, be it what it may, the Pavilion set the seal of a certain permanence upon the princely and royal favours extended to the town, whose population, numbered at 2,000 in 1761 and 3,600 in 1786, had grown to 5,669 by 1794 and 12,012 in 1811. In the succeeding ten years it had more than doubled itself, being returned in 1821 at 24,429. How Georgian Brighton is wholly swallowed up and engulfed in the modern towns of Brighton, Hove, and Preston is seen in the present population of 161,000—the equivalent of nearly six other Brightons of the size of that in the last year of the reign of George the Fourth.