Somewhat later the other coast towns began to develop, and so long as the railway controlled that development, their growth was regular and almost according to a set law. Fashion or the doctors would recommend some point upon the coast. The long coastal railway from Brighton to Portsmouth afforded a station at the place, and the town increased in regular fashion, not with the station as the centre, but as the point from which branches spread out to the sea, so that these towns all more or less resemble a tree spreading from the railway station, and trippers hurrying from that station to the beach are like the deployment of a regiment
THE WATERING TOWNS
from column into line. These towns are, of course, stretched out along the beach; for their separate and successive organisation, the continual presence behind them of the coastal plain, with its railway parallel to the shore, has afforded admirable opportunities. That plain from Brighton to Bosham is perfectly flat; the crossing of the rivers has presented the only obstacle, and that obstacle was insignificant. The railway could run pretty well in a straight line and build up the towns along the sea.
Even to-day the villages are linking up with the towns. Rustington is full of bricks. Rottingdean, for twenty years a sort of suburb, has now long been full of painters and others. A curious collection of bungalows has sprung up on the long pebbly beach which shuts out the Adur from the sea. Opposite these barracks lies Lancing; and even upon the extremity of old Selsea a new settlement, now nourished by a light railway from Chichester, is arising. At Seaford, which is saved a little by its hills, the same attempt at rapid building is made.
There is one feature in this string of houses all along the coast of the county which Sussex men note with a pleasure not unmixed with malice. It is this, that while places of absolutely no commercial use and of no historical importance in the growth of the county are thus gradually being turned into appendages of London (so that all the way from Beachy Head to Chichester Harbour you have within the space of some fifty miles at least sixteen miles of houses), yet the places characteristically Sussex, the places upon the sea-line, which have gone to the building up of the county, and in which the population naturally gathered, continue to resist with extraordinary tenacity.
You can do nothing with Newhaven except leave it a port. Littlehampton refuses to be the pleasure ground that its landlord desires it to be. Bosham is still the ancient harbour and village which its history demands that it should be. Shoreham will not consent to become a lesser Worthing or a second Brighton, and this is the more remarkable from the fact that these harbour towns and villages are geographically more in touch with London than those other towns whose special character it is to lie sheltered by the hills and far from the gaps by which a railway could approach them from the north.
One may discover precisely the same state of affairs upon the eastern coast of the county
THE WATERING TOWNS
beyond Beachy Head. Here, for example, is the enormous development of Eastbourne, in a place which was useless for sailors, but sheltered from the winds by the neighbouring hill. Bexhill has increased along a beach which was not used until speculation had built the new town. Pevensey between them, upon its flat inland, is still deserted.
To this list Hastings is a very considerable exception, because its beach and hill made it during the Middle Ages, and for very different reasons to-day, a necessary sea-town. But, with the exception of Hastings, every other town follows a general rule, that the new growth of watering-places along the south coast is extraneous.